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AIPROPX ReportFortune · 3h ago
No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world by revenue
Jeff Bezos won’t pretend he didn’t see this day coming. Sure, when he was sitting in his Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1995 , at a makeshift desk made from a wooden door slab, he probably wasn’t imagining that his nascent online bookshop would grow into the largest company in the world. Instead, he may have been puzzling over how to set up extension cords to keep his computers and servers running without tripping his home’s circuit breakers. Or he may have been mulling over changing the name of his tiny startup, then called Cadabra, to Amazon .
But three decades later, now that his startup has become an “everything company” that reportedly delivers as many packages as the U.S. Postal Service; now that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business powers a third of the internet; and now that Amazon has topped the Fortune 500 and ascended to the No. 1 spot in the Global 500 —making it the biggest company in the world—Bezos admitted to Fortune : “It’s not like it’s a complete surprise.”
And anyhow, Bezos added in April, sitting at that original door-desk in his study in Washington, D.C., bigness was never the point. “I don’t want us to take pride in being big,” Bezos said. “I want us to take pride in servicing customers. And it turns out, if you service customers really well, that will drive growth.”
“Customer obsession” has long been a mantra for the 62-year-old Amazon founder. (In fact, he used the phrase 10 times during our conversation.) And with good reason: It’s what propelled the company to the top of Fortune’s annual list of the largest companies in the world by revenue, a spot held by Walmart for over a decade. Amazon will likely become the first company to reach $1 trillion in revenue in the next few years.
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Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, handed the CEO role to AWS chief Andy Jassy in 2021, but he still serves as Amazon’s executive chair, and he’s often asked about the company’s next big projects. Satellite internet? Advertising solutions? Health care? Yes, yes, and yes.
But the company’s biggest venture by far is a bid to own the future of AI. Amazon devoted $131 billion to capital expenditures in 2025 and estimates that it will spend some $200 billion in 2026 —largely on AWS and generative AI. In April, Amazon inked a multibillion-dollar deal with Meta , which will use Amazon’s Graviton chips to support AI initiatives. It has also partnered with Anthropic , agreeing to invest as much as $25 billion in the AI startup, which will purchase more than $100 billion of Amazon’s cloud services.
“A few of our offerings have become durable pillars, things like Marketplace and Prime and AWS,” Bezos said. “What I see right now is that our chips business, our silicon business, is lining up to be our next pillar.”
If Bezos is right—and his track record suggests he often is—Amazon’s current enormous size could soon look modest.
Of course, for a company this dominant, there are always risks. In addition to battling Walmart in the retail sector, Amazon faces tough competition in the AI arms race—and there’s no denying that Amazon has some catching up to do.
Bezos’s decision to step away from the CEO role and focus on his other tech companies created concerns that the founder was taking his foot off the gas at Amazon just as the AI race was starting, said futurist and NYU Stern School of Business professor Amy Webb: “I would be curious to know if the next 10 years of the company is going to be as dramatic and exciting as the past 10 years,” she said.
With all the big plans ahead, Bezos said he’s also laser-focused on what’s not going to change: that foundational ethos of low prices, fast delivery, and a vast selection—an approach that’s just as powerful when applied to chips and servers as it is in the world of books and groceries. It’s what put Amazon on the map in the first place, and what keeps customers coming back.
“It’s impossible to imagine a scenario where a customer would say, ‘Jeff, I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.’ Or, ‘I love Amazon, I just wish your prices were a little higher,’” Bezos said. “Because you can count on those things, you can keep putting energy into them.”
It may look now like the success of Bezos’s model was a foregone conclusion, but getting investors to take a chance on an online-only store in the early days of the internet was not easy. Before Amazon’s launch in 1995, Bezos recalls having to explain to people what the internet was. He spoke with some 60 investors to raise a million dollars. Twenty-two said yes, with checks of roughly $50,000 each.
Amazon went public two years later, on May 15, 1997, at a price of $18 and a valuation of nearly $440 million. (It’s now valued at $2.6 trillion.) Initially, investors were cautious. A 1999 Barron’s cover story titled “Amazon.bomb” questioned whether the startup would ever turn a profit.
“People make this comment that if you had bought Amazon at its IPO, you’d be enormously wealthy now. But I think if you had bought Amazon at its IPO and held the stock throughout the entire time, you would’ve been almost completely irrational,” said Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney. “It was so speculative when it went out. The company, the management team, Jeff Bezos’s prior business experience running a large company: zero.”
Bezos concedes that Amazon’s trajectory since its launch was improbable, to say the least. “You could not at that time have predicted the magnitude of change that would occur—and anybody who did predict that magnitude of change would probably have been quickly institutionalized and sen...
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