Featured Image Credit: PBS
Topics: Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Business, Celebrity
Niamh Shackleton
An interview dating back almost 30 years has left people saying the same thing.
Jeff Bezos is now one of the richest people on the planet, but once upon a time people didn't take the Amazon founder very seriously.
In fact, in a 1999 interview with Jay Leno, the audience laughed at Bezos when he admitted that Amazon wasn't making any profit.
Leno said to Bezos: "Here’s the thing I don’t understand, the company is worth billions and every time I pick up the paper each year it loses more money than it lost the year before."
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"We are a famously unprofitable company and we are investing in the future, which isn’t unusual," Bezos replied.
Fast forward to 2023, and Amazon made an annual gross profit of over $270 billion, up from $33 billion in 2021.
In another interview dating back to 1996, Bezos spoke on The Computer Chronicles about online shopping.
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"If our catalog was on paper it would be the size of seven New York City phone books," the Amazon founder said of the then newly-founded site.
Bezos went on to pledge that Amazon can be 'every bit as fun and engaging as a good, physical bookstore'.
The 29-year-old clip has been doing the rounds on social media of late and has sparked a conversation about Bezos' appearance — a common theme being that he resembles a movie villain nowadays.
See the interview here:
"Before he looked like a James Bond villain," somebody wrote.
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Another person said on 1996 Bezos: "Before he went for the Bond villain look…"
Elsewhere, someone compared him to Lex Luthor, writing: "He seemed so down to earth back then, now he's Lex Luthor!"
Echoing similar sentiments about looking 'down to earth', a different person penned: "Jeff seemed more down to earth back in the early days of Amazon unlike his bald and laugh crazy like persona many years later."
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While Bezos may have been like that at one point in his life, the 61-year-old lives quite the lavish lifestyle now and recently wed Lauren Sanchez in what was reported to be a $56 million wedding in Italy.
Dozens of celebrities attended the nuptials, many of whom weren't known to have ties to the Bezos or Sanchez.
From Sydney Sweeney and Ellie Goulding, to Leonardo DiCaprio and his model girlfriend Vittoria Ceretti, you could say that the event was the Met Gala of weddings...