We recently compiled a list of the Jeff Bezos Investments in 2025: 12 Companies Bezos Is Investing In. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) stands against the other companies Bezos is investing in.
Since leaving his position as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Jeff Bezos has been quite active. He has been investing in real estate and companies, staying involved with Amazon and Blue Origin, and becoming close to President-elect Trump. “I’ve actually never worked harder,” he told the New York Times last December.
Jeff Bezos has directly invested in at least 108 startups across all industries since 1998, when he was reported to have invested $250,000 into Google. Although he does not publish his returns nor do the firms in which he invests, he has made early bets on several companies that have gone on to launch some of the most high-profile tech IPOs in the recent decade.
He certainly has enough cash to play with. According to Forbes, Bezos has sold around $32 billion in his main company shares since its initial public offering, including nearly $14 billion last year. He is now the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of $237 billion.
Although Bezos has spent a lot of time and money on yachts, aircraft, and real estate since transitioning from CEO to chairman of Amazon in 2021, he remains actively involved in his venture portfolio, advising portfolio firms and assisting with investment selections. However, Bezos isn’t as engaged as, say, a typical large venture capital firm: he was only the lead investor in one funding round last year (for Swiss-Mile), which means he likely didn’t acquire significant stakes in the majority of the companies, and he isn’t known to hold a board seat at any of the startups he has backed.
Two of the companies Forbes contacted said that a Bezos spokesman asked them not to discuss with the media about the Bezos investment, but those who did speak favorably about it. Swiss-Mile’s Bjelonic, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, made the following comment:
“What I was most surprised with was actually how well he understood the technology behind the Al training. He would ask questions about reinforcement learning, imitation learning, how it works, going all the way to the details of the physics elements that are needed on our side.”
Regardless of how invested Bezos is in any given company, publicizing his name as an investor provides marketing exposure.
The autonomous robot business is still in its early stages of commercialization. Bjelonic compared the business to a “blue ocean,” predicting that in ten years, hundreds of robotics startups will fail while only a few will flourish. It will take years to determine whether those bets pay off.
However, the chances may be in Bezos’ favor, in part because he can combine his economic expertise with the fact that he will almost certainly be able to invest in any firm he chooses.
According to Columbia Business School professor Michael Ewens, the “best” and “hottest” startups reach out to people like Bezos first.
“In general, he’s a very good investor, because he’s getting calls. He’s first in line.”
A customer entering an internet retail store, illustrating the convenience of online shopping.
Methodology
We examined the investments of Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’ family office, to identify key companies he’s invested in. All selected firms are publicly traded except the last one, and the stocks are ranked in ascending order using Insider Monkey’s database of over 1,000 hedge funds in Q4 2024 to gauge hedge fund sentiment for stocks. The portfolio also includes one of his most recent private company investments, which is ranked last on our list.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 338
It is necessary to recognize Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) as a one-stop shop for investing in publicly traded stocks, much like Jeff Bezos. This is due in part to the fact that many of the businesses in which Bezos Expeditions now has stock are privately held, but some of them have simply been incorporated into the Amazon mothership. There are prominent businesses like Whole Foods, but there are also a ton of smaller ones that work in areas like cloud computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Even though it is a huge tech company, its shares have increased by more than 21% in the last year, showing that there is still potential for profit.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is the industry leader in cloud computing and e-commerce, using its size to provide unparalleled product variety and affordability. Through speedy shipping and access to exclusive content, the Prime membership increases consumer loyalty and generates high-margin recurring income. The Amazon ecosystem, which includes the Kindle and other gadgets, increases user engagement and draws in new customers.
Operating cash flow for the fiscal year 2024 trailing twelve months was $115.9 billion, up 36% from $84.9 billion for the same time in the previous year, which concluded in December. In February, Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced that it would invest over $100 billion in capital projects this year, with a focus on artificial intelligence advancements. This decision was made despite the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm renowned for producing incredibly effective and affordable AI models that have ignited the IT industry. A large portion of Amazon’s capital expenditures go toward developing AI through Amazon Web Services, which requires upfront investments in data centers and infrastructure to maintain the platform’s explosive growth.
Fred Alger Management, an investment management company, released its Q4 2024 investor letter. Here is what the fund said:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is a renowned online retailer and leader in cloud computing. The company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) division offers utility-scale cloud solutions that support corporate America’s digital transition. During the quarter, Amazon’s shares contributed to performance as the company reported better-than-expected fiscal third-quarter results, with revenues and earnings beating analyst estimates. Operating margins expanded to 11%, driven by efficiency gains in logistics and robust AWS performance. Notably, AWS revenue growth accelerated during the quarter, along with recording its highest-ever operating margin of 38.1%, driven by easing cloud cost optimizations, renewed workload migrations, and an increasing contribution from AI workloads. On their earnings call, management highlighted plans to increase capital expenditures to enhance their technology infrastructure, catering to the surging demand for AI-driven computing.”
Overall, AMZN ranks 1st on our list of Jeff Bezos’ Investments in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential for AMZN as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMZN but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
