Once a year for the past two decades, Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, has sent the same missive to investors: his annual shareholder letter from 1997, which outlined his grand designs for a company that was, at the time, little more than an online bookseller.
Nowadays, it feels like a bit of a brag. In 1997, Amazon reported sales of $148 million, served 1.5 million customers and had 614 employees. Last year, the company reported sales of $178 billion, served 300 million customers and had 560,000 employees.
Amazon is the world’s largest ecommerce company and Mr Bezos is the world’s richest man. In his latest shareholder letter, published on Wednesday night, he disclosed for the first time the number of people