Insider Monkey
Jeff Bezos Stock Portfolio: 10 Companies and Startups
Ramish Cheema
8 min read

In This Article:

In this piece, we will take a look at the Jeff Bezos Stock Portfolio: 10 Companies and Startups. For more Jeff Bezos investments, head on over to Jeff Bezos Stock Portfolio: 5 Companies and Startups.

If there's one thing that can be said for sure, it's that Jeff Bezos knows how to follow his gut. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), which Bezos founded in 1994, is one of the largest electronic commerce retailers in the world, and has allowed Mr. Bezos to become a billionaire with unfathomable financial resources at his disposal. The billionaire set up Amazon when the consumer adoption of the Internet was in its nascent stages, and persisted with the firm despite the numerous setbacks that he faced in the way.

Amazon's history is full of interesting and unique facts that show Mr. Bezos' peculiar way of thinking and how he built the corporate behemoth that we know today. In its early days, the company was an online bookseller, and faced a challenge of processing big orders from wholesalers that had a ten-book minimum condition. However, to avoid excessive costs, Mr. Bezos and his team discovered a rather interesting workaround, where they would order only one book of the title that they needed, and nine books that were out of stock.

The executive explained this workaround in an interview that he gave to Playboy in 1999, and in the conversation, he also shared his approach that let Amazon take on bookselling heavyweights such as Barnes & Noble. According to Mr. Bezos:

Some people thought we were toast, and they had a logical argument. Amazon.com had two good years—most companies don’t get a two-year window without any real competition—but then the fun was over. We were about to get creamed by the big guys. Barnes and Noble had a powerful, trusted brand name. Also, they had huge purchasing power. We were tiny. We had 125 employees and 340,000 customers and our revenues were 50 times smaller than Barnes and Noble’s. To put it in perspective, they had 30,000 employees and 10.7 million customers. Now we are only three times smaller than Barnes and Noble in terms of revenue. It’s because we didn’t look over our shoulder. We looked ahead, focused on our customers and obsessively did whatever we could to make them happy. I ask our folks here to wake up scared every morning with their sheets drenched in sweat. But I also ask them to be precise about what it is they are scared of—not our competitors, but our customers.

Since then, Mr. Bezos has come a long way. A year after his interview, he would go on to set up his aerospace firm Blue Origin. Blue Origin is currently fighting the heavyweights of the aerospace world, such as Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA), for a foothold into the heavy lift rocket launch market and a slice of the pie for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Artemis program through which the agency plans to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon. While it missed out on NASA's first award for a lunar lander - and one which saw considerable controversy - Blue Origin is now competing for a new lander contract. At the same time, and perhaps as an indication of its founder's futuristic mindset, Blue Origin has also perfected the method to manufacture solar panels on the Moon.

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