The day this story was published AMZN closed at $1,460.09 vs. today's last trade at $2,476.23 up 49.97 (+2.06%)
From the Guardian, 25 Apr 2018:
In 1994, Jeff Bezos held 60 meetings with family members, friends and potential investors in an attempt to persuade them to invest $50,000 (£35,000) in his revolutionary idea to create an online bookshop. He failed to convince 38 of them, and 24 years later some of them still cannot bring themselves to talk about what life might have been like if they had taken a punt on Bezos and this “Amazon thing” that the then 30-year-old hedge fund manager wouldn’t shut up about.....MUCH MORE
“I’m in touch with a few of them now,” Bezos revealed in an on-stage interview at a charity dinner in Washington DC last year. “It’s kind of a study in human nature ... Some of them take it in their stride, and they recognise that they actually have ridiculously happy lives. [But] others of them just cannot talk about it – it’s too painful.”
That pain comes from knowing that they opted out of the chance to become billionaires. Each of the 22 investors – who included Bezos’s parents, his younger brother Mark and sister Christina – were granted just under 1% of Amazon’s stock on average. If they held on to all of the shares their stakes could now be worth up to $7bn (£5bn) each. “That’s just human nature,” Bezos, now 54, says. “Some people are just better at rolling with the punches.”
The biggest winners from investing early in Bezos’s idea were his parents, Mike and Jackie Bezos, who pumped in $300,000 in return for 6% of the company, which sold its first book – about artificial intelligence – in July 1995. “It couldn’t happen to two nicer people,” Bezos says of his parents’ windfall.
They have given away $68m of it through their Bezos Family Foundation, which focuses on education. The foundation’s mission statement is a Winston Churchill quote: “What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?”....
Among the names:
Miguel Bezos, Jeff Bezos' Father
Mark Bezos, Brother
Christina Bezos Poore, Sister
Nick Hanauer
Tom Alberg
Scott D. Cook
Patricia Q. Stonesifer
There is some discrepancy between the Guardian story and this spreadsheet put together by Jordan Elpern-Waxman in answer to a Quora query:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M---QLabFZ3XRSVbH0Yl75awm5lvcxUnx-8m8q00piE/edit?hl&hl#gid=0
And some additional names via amendments to the 1997 S-1:
SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT (SHELDON KAPHAN) Vice President, CTO
SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT (SCOTT LIPSKY) Vice President of Business Expansion
SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT (JOY D. COVEY) Vice President, Finance, CFO
No. 1:
| 4 | SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT WITH RICK R. AYRE | |||
| 5 | SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT WITH JOHN D. RISHER | |||
| 6 | SHAREHOLDER'S AGREEMENT WITH JOEL R. SPIEGEL |
*If You Were Concerned For Jeff Bezos, What With the Divorce and the Economy And All, He Is Still On Track To Be A Trillionaire In 2026 (AMZN)
