What if you bought Amazon in 2000?
US Tech · Internet. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play55.0× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Amazon at the start of 2000 would be worth about $55,000 today — 55.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Amazon listed in 1997 as an online bookseller with grand ambitions and no profits, and the market loved it. When the dot-com bubble burst the shares fell by more than 90 percent from their peak, and in 2003 a dollar of Amazon stock bought what four had bought three years earlier. Critics pointed to thin margins, heavy spending and a founder who seemed proud of both.
Jeff Bezos kept reinvesting. Prime launched in 2005 and quietly rewired shopping habits; Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006 as a way to rent out spare computing capacity, grew into the dominant cloud platform and the company's main profit engine. The marketplace for third-party sellers, the Kindle, logistics built to rival the parcel carriers and later an advertising business all followed. Profits stayed modest for years because the company chose to spend them, which a patient market eventually decided was a feature. A buyer in 2000 suffered badly before being rewarded; a buyer in 2003 was rewarded a great deal more.
The lesson: Accounting losses are not the same as a bad business; Amazon reinvested its cash flow for years while short-term investors read thin profits as weakness.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $4.00 | $55,000 | $4,626 | 55.0× |
| 2003 | $1.00 | $220,000 | $7,727 | 220.0× |
| 2005 | $2.20 | $100,000 | $5,763 | 100.0× |
| 2007 | $1.90 | $115,789 | $4,789 | 115.8× |
| 2008 | $4.60 | $47,826 | $4,626 | 47.8× |
| 2010 | $6.70 | $32,836 | $6,071 | 32.8× |
| 2012 | $9.00 | $24,444 | $5,312 | 24.4× |
| 2015 | $15.00 | $14,667 | $3,301 | 14.7× |
| 2018 | $60.00 | $3,667 | $2,519 | 3.7× |
| 2020 | $95.00 | $2,316 | $2,092 | 2.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $220,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
On this day
- 2 February 2021: Jeff Bezos says he will step down as Amazon CEO
- 15 May 1997: Amazon goes public at $18 a share
- 16 June 2017: Amazon buys Whole Foods
- 5 July 1994: A bookstore called Cadabra
- 19 November 2007: Amazon launches the Kindle
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Amazon is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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