How Siblings of Jeff Bezos Invested Rs 8 Lakh in Amazon to Become Billionaires
For Mark and Christina Bezos, the siblings of Jeff Bezos, investing $10,000 (about Rs 8.33 lakh) in a new online bookshop in the mid-1990s may have sounded like a risk, but it ended up being a very smart move. Bloomberg claims that they each paid $10,000 to purchase 30,000 shares in Amazon.com Inc. back in 1996. Due to the investment’s tremendous growth over time and return of more than 10,249,900%, each of them is now a billionaire.
As Amazon’s stock was trading at $91 (Rs 7,582) on July 31, 2018, a report from Luxury Launches, citing Bloomberg, said that each of their shares was worth $640 million (Rs 5,332 crore). At $149 (Rs 12,414), the stock price today, each of their shares is worth around $1.044 billion (Rs 8,698 crore).
While governments and educational institutions were the main users of the internet in July 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. Despite the dangers, he chose to open an online business because he recognized the potential for online purchasing in the future. It was very difficult to persuade investors—including members of his own family—about this novel concept. Bezos even forewarned his parents that their chances of losing their money were 70%. He joked that even if the endeavor failed, he still hoped to be welcomed for Thanksgiving, but he wanted to make sure they realized the dangers. The book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” gives an overview of this tale.
Jeff Bezos met with friends, family, and potential investors sixty times in 1994 in an attempt to convince them to fund his online shop concept. 38 of the 60 did not make any investments. When Bezos reflected on these rejections years later, he saw that some of the individuals who chose not to contribute were still impacted by their choice, either because they found it difficult to discuss or because they accepted it as a fact of life. On its path to success, Amazon overcame several obstacles, such as weathering the ups and downs of the dot-com boom and making its initial public offering on May 15, 1997, at a price of $18 (Rs 1,499) per share. Under Bezos’s direction, Amazon not only survived but flourished, expanding from an online book seller to a $1.5 trillion corporation.
Despite not being in the limelight much, Mark and Christina Bezos have been important to the Amazon narrative. Christina has maintained a low profile, devoting her time to her family and charity endeavors, while Mark took a different route and became well-known in the advertising and philanthropic fields.
