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A lot of money to be sure, but he'd have an order of magnitude or two more if he were the last cofounder instead of the first employee.

• phonon 10y ago
  Well, he was given the option to put up some money with Jeff at the beginning and declined. I'm guessing that would have doubled his eventual stake... It was all done on a threadbare budget. At first Bezos backed the company himself with $10,000 in cash, and over the next sixteen months, he would finance the startup with an additional $84,000 in interest-free loans, according to public documents. Kaphan’s contract required him to commit to buying $5,000 of stock upon joining the company. He passed on the option to buy an additional $20,000 in shares, since he was already taking a 50 percent pay cut to work at the startup and would, like Bezos, earn only $64,000 a year. “The whole thing seemed pretty iffy at that stage,” says Kaphan, who some consider an Amazon cofounder. “There wasn’t really anything except for a guy with a barking laugh building desks out of doors in his converted garage, just like he’d seen in my Santa Cruz home office. I was taking a big risk by moving and accepting a low salary and so even though I had some savings, I didn’t feel comfortable committing more than I did.” (From "The Everything Store")