Amazon didn't have a profitable quarter until 2001, more than 6 years into its existence

Amazon's success is attributable, in large part, to founder Jeff Bezos’ vision

Bezos parlayed a career on Wall Street into founding an online bookstore that would evolve into the largest online retailer in the world. Bezos’ story is characterized by his relentless focus on innovation and on the customer experience at Amazon.

Bezos has frequently cited a 1999 article titled Amazon.bomb to illustrate how dire the early predictions about Amazon got

Over the years, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often recalls how wrong the predictions in the 1999 Barron’s cover story were. Among other things, that article declared Amazon’s entire business model to be unsustainable and destined to fail, noting its lack of profit and dependence on a massive amount of capital to fund its growth.

In 1994, Amazon was founded as an online bookseller

Books were just the start, as founder Jeff Bezos' ultimate goal was to create an "everything store," using the internet to transcend the physical limitations of brick-and-mortar retail. The Seattle-based Amazon gradually added CDs and consumer electronics, becoming a dominant e-commerce player in the late 1990s, and one of the few dot-com companies to make it through the bust.

Amazon has experienced relentless, if occasionally bumpy, growth since its founding

From its founding in 1994 to a slew of acquisitions and new products and services launched in the decades since then, Amazon has experienced relentless, if occasionally bumpy, growth. This timeline from The Verge lays out some of the major events in the company’s story, including its IPO, rollout of its lucrative cloud-computing division, and much more.

Read Jeff Bezos' letter to Amazon shareholders from 2000, when shares were down more than 80%

"Ouch. It's been a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders," the letter begins. Amazon shares were down more than 80% from the prior year at the time.

Bezos' wealth primarily stems from his Amazon ownership stake

Three decades after founding Amazon, Jeff Bezos has built a sprawling empire of business and financial interests. A chart from Visual Capitalist details his many business interests outside of Amazon, including his ownership of the Washington Post; his private aerospace company, Blue Origin; and his personal stake in companies ranging from Airbnb to Uber and Google.

Amazon sold its first book on April 3, 1995

Before selling everything on the internet, Amazon started as an online bookstore. The company's first customer was a man named John Wainright, who purchased "Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought" by Douglas Hofstadter. There's a building named after Wainwright on Amazon's Seattle campus.

Jeff Bezos started his career working at McDonald’s

He now claims that his high school gig at the fast food restaurant taught him about efficiency, customer service, and other valuable lessons that he took with him when building Amazon.

Amazon's largest profit engine is the cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services

Also known as AWS, Amazon Web Services is a suite of IT resources such as storage, databases, and more. While Amazon owns AWS, lots of other tech companies—including Slack and Pinterest—use it to help run their IT operations. In 2023, AWS brought in $25B in profit—outpacing Amazon's entire North American retail division.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Jeff Bezos launched his philanthropic ‘Bezos Day One Fund’ in 2018 with his then-wife, Mackenzie Scott

The fund focuses on promoting education and reducing homelessness. This article compares Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ philanthropic initiatives to those of other billionaires, including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

Jeff Bezos’ grandfather made his own needles by hand for the cattle on his ranch

Jeff Bezos’ mother gave birth to him at 17 years old, and his grandfather was very involved in his life. Bezos spent much of his childhood helping out on his grandfather’s ranch, for instance. In this short clip, Bezos shares some of his thoughts on his family members and his early years of life.

Warren Buffett has said not investing in Google or Amazon early enough was a mistake on his part

After avoiding investing in tech stocks during the dot-com boom, Buffett's stance on investing in tech was widely criticized. Buffett later shared his thoughts on why he regrets not investing early enough.

Spotify took 18 years to reach profitability; 70% of revenue goes to rights-holders

The music streaming company lost revenue for years as it sought to grow, but once it went public, investors pushed the company to expand into podcasts, cut costs, and prefer passive mood listening via algorithmic curation to increase value. Users have mixed feelings about using it.

A 2002 profile of unprofitable Netflix as it bet on a subscription model

The streaming behemoth saw the potential in subscriptions early, and in this 2002 profile CEO Reed Hastings was already talking about plans to offer "downloadable" movies. The profile serves as a historical artifact confirming the startup's risky bets and showcases the contingent factors that led to its success. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

More than 650 companies went public in the US in 1996

As the dot-com bubble reached its peak, most dot-com companies went public with little proof of being profitable and were often overvalued. In 1999, the Nasdaq's price-to-earnings ratio (a tool used to determine a stock's value that divides its price by earnings) hit 90.2, signaling that many companies were operating at a net loss. Startups promised investors that more time and money would help scale their businesses and become profitable.

Steve Jobs saved a nearly bankrupt Apple

Apple nearly went bankrupt in 1997, when the tech company had only three months of operational cash left. Apple's board ousted cofounder Steve Jobs in 1985, but he was brought back as interim CEO to revive the company when Apple purchased Jobs' company, NeXT.

Southwest Airlines was profitable for nearly 5 decades

Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore how a carrier with just four airplanes shuttling across Texas revolutionized flying by offering free whiskey, cheap late-night tickets, and free-for-all seating allocation, despite how hard it is to make money running an airline. However, the success story didn't last forever.

Google's early focus on simplicity and user experience drove its future successes

Google Search revolutionized information retrieval in 1998, but additional web-based products, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and YouTube reinforced the company's core ad business while allowing it to aggregate the world's information. Forming Alphabet protected this business from riskier moonshot projects.

Elon Musk's $100M investment in SpaceX was lost to three failed rocket launches

The attempts with Falcon 1 endangered the company's future but provided valuable information from which to iterate and follow up with the successful first privately funded orbital launch in history and multiple ISS resupply missions.

Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018

Although the retailer may have failed financially speaking, some argue that longevity in itself is a success—the brand operated for over 130 years before that bankruptcy filing, after all.

The first private equity fund was launched in 1960

At the time, the industry—and the public's understanding of it—was rather limited, and few private equity firms existed until the 1980s. The first leveraged buyout is thought to have taken place in 1955.

One Facebook investor turned $500K into $1B

Peter Thiel was Facebook's first big investor. In 2004, he invested $500K into the social network, long before the company owned Instagram or renamed itself "Meta." In 2012, when he sold off most of his stake, he turned that initial $500K investment into more than $1B in cash.

A company is ‘in the black’ if it is profitable

If a company is “in the red,” however, it is unprofitable. The expressions stem from the days before computers were widely used in accounting, when accountants updated financial data in their books by hand, using different colored ink (black and red) to signal a company's profitability.

Temu was losing an average of $30 per order as of 2024

Some business experts have made the argument that Temu is more focused on rapidly gaining market share and growing its customer base than achieving profitability.

Jensen Huang doesn't think Nvidia was a great company on day one

"Nvidia wasn't a great company on day one. We made it great over 31 years," explained businessman Jensen Huang on a recent podcast episode. He covered other principals and lessons he learned while building Nvidia in the epsiode too.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

While the first exchange-traded fund (a 'basket' of different assets that can be bought and sold on a stock exchange) in the US only launched in 1993, the global ETF market has grown to more than $10T in the short time since.

Dozens of S&P 500 stocks, including Coca-Cola and Walmart—known as the dividend aristocrats—have increased dividends every year for 25 years

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Despite being favored by 87% of Americans, Congress does not have term limits.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

The first steps to rebuilding your credit score include getting to know exactly what's on your credit report and figuring out how far you are from the '700 club,' or 'good score' range.

Urushiol, the oily toxin in poison ivy, can remain allergenic on clothing for years.