Jeff Bezos' father invested $245,573 in life savings to help launch Amazon
Miguel Bezos fled Cuba alone at sixteen with three shirts.
The short version
- He later worked for Exxon for thirty-two years.
- He trusted his son Jeff with his life savings.
- That risk became one of history's most lucrative investments.
- Amazon now has a market cap of trillions.
Miguel Bezos arrived in Miami on July 21, 1962, with no English skills and only a small suitcase containing three shirts, three pairs of pants, one pair of shoes, and a jacket made by his mother and sister. Sent from Cuba at 16 through Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. State Department program, he worked at a bank and McDonald's before graduating from the University of Albuquerque and spending 32 years as an engineer and manager at Exxon, according to Yahoo Finance.
Years later, his stepson Jeff Bezos told him about an idea to start an online bookstore. When Jeff quit his New York City investment firm job, his parents became Amazon's first financial backers. According to a 1997 Amazon prospectus, Miguel and his wife Jackie invested $245,573 of their savings, even though Jeff warned them there was a 70 percent chance they would lose every dollar.
That gamble on the early internet paid off beyond imagination. Amazon, the giant online store, now commands a market cap of roughly $2.68 trillion, and Jeff Bezos holds a net worth of about $369 billion, according to Forbes. The family still keeps the original jacket Miguel brought from Cuba as a reminder of where they started. Jeff Bezos said his parents have been incredible role models their entire lives.
Photo: SounderBruce, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
