Jeff Bezos's parents sank $245,573 of their retirement savings into Amazon after he told them they'd probably lose it

In 1995, Mike and Jackie Bezos handed their son $245,573 — a big chunk of their life savings — to fund Amazon [NASDAQ: AMZN] the online bookstore he was building out of the garage of his rented home near Seattle. Jeff had warned them there was a 70% chance they'd lose it all .

The number comes from a 1997 Amazon prospectus , and it went mostly unnoticed until Bloomberg dug it up in July 2018. If the couple never sold, Bloomberg estimated, that stake would have been worth about $30 billion by then. That's a return of up to 12,000,000%, which Bloomberg says could top anything in venture capital history.

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Bezos pitched 60 people in 1994, and most said no

A year earlier, Bezos had made his pitch in about 60 separate meetings, trying to raise $1 million from family, friends and other would-be backers at roughly $50,000 a head, according to CNBC . Most of them passed.

His parents had questions, too. "What's the Internet?" his father asked when Jeff first pitched him, Bezos recalled in an interview with the Academy of Achievement. His mother, meanwhile, told him , "Don't quit your job," and asked, "Can you do this on the weekends and nights?"

Even so, he made sure they understood the risk. "I want you to know how risky this is," Jeff told them, as Mike later recalled onstage at a 2015 National Constitution Center event, "because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don't want you to be mad at me."

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."

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.