In the spring of 1994, Jeff Bezos was a senior vice president at D. E. Shaw, the quantitative hedge fund. He had just been handed a memo on the explosive growth of internet usage — 2,300 percent per year — and could not put it down. Within weeks, he resigned, drove west with his wife MacKenzie, and started writing the business plan for Amazon from the passenger seat.

The first office was a converted garage in Bellevue, Washington. The first product was books — chosen because the global catalog was vast, prices were standardized, and no single physical store could carry more than a fraction of the available titles. By July 1995, Cadabra had been renamed Amazon and was shipping nationwide.

Bezos raised $1 million from 22 angel investors at a $5 million valuation. The pitch deck warned them, in writing, that there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their entire stake. Several declined. Those who said yes turned $50,000 checks into north of $7 billion.

What separated Amazon from the dozens of e-commerce startups that died with the dotcom bust was a relentless reinvestment ethos. For nearly two decades, Amazon ran at razor-thin margins, recycling every dollar into AWS, fulfillment infrastructure, and Prime. By the time Wall Street demanded profits, Amazon had built moats that no competitor could replicate without spending a decade and tens of billions of dollars.