The business plan for Amazon was written in a car. Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Scott, drove across the United States from New York to Seattle in 1994, and somewhere on that road the plan for an online bookstore took shape. They had left good jobs behind. He had been a senior vice president at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw by thirty.
He was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque in 1964, to a mother who was seventeen and a father of nineteen. His mother later married Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, who adopted him. He grew up in Houston and Miami, then studied engineering at Princeton, graduating summa cum laude in 1986. Wall Street followed.
His mother later married Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant, who adopted him.
The decision to leave was famously methodical. Bezos has described a regret-minimization framework. He pictured himself old and asked which choice he would regret more: walking away from a Wall Street bonus, or missing the start of the Internet. He judged the second worse. He had read that web usage was growing at a startling rate, and he started listing products to sell online. Books won.
Seattle came next. He chose it for the engineers coming out of Microsoft and the University of Washington, for the smaller population, and for the book distribution warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon. Amazon began on 5 July 1994 in a rented garage in Bellevue, as Cadabra. He changed the name in November, partly to be easy to find in alphabetical listings. A lawyer, the story goes, had misheard Cadabra as cadaver. The first book sold, when the site opened on 16 July 1995, was Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.
Money was tight and personal. His parents put in an estimated $300,000. He asked angels for money with a blunt warning: he told them there was a 70 percent chance it would fail. The site opened to customers in July 1995.
The publishers were not sure about him. When they asked why a shop would print bad reviews of the books it sold, he told them Amazon wanted every book available, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The turn was in how he thought, not in a single day. The company went public on 15 May 1997 at $18 a share, and in 2002 it launched Amazon Web Services. Selling spare computing power began with offering developers tools, then S3 in 2006 and EC2 in 2008, and it grew into the engine behind the business.
The numbers are now almost silly. In 2025 Amazon reported revenue of $716.9 billion and net income of $77.67 billion. Its market value was about $2.81 trillion on 6 November 2026.
A new founder can take one thing from the drive to Seattle: Bezos quit a safe job, but only after turning the choice into a question he could answer honestly. Then he told investors the odds.