Jeff Bezos is known for making big bets and seeing them through with a tenacity that helped him create a trillion-dollar company like Amazon.com Inc. However, his other bet on a small project back in the late 90s is not known quite as well.
Two 25-year-olds, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had developed a search engine as part of a project. Although they were on the verge of giving up, to focus on their academics, they persisted and created a product so powerful that it would dominate the search engine landscape for several years, helping create one of the biggest technology companies in the world.
Bezos took a bet on these two and invested $250,000 purely because he loved the two Google founders.
"I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey," Bezos famously said, according to the book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It."
Bezos' $250,000 investment in Page and Brin helped create what is today the most-used search engine on the internet, where "Google" is now a verb as well in addition to being the name of the company.
It also underscores Bezos' long-term investment horizons and his ability to see through tough periods instead of a short-term perspective oriented towards making a profit.
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His vision is also visible in how he steered Amazon first, and then Amazon Web Services, especially after the dot-com crash. The company was weeks away from bankruptcy before Bezos intervened and struck a deal that saved Amazon. Nearly 25 years later, Amazon is now among the world's most valuable companies with a market capitalization of $1.9 trillion.
How Much Bezos' $250K Google Investment Would Be Worth Today
Bezos struck gold with his $250,000 early-stage investment in Google in 1998. Not only did Page and Brin see their project through, they laid the foundation of a company that would become the de facto search engine of the world a decade later.
Google went public in 2004, and Bezos' $250,000 investment fetched him 3.3 million shares, worth $280 million at the time. Those shares would now be worth $6.2 billion, adjusted for stock splits, bonuses, and other corporate actions.
That is a gain of nearly 25,000 times, assuming Bezos kept his investment and did not cash out. However, Bezos is said to have offloaded his Google stake, although it's not clear exactly when he did so.
Bezos' net worth is estimated to be $206 billion today, making him the second richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. However, his $250,000 investment in Google alone would have been enough to make him a billionaire.
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