Every parent has to deal with children asking them for money. It usually starts out to buy little things like toys and candy and then grows to bigger and bigger things as time goes by. Jackie and Mike Bezos know about all this from personal experience. They gave their son almost a quarter of a million dollars in 1995. Today that investment could have grown into a pot worth around $30 billion.
Amazon is currently one of the biggest companies in the world, and its owner is officially the richest man on Earth as of writing. He has $147 billion dollars that he earned off of his trillion dollar company. He’s certainly done well for himself and passed along plenty of wealth to his parents.
We can’t say for sure just how much Bezos’ parents are worth, but we can say that if they are in fact worth $30 billion they’re among some of the richest people in the world. If the two of them divided their money up evenly, they’d both be among the top 100 richest people on the planet, with individual wealth equal to media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Their combined wealth puts them in a league with Phil Knight, Michael Dell, and Elon Musk.
The Bezos fortune doesn’t just cover Jeff and his parents, his sister, and brother also received Amazon stock during the earliest stages of the company. They only put in a fraction of what their parents put in, but they’re still worth hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to their decision to help their brother out.
Many investors are excited to see that their investments stay ahead of inflation and most parents are happy when their children don’t waste the money they were given. Jackie and Mike have exceeded the wildest dreams of most members of either of these groups. Their slice of a trillion dollar pie could earn them a twelve million percent return on their investment.
It’s easy to look at these numbers and get jealous, but it’s important to keep such matters in context. When Bezos started Amazon, it wasn’t even a glimmer of what it would become today. The Bezos family was taking a big risk giving so much money to their son. He made it clear to them, saying that there was only a 30% chance that his company would make their money back. He probably would have estimated that there was a one in a million chance that Amazon would blow up the way it did, and many of the site’s competitors from the 90s have fallen by the wayside over the years.
Still, the risk the Bezos family took in supporting Jeff paid off handsomely. At least, that’s the case if they held onto their stocks. No one knows for sure how much stock any Bezos has in Amazon because this information hasn’t been released publicly for almost two decades. So it could be that Jackie and Mike sold their stocks early on and blew the money. Still, there’s little chance that they have to worry for money with a son that has become the wealthiest individual on the planet.
