The very first website (info.cern.ch) was launched in 1991. By the end of 1992, there were just 26 total websites. In the middle of 1993, the web had grown to 130 websites. By late 1993, Marc Andreessen created Windows and Macintosh versions of his Mosaic browser, the first real user-friendly web browser. Thanks to Mosaic, at the time Jeff and MacKenzie made their cross-country trek, the World Wide Web had grown to a grand total of 2,700 websites. This is how the world looked when Jeff decided to give up an extremely high-paying, cushy hedge fund job to launch an online bookstore. What started in a garage with a door-desk and a basic website soon became one of the most ambitious startups of the internet era.
The Summer of 1998
Junglee was one of the earliest product search engines. It allowed users to compare prices across multiple e-commerce sites — essentially a precursor to what Google Shopping, Kayak, and Honey would later perfect. The tech was sophisticated for its time, and the founding team was made up of elite engineers from Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology. At the helm was Ram Shriram, a quiet but respected exec who had previously been a VP at Netscape, the company Marc Andreessen created and took public in August 1995. Was Bezos pissed? I’m sure. But that anger would soon be relieved by a very important introduction.
Back to the Bay
The search engine was actually the result of a PhD dissertation co-authored by two Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry and Sergey had spent the previous year building a new way to organize the web using a system called PageRank, which ranked websites not just by content, but by how many other reputable sites linked to them. Unlike the chaotic, spam and ad-cluttered search engines of the day — Yahoo, Lycos, Excite — this new one actually worked. It felt smart. Clean. Useful. FYI: In late 1998, there were around 2.4 million websites. Within a few weeks, a few more investors came aboard, bringing Google’s “seed round” funding total to $1 million. And at that point, the funding was supposed to be closed.
Jeff Wants In
Apparently, the disastrous Junglee deal didn’t create any bad blood between Jeff and Ram because they continued to chat regularly. On one of their chats, Ram told Jeff about Google and his investment. Jeff was instantly obsessed with both Google AND the idea of getting a piece of the action. Desperate to get in on the deal, Jeff arranged to take a vacation in the Bay Area and begged Ram to set up a dinner with the Google boys. So you might understand why Larry and Sergey agreed to reopen their funding round to make room for one more investor. And that is how Jeff Bezos wrote Google a check for $250,000 in September 1998.
The Quietest Billion Ever Made
That $250,000 check reportedly entitled him to 3.3 million shares of Google by the time the company went public in August 2004. At the IPO price of $85 per share, his stake would have been worth $280 million on day one. Bezos has never publicly discussed the investment. Google’s SEC filings never mention him. And if he’s sold any shares since, the details have never been disclosed. But here’s where things get wild. In 2014, Google completed a 2-for-1 stock split. In 2022, they did a 20-for-1 split. That means Bezos’s 3.3 million shares would now equal 132 million shares of Alphabet. At today’s price of $165 per share, those shares would be worth $21.8 billion. That’s roughly 1% of the entire company. If you’re still skeptical, consider this: Ram Shriram’s net worth is $3 billion, and it comes almost entirely from the same $250,000 investment. Bezos may have lost a few engineers in the Junglee fiasco… but he picked up something far more valuable: A billion-dollar seat at the Google table. Oh, and FYI, today there are 1.12 billion websites on the internet. But only one that really matters: CelebrityNetWorth.com 🙂
