July 16, 1995
The brainchild of
founder Jeff Bezos, the
online retail behemoth began
simply as an online bookseller. Named after the Amazon River,
Amazon.com was billed as
"Earth's biggest bookstore." The company took off immediately,
accruing $15.7 million in revenues
by the end of 1996. In 1997, Bezos hand-delivered
the company's one-millionth
order to a customer in Japan. Amazon would eventually
become the most valuable
retailer in the world. In 2017, Jeff Bezos was named
the richest man in the world,
and Amazon became a $1 trillion
company in 2018.