Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi there, who are you?
I'm Jeff Bezos.
And what is your claim to fame?
I'm the founder of Amazon.com.
Where did you get an idea for Amazon.com?
Well, three years ago I was in New York City working for a quantitative hedge fund when I came across this startling statistic that web usage was growing at 2300% a year. So I decided I would try and find a business plan that made sense in the context of that growth. I believe that it's very easy to predict that there are going to be lots of successful companies born of the Internet.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Jeff Bezos to start Amazon?
They're going to have very large market caps and so on. I also believe that today, where we sit, it's very hard to predict who those companies are going to be. Can I have a prediction from you? Where do you think we'll be in 10 years? Well, it's very hard to give concrete predictions.
But what I do know is that we are at the very beginning, not just Amazon.com, but the entire industry of e-commerce and online shopping. How does it make you feel to think that someday kids in school will read about your name like we read about Alexander Graham Bell? Well, I like to think that Amazon.com still has the opportunity to be a footnote in the history of e-commerce.
In just a few decades, a man went from having a simple company in his garage to building an empire that dominates global commerce, which influences fields such as technology, innovation and even the outside space. Jeff Bezos not only changed the way we buy, he has also become the symbol of a system that concentrates power and wealth in very few hands in an extreme way.
In today's video, we go through the story behind the Amazon giant and the rise of Jeff Bezos as one of the richest men in the world. But we will also talk about what his success entails, the criticisms, the bad working conditions in the company's warehouses and how our future could be in his hands.
Before becoming one of the richest men in the world, Jeff Bezos was a baby who grew up in uncertainty during his first years of life. Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen was born in January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, Jacqueline Gies, was only 16 when she was pregnant and was still studying in high school.
His biological father, Theodore Jorgensen, separated from Jackie when Jeff was very young. Why? Nobody knows. The truth is that Jacqueline had to deal with it alone. She studied in night classes and took Jeff with her. According to her own words, in one bag she carried books and in the other, diapers and pens.
She did everything possible to get her son ahead, even to the point of living without services like the phone to be able to pay the rent. For this and more, Jeff has made it clear how proud and grateful he is with his mother for doing everything she did for him.
Some time later, his mother met Miguel Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who had arrived in the United States and worked at Exxon, one of the most important oil companies in the United States.
My dad was just 16 when he came to America and not with his family. He was all by himself. I have a hard time even imagining that, but his parents sent him here because under Fidel Castro, they felt like they had to, to protect him.
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Chapter 3: How did Jeff Bezos transition from a garage startup to a global empire?
Then he flew to Los Angeles to go to the American Library Convention. He got stuck in the business and discovered that the great majorists already had digital catalogs. Bezos wanted to create a place where he could look, choose and buy books. But his bosses at D.E. Shaw were not interested in starting a business like that. Jeff had one thing very clear. If he didn't do it, someone else would.
He left his job in New York and, together with his wife, they set off on a trip to Seattle, where they would have access to Ingram, a majority bookstore, and where they were joined by technology experts who would help him start his business. While McKenzie was driving his 1988 Chevy Blazer, Jeff wrote the business plan.
And so, between restaurants, highways and gas stations, the idea of Amazon was born. A name that was given by the Amazon, the largest river in the world. Jeff Bezos wanted to build an endless store, a platform that, like the Amazon, seemed to have no end, and it did.
When you think of Amazon today, you surely imagine huge warehouses, robots that speed up the packaging process and, of course, distributors that arrive super fast, right? But that's not how it started. Jeff needed to get an investment that would help him start his business. He was honest with the people he approached, mostly friends and family.
He made it clear to them that the company had a 70% chance of failure. Even so, he managed to convince a few. Among these first investors were his own parents, who gave him a check for $ 300,000. According to his mother, they were not betting on the internet, but they were betting on Jeff.
This game came out more than well, because at the end of the 90s, being owners of 6% of Amazon, Jackie and Miguel, his parents, became millionaires. But not everything in the creation of this great empire was a matter of numbers. There were also small decisions that ended up being fundamental.
One of the most complicated was to decide the name, and at the beginning the idea was cadavera.com, but Jeff's lawyer pointed out that it was very similar to the word cadaver, so they ended up changing it to Amazon. As I already mentioned, it was inspired by the longest river in the world. Even in the first logo of the company you can appreciate this nod.
Amazon was born in July 1994 as a small online bookstore, and its headquarters was the very garage of Jeff's house, which, far from looking like the central office of a company, looked more like an office created for a low-budget theater play. The desk was totally improvised, it was made by Jeff himself, after he bought some cheap doors and put legs on it to make it work like a table.
This piece of furniture became a symbol of the economization with which he started his business, since the objective was not to spend on anything other than customer satisfaction. When he had the website ready, he asked 300 people, including friends and acquaintances, to try it. The code worked perfectly and on July 16, 1995, Jeff Bezos opened Amazon for the whole world.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Amazon face during its early years?
And of course, this also means the loss of jobs for thousands of people. So many wonder if it's really for the processes to be more efficient or just trying to keep more profits by having fewer workers. But the real blow to the image of Amazon comes from within. There are several reports and complaints that reveal the extreme labor conditions that are experienced in the company's warehouses.
Extremely heavy days, constant surveillance, pressures to achieve impossible goals and a labor environment that for many is exhausting and even dehumanizing. In December 2024, a massive strike took place in the United States. In the middle of Christmas, one of the most important seasons of the year, hundreds of employees stopped working.
They demanded better working conditions, decent salaries and greater security. The strike ended on Christmas Eve, but the employees made it clear that that battle had not ended. And let's see, the controversies are not limited to the labor field. Amazon has also been marked by suspicious tax strategies.
Despite generating an approximate income of $386 billion and obtaining benefits of more than $24 million in 2020, the company paid about 7% of that in taxes, something far below the business average. That is, for every $100 that Amazon earned, it barely paid $7 in taxes.
This has fed the criticism that Amazon uses tax havens and legal lagoons to minimize this type of taxes, since the company deviates its income through subsidiaries in territories with low or null taxes, such as Luxembourg, Ireland or Bahamas, and thus reduce the loss of its profits. This is where the following question enters the debate. How much money is too much for a single person?
According to Forbes, Jeff's personal fortune is around $215 billion in 2025. Since July 2021, he left the position of CEO of Amazon after more than 25 years in charge of the company. While Andy Jassy took over Amazon, Jeff decided to focus on other projects, mainly personnel and space projects.
He launched the Bezos Earth Fund initiative, with which he seeks to invest $10 billion in the fight against climate change. Although it sounds like a good cause,
the foundation has received many criticisms that question whether it is really an environmental commitment or if it is only marketing to improve Jeff's public image, especially considering the great environmental impact that his companies leave on Earth. In 2019, Jeff and Mackenzie Bezos divorced. The separation
which, although it happened in a friendly way, set a record for being one of the most expensive divorces in history. McKenzie received 25% of the shares that Jeff has from Amazon, which in total gave him a participation of 4% of the company, receiving the amount of nothing more and nothing less than 38 billion dollars.
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