When was Amazon.com, Inc. founded?

Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in 1994, in Seattle, Washington by Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

Who are the founders of Amazon.com, Inc.?

The founder of Amazon.com, Inc. is Jeffrey Preston Bezos. The company was established in 1994 in Seattle, Washington.

Who is the current CEO of Amazon.com, Inc.?

The current CEO of Amazon.com, Inc. is Andrew R. Jassy, serving since 2021.

Where was Amazon.com, Inc. founded?

Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in Seattle, Washington in 1994 by Jeffrey Preston Bezos.

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Amazon.com, Inc.

E-commerceFounded 1994- Updated June 2026

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: June 2026

Content is for informational purposes only. Not financial advice. Data sourced from SEC filings, annual reports, and public records. See our full disclaimer and methodology.

CorpDigest

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Amazon.com, Inc.

E-commerceFounded 1994- Updated June 2026

Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya

Last reviewed: June 2026

Founders

Who Founded Amazon.com, Inc.?

Q: Who founded Amazon.com, Inc.?

Amazon.com, Inc. was founded by Jeffrey Preston Bezos in 1994 in Seattle, Washington.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos · Founded 1994 · Seattle, Washington

Last reviewed: June 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya

Quick Answer

Amazon.com, Inc. was founded by Jeffrey Preston Bezos in 1994 in Seattle, Washington. The company is currently led by Andrew R. Jassy.

Founding Story

Nobody remembers this, but Amazon almost got named Cadabra. As in abracadabra. Jeff Bezos's lawyer talked him out of it because it sounded too much like 'cadaver' over the phone. That's the level of improvisation happening in the summer of 1994 — a thirty-year-old quant from a hedge fund, driving cross-country with his wife while dictating a business plan from the passenger seat, hadn't even settled on a name for the company that would eventually be worth $2 trillion.

The origin isn't really about books. Everyone tells it that way — 'Bezos started an online bookstore' — but that misses the actual decision. Bezos was at D. E. Shaw in Manhattan, one of the most secretive and profitable quantitative trading firms on Wall Street, pulling in the kind of compensation that makes people stay forever. He'd stumbled on a statistic: web usage was growing at 2,300 percent annually. Not 23 percent. Twenty-three hundred. He made a list of twenty product categories that could work online and picked books for coldly rational reasons. Three million titles in print. No physical store could stock more than 150,000. An online catalog could offer everything. The product was cheap to ship, impossible to damage, and attracted exactly the kind of educated early-adopter who was already comfortable with the internet in 1994.

Here's what I find fascinating about the founding decision: Bezos didn't quit his job because he was passionate about books. He quit because he ran a mental exercise he called the 'regret minimization framework.' At eighty years old, would he regret not trying this? Obviously yes. Would he regret trying and failing? Obviously no — he'd still have his Princeton degree and his Wall Street resume. The asymmetry of regret made the decision trivial. His boss David Shaw took him on a walk through Central Park, told him it was a great idea for someone who didn't already have a great job, and wished him well.

Bezos and MacKenzie Scott packed a car and drove from New York to Seattle. He chose Seattle for two reasons that had nothing to do with tech culture: a major book distributor (Ingram) had a warehouse in nearby Roseburg, Oregon, and Washington state's small population meant fewer customers would owe sales tax. They rented a house in Bellevue with a garage — the garage, the one that became the founding myth — and Bezos set up Sun Microsystems workstations on a door-desk (literally a door from Home Depot laid across sawhorses, a cost-saving habit he'd maintain for years as a cultural statement).

The site launched July 16, 1995. Within the first week, they'd sold books to customers in all fifty states and forty-five countries. Bezos had told early employees that if they sold $1 million in books by 2000, he'd consider it a success. They hit that number in the first year.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos

Co-founder 1994

Background

Jeffrey Preston Bezos came to Amazon from the intersection of computer science, finance, and early internet analysis. After studying electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton, he worked at firms including Fitel, Bankers Trust, and D. E. Shaw, where he became a senior vice president and studied technology-driven investment opportunities. At D. E. Shaw, Bezos encountered the data point that shaped his career: web usage was rising fast enough to support new kinds of businesses. He did not have a traditional retail background, which became an advantage. Instead of thinking in terms of store locations and shelf space, he thought in terms of catalog depth, software, customer data, distribution, and long-term capital allocation.

Role at Amazon.com, Inc.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 after leaving D. E. Shaw and moving to Seattle with MacKenzie Scott. His first strategic choice was books, a category with millions of titles and a clear internet advantage over physical shelves. Bezos built Amazon around customer obsession, long-term thinking, written decision-making, and a willingness to sacrifice near-term profit for market position. Under his leadership, Amazon expanded from books into a multi-category retailer, launched Marketplace in 2000, introduced Prime in 2005, and built AWS into a cloud infrastructure business after 2006. He also tolerated failure, including Amazon Auctions and Fire Phone, when those bets produced useful lessons. Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021 but remained executive chair, leaving a culture that prizes speed, measurement, and high standards while also attracting criticism for intensity and labor pressure.

Amazon.com, Inc.: CEO & Leadership History

Full timeline →

Andrew R. Jassy

CEO

2021 – Present

Andy Jassy became CEO in July 2021 after building AWS from an internal infrastructure experiment into Amazon's defining profit engine. His tenure has focused on restoring discipline after pandemic overexpansion — reducing excess warehouse capacity, cutting 27,000 corporate roles, regionalizing the fulfillment network, and pushing operating margins to record levels. Jassy has also bet heavily on AI infrastructure (Trainium chips, Bedrock, Amazon Q) and expanded advertising into Prime Video.

Brian T. Olsavsky

CFO

2015 – Present

Olsavsky became CFO in 2015 during a period when Amazon was simultaneously scaling AWS, logistics, advertising, content, devices, and international markets. His role has been to fund long-term bets while maintaining valuation support through periods of thin retail margins and heavy capital expenditure.

Werner Vogels

Chief Technology Officer

2005 – Present

Vogels became CTO during the period when Amazon was turning internal infrastructure lessons into external cloud services. He shaped Amazon's distributed systems culture, service-oriented architecture, developer messaging, and technical credibility around AWS.

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder & CEO

1994 – 2021

Bezos led the founder era from 1994 to 2021 and made the decisions that turned Amazon from an online bookstore into a platform company. He expanded beyond books in 1998, opened the marketplace to third-party sellers in 2000, launched Prime in 2005, backed AWS in 2006, acquired Whole Foods in 2017, and repeatedly reinvested cash flow into logistics, devices, media, and infrastructure rather than returning it to shareholders. The measurable outcome was a company with hundreds of billions in revenue, a global fulfillment network, and a culture organized around customer obsession and long-term capital allocation.