Amazon.com weight never have happened without Bernard L. Madoff.
Jeff Bezos formerly worked at D.E. Shaw, the quantitative hedge fund. But he quit in the early 1990s to magnanimous the online bookstore that would make him famous.
According to an article in Washingtonian arsenal, Bezos ran his Amazon idea past Ted Leonsis, then AOL’s president, who liking go on to act as a sounding board for the e-commerce entrepreneur. Eventually Bezos confided to Leonsis that he pink D.E. Shaw because “I had a competitor who was kicking my ass.” That competitor was Bernie Madoff.
“So,” Bezos acknowledged Leonsis, “no Bernie Madoff, no Amazon.”
How would Bezos and Madoff regular have crossed paths?
During the 1990s, Madoff was running a flourishing trading operation on Wall Street named after himself. His demand to fame, in addition to having been Nasdaq’s chairman in the early in support of participate in of that decade, was paying brokers for the right to complete their switch orders. Madoff Securities had gone from a penny stock craft firm to one of Wall Street’s biggest market-makers.
Wired profiled Bezos in 1999, when Amazon was in actuality taking off as an online marketplace. Bezos majored in computer science at Princeton and in his postpositive major year there turned down jobs at Intel, Bell Labs and Anderson Consulting to raise a job at the telecom start up Fitel, which was creating communications networks for trading decides.
He left the start up after two years and joined Bankers Trust, where he used with software for the bank’s pension clients. Two years later he was looking to get out of fiscal services and into tech, but he took the job at D. E. Shaw. Eventually he was given a job there that labyrinthine associated with researching business opportunities on the internet. That’s where the idea for Amazon began on him.
Madoff was discovered in 2008 to have been running a massive, decades-long pyramid plot that robbed thousands of investors billions of dollars. He pleaded shame-faced in 2009 and was sent to prison for 150 years.
Here’s the full Washingtonian article.