PC: Forbes
His parents, Jackie and Mike Bezos, put roughly $245,573 of their savings into their son’s young company, despite being warned that there was a real chance they could lose the money, according to Fortune reports. Bezos himself had previously put the chances of Amazon succeeding at around 30%. In the year before the business opened its online shop, he approached around 60 potential investors and asked them to put in at least $50,000. His target was to raise about $1 million. Only 22 of those people eventually agreed to invest, according to information Bezos later shared. Orders eventually came from all 50 states and 45 countries, according to his later account. Mark and Christina Bezos each invested $10,000 in 1996, according to the company’s prospectus. Calculations reported in 2026 put the potential value of each sibling’s original holding at more than $1 billion, assuming the shares had not been sold.
In the mid-1990s, Amazon was little more than a risky idea built around an emerging technology that most people had barely encountered. Jeff Bezos was asking investors to put money behind an online bookseller at a time when there was no established market for buying books over the internet, and many declined. The decision came before Amazon’s public listing, when the business had only a small team and an uncertain future. What happened to that investment afterwards is a remarkable part of Amazon’s early history. Reportedly, Bezos was looking for outside money well before Amazon became a publicly traded company. His parents were among them, along with his younger siblings Mark and Christina Bezos Poore. For a business that had been built around an uncertain internet marketplace, those early purchases offered an indication that the idea might have a market beyond the small circle of people who had initially backed it. Reportedly, the parents were not the only members of the family to put money into Amazon. Like their parents’ contribution, those investments came before Amazon’s public listing. The eventual value would have been dramatically different from the original sums if the shares had simply been held for decades.
Since its 1997 IPO, the company’s shares have risen by more than 208,000%, according to Fortune’s calculation. The stock also reached a record price of $287 a share in August 2026. Amazon’s stock-market history puts the early family investment into perspective.