43 Absolutely Amazing Facts About Amazon
"Work hard, have fun, make history."—Jeff Bezos
Beginning in 1995 as a simple online bookseller, Amazon has quickly grown to become the alpha dog of online retail. While few companies are as large or as pervasive in our daily lives as Amazon, surprisingly few of us know much about it.
In this list we count down 43 absolutely amazing facts about this lucrative online behemoth.
42. What’s in a Name?
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos was born by the name Jeff Jorgensen in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964. Jeff’s mother remarried when Jeff was four years old to a man named Miguel “Mike”
Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who adopted Jeff and gave him his surname.
41. Portrait of a Scholar as a Young Man
Bezos was a precocious student as a young man. He served as his high school’s valedictorian and was a National Merit Scholar.
After high school, Bezos went on to study at Princeton, graduating in 1986 with Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science and electrical engineering.
40. You’ve Got Mail
Amazon was founded as a simple online book retailer out of Bezos’ garage in Bellevue, Washington. To handle all of the mail the fledgling company received, Bezos installed an oversized mailbox.
The oversized mailbox Bezos put in can still be seen outside that house today.
39. First Book
The first book Amazon ever sold was called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Doug Hofstadte. This complex science book, which explores the mechanisms of intelligence through computer modelling, was sold on April 3, 1995.
