Sometimes the best investments are more about a gut feeling than hard numbers. At least that holds true for Jeff Bezos’ parents, who bet on their son when few others would.
In 1995, a mere two years before Amazon would go public, and more than 30 years before it would surpass Walmart to become the biggest company in the world (and clinchingMike Bezos recalled his son saying in a 2015 interview the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500 as a result), Bezos received a lifeline from his parents.
According to a 1997 prospectus, his mother Jacklyn Gise Bezos, who died in 2025, and stepfather Miguel “Mike” Bezos, gave their son $245,573 from their savings so he could get his business off the ground. The six-figure sum represented a “large fraction” of their life savings at the time, according to Bezos, but it would eventually make them both billionaires.
Yet, before he accepted his parents’ money, Bezos made it abundantly clear to them that they might never get it back.
“I want you to know how risky this is,” Mike Bezos recalled his son saying in a 2015 interview. “Because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
Bezos put the odds that his online bookseller would succeed at about 30%, which he previously said was generous given that the overall success rate for startups is closer to 10%.
A year before his parents invested, Bezos had approached 60 investors asking for $50,000 minimum investments as he sought to reach $1 million in funding. Only 22 of the people he approached agreed to invest, including his parents and two younger siblings, Mark and Christina Bezos Poore.
Still, in the end, his parents made the investment despite the long odds—and despite his stepfather’s first question about the company being “What’s the internet,” Bezos joked.
“He wasn’t making a bet on this company or this concept,” Bezos said of his stepfather in an interview with the Academy of Achievement. “He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother.”
“The rest is history”
Almost immediately after opening Amazon’s online store in 1995, Bezos told the Academy of Achievement he was surprised to see orders coming in from all 50 states and from 45 different countries.
At that time, the company had about 10 employees. By 1997, the company had grown to more than 600. It went public that year at $18 per share, and raised $54 million. Bezos became a billionaire by 1998 thanks to his 40% stake in Amazon, and today, he holds the title of the world’s third richest person, with a net worth of $283 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
As for Bezos’ parents, their initial bet on their son turned out to be one of the most successful venture investments of all time. It’s unclear how many shares Mike Bezos has in his possession after his wife died last year, but the couple donated 595,027 shares to the Bezos Family Foundation from 2001 through 2016.
If Mike Bezos still retained the rest of their original 1.4 million shares, they would be worth an estimated $51.7 billion at today’s stock price, according to Fortune’s calculations. Bezos’ siblings Mark and Christina, who each invested $10,000 in Amazon in 1996, according to the prospectus, would also each have shares worth more than $1 billion today if they had never sold any.
Amazon’s shares have skyrocketed more than 208,000% since its IPO in 1997. And just last month, the company’s shares hit their all-time-high stock price of $287 per share.
The Bezos family later turned some of the wealth they got from Amazon toward philanthropy. In 2000, Mike and Jackie founded the Bezos Family Foundation with their three children—Jeff, Mark and Christina—and their spouses. Since then, the foundation has focused largely on education and child development, funding research and programs aimed at helping young people from birth through high school.
“We were fortunate enough that we have lived overseas and we have saved a few pennies so we were able to be an angel investor,” Mike said of him and his wife’s initial Amazon investment. “The rest is history.”
