Founding of Amazon

Amazon was founded in July 1994 by Jeff Bezos, who left a job at a New York hedge fund and started the company in a garage in the Seattle area. It began as an online bookstore, taking its name from the great South American river to suggest large scale, and it went public in 1997. The company then expanded into music, electronics and almost every kind of product, and began allowing third-party sellers to use its marketplace. In 2006 it launched Amazon Web Services, which became a dominant provider of cloud computing and a major source of profit. Amazon later added streaming media, devices such as the Kindle and Echo, and the purchase of Whole Foods, and has become one of the largest companies in the world, but it has been criticized over working conditions and market power.

Open on the timeline