Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5, 1994, in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, had written the business plan on a drive from New York to Seattle. His parents put in an estimated $300,000. Bezos told early investors there was a 70% chance the company would fail.
It did not. Amazon began as an online bookstore under the working name Cadabra, went public in 1997, and by the end of 1998 was selling music, video and other goods. The dot-com crash hurt. By the end of 2000 Bezos had borrowed $2 billion from banks while cash fell to $350 million, and the next two years brought distribution center closures and a layoff of 14% of the workforce. Amazon turned a $35 million profit in 2003.
From bookstore to cloud and space
Amazon Web Services launched in 2002. The Kindle followed in November 2007, and in 2013 AWS won a $600 million contract with the CIA. Bezos also bought The Washington Post that year. On July 5, 2021, he handed the chief executive job to AWS head Andy Jassy and became executive chairman.
Blue Origin is older than most of that. Bezos founded it in 2000, and in 2021 he flew to the edge of space aboard its NS-16 flight. The company has flown its reusable New Shepard rocket several times and is developing the larger New Glenn. Bezos told Matthias Döpfner of Axel Springer in 2018 that Blue Origin is “the most important work [he’s] doing,” and that he planned to fund it with his “financial lottery winnings from Amazon.”
Kuiper, now Amazon Leo
Amazon announced its satellite broadband project, Kuiper, in April 2019. The Federal Communications Commission authorized a constellation of 3,236 satellites in July 2020, and Amazon said it would spend $10 billion. In November 2025 the service was rebranded Amazon Leo.
The launch contracts tie Bezos’s two ventures together. Amazon bought 92 launches from United Launch Alliance, ArianeGroup and Blue Origin for more than $10 billion in total. In 2023 an Amazon shareholder, the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, sued the board, saying it acted in bad faith in awarding those contracts. Blue Origin’s share came to 45% of the spending, and the suit suggested that animosity between Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk may have kept Amazon from using SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Amazon did later buy three Falcon 9 launches, and they flew in 2025.
The first 27 production satellites went up on April 28, 2025. In June 2026 the FCC waived the July 2026 deadline for launching half the constellation, though it said it would temporarily demote the spectral priority of satellites launched after that date. Forbes and Bloomberg have ranked Bezos the world’s richest person from 2017 to 2021, and in 2026 his net worth was about $284 billion.
Sources
- Jeff Bezos – Wikipedia
- Amazon Leo – Wikipedia
- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledged to donate the majority of his wealth to charity. Here's how he currently spends his $122 billion fortune, from giant underground clocks to space exploration.
