He put the typical startup’s chance of success at about 10%, he said in the same Academy of Achievement interview, so by his own math a 30% shot was generous.
In the end, they invested anyway. “He wasn’t making a bet on this company or this concept,” Bezos said of his father. “He was making a bet on his son, as was my mother.”
What happened to the money
Two years later, in May 1997, Amazon went public. By the end of the decade, the couple, whose stake came to roughly 6% of the company, were billionaires, according to the Academy of Achievement.
Jackie died at her home in Miami on Aug. 14, 2025, Bloomberg reported at the time. She was 78. Exactly how much of the fortune the family holds is anyone’s guess, since she and Mike never publicly shared what they owned after 1999; notably, though, they did give nearly 600,000 shares to the Bezos Family Foundation, the education charity the couple set up together, between 2001 and 2016. If that’s all that ever left their accounts, Bloomberg figured they were still sitting on around 16 million shares in 2018.
That would have ranked them among the world’s 30 richest people, ahead of Elon Musk and the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, CNBC noted at the time. Even in the most pessimistic version Bloomberg modeled, with every share sold at the cheapest possible moment, the couple would still have walked away with at least $100 million and gains of more than 40,000%.
What to do if a relative asks you to invest
If your nephew comes to you asking to bankroll his new app, or your brother-in-law approaches you about investing in his restaurant, remember that most people who hear that pitch will say no. In the case of Bezos and Amazon, most investors saw an unproven online store run by a guy who’d just quit a good job and who was openly calling the whole thing a likely loss. Most other people in their shoes would have passed, too.
Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, and Robert Herjavec of Shark Tank, for what it’s worth, avoid mixing money and family altogether.
That said, the Bezos family did get one thing right. Jeff spelled out the odds before he took a single dollar, so his parents knew exactly what they were signing up for. If you do decide to back a relative, ask for that same level of honesty, and only invest money you could afford to lose without touching your retirement.
“We were fortunate enough that we have lived overseas and we have saved a few pennies so we were able to be an angel investor,” Mike Bezos, Jeff’s stepfather, said at the same 2015 event in Philadelphia, according to Bloomberg. “The rest is history.”
Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
