Jeff Bezos was asking his parents for money to start an internet company in 1995. There was no Amazon empire yet. There was an online bookstore, a new kind of business and plenty of reasons to wonder whether people would actually use it.
His parents, Jacklyn Gise Bezos and Miguel “Mike” Bezos, decided to take the chance. They gave him $245,573 from their savings. Amazon’s 1997 prospectus later said the amount was a “large fraction” of their life savings.
