Jon Erlichman, BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take, a YouTube channel dedicated to investing and financial literacy recently shared photos of Amazon’s first non-employee purchase. The X post included original packing slip and Douglas Hofstadter’s “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies,” a book exploring AI and computer models of thought. “On this day in 1995: the first item was purchased on Amazon. It was a book on artificial intelligence,” he captioned the post. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos shared the post on this timeline with a smiling face emoji. The post caught the attention of Elon Musk who replied writing: “It was the start of something great”. For those unaware, Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994 in Bellevue, Washington. Originally named ‘Cadabra’, it then operated as an online bookstore out of Bezos’ garage before expanding into an online commerce platform. Visitors to the website were then greeted with a message “Welcome to Amazon.com Books!” and the promise of being able to order from “one million titles”.
Why Jeff Bezos chose to sell books on Amazon
During the early days, Jeff Bezos ran the company along with his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott and seven other employees. Amazon celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. In a 1997 interview, Bezos revealed that he chose to sell books because there were more varieties of books than any other type of product. At that time, Bezos estimated there were about 3 million books in print, about half of which were in English.“When you have that many items, you could literally build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way,” Bezos then said.Since then, the company has expanded to become one of the world’s largest online retailers, expanding businesses into groceries, web services, and entertainment. Amazon now has a market cap of 2.25 trillion.
