With 64,588,418 shares, Jeff Bezos is the primary individual investor. Owning 12.7% of the company. Other top individual investors comprise Amazon’s CEO Andy Jessy, with 94,729 shares. Top institutional investors include mutual funds like The Vanguard Group (6.6% ownership) and BlackRock (5.7% ownership).
The Bezos Empire

Jeff Bezos’ ownership of Amazon makes him the wealthiest person on earth.
Amazon itself is an empire, owning many subsidiaries!

In fact, as of 2023, his ownership stake is worth over $121 billion.
Following the divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos, the Amazon ownership structure didn’t change that much.
Indeed, Jeff Bezos kept voting and controlling power for all the stocks co-owned with Mackenzie Bezos.
Therefore, of this 15%, 100% of the voting power belongs to Jeff Bezos.
Of this 15%, 75% of ownership belongs to Jeff Bezos, while the remaining 25% belongs to Mackenzie Bezos.
Amazon customer obsession

As Jeff Bezos said in their first shareholders’ letter of 1997:
It’s All About the Long Term
We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.
The key metrics Amazon is using to measure its long-term growth are:
- customer and revenue growth,
- the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from Amazon on a repeat basis,
- and the strength of our brand
What has driven Amazon along this massive growth is what Jeff Bezos calls “customer obsession.”
This customer obsession has transformed into a trillion-dollar company, with Jeff Bezos seeing his wealth turning to over sixty billion dollars!
Amazon business milestones
In 2022, Amazon reached a few critical milestones:
Prime

More than 15 years post-launch, it had exceeded 100 million paid Prime members globally.
By 2022, Prime generated more than $35 billion in revenue, and it’s a key segment for the company, as it drives repeat customers while offering a streaming service that competes against Netflix.
Prime Video award-winning Prime Originals, like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, winner of two Critics’ Choice Awards and two Golden Globes, and the Oscar-nominated movie The Big Sick. Those help Amazon sell more shoes.
AWS

Amazon Web Services, an over $80 billion revenue run rate business in 2022, which just a few years before didn’t even exist as a line of business
Marketplace
By 2017, for the first time in Amazon’s history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from third-party sellers, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
Amazon today is one of the largest platforms on earth.
Alexa & Amazon Devices
Alexa-enabled devices are among the best-selling items across all Amazon.
With tens of millions of Echo devices, Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa were the best-selling products across all of Amazon – all categories and all manufacturers.
Amazon’s flywheel is one of the most potent mental models of the business world.

Amazon’s humble beginnings: a simple bookstore
As specified in the 1997 shareholders letter signed by Jeff Bezos:
From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy- to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
Amazon didn’t seek to expand right away and become what we like to call today “the everything store.” Instead, it started as a bookstore.
It conquered that niche, then expanded to monopolize and disrupt other niches; Until it became so big to disrupt entire industries.
Connected to Amazon Business Model


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