Amazon at 30: All Grown Up

30 years ago, on July 5, 1994, Jeff Bezos founded a company called Cadabra, Inc. While that may not ring a bell with everyone, the company’s later name certainly will: Amazon.com. The story goes that Bezos quickly changed the name to Amazon after a lawyer had misheard the original name as “cadaver” – and the rest is history. On July 16, 1995, the unheard-of company from Seattle launched a website immodestly claiming to be "earth's biggest bookstore". While that may have sounded a little presumptuous back then, three decades later said company is not only the biggest bookstore on earth but arguably the biggest store, period.

If there is one thing that Bezos has been (in)famous for during his time at the helm, which ended in July 2021, it’s his relentless focus on long-term growth. Having ignored critics for years, Bezos’ willingness to sacrifice short-term profits for long-term growth has paid off big time, turning Amazon into a multitrillion-dollar company and Bezos into one of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Under Bezos' leadership, Amazon has cemented its position as the leading online retailer in large parts of the world, built an industry-leading cloud computing business, and established itself as a major player in digital media and consumer technology. The company has achieved all that by rigorously re-investing most of the money it makes, until eventually the profits became too large to spend. Last year, the company turned a profit of $30.4 billion on $574.8 billion in net sales, which is more than its total profit from 1997 through 2019.