Jeff Bezos once said he has convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff to thank for his e-commerce empire.
The Amazon founder and CEO left his job at a New York-based hedge fund in 1994 and set out to sell books online, driven off Wall Street in part by competition from Madoff, according to a report from The Washingtonian.
Former AOL President Ted Leonsis recounted the conversation in which Bezos revealed the reason behind his multi-billion dollar pivot.
“He said, ‘I had a competitor who was kicking my ass,'” Leonsis told The Washingtonian.
“No Bernie Madoff, no Amazon,” Bezos reportedly said.
Madoff would have been a formidable rival in the mid-90s.
The chairman of Madoff Investment Securities ultimately defrauded investors of an estimated $65 billion in the largest Ponzi scheme in history — a scheme that didn’t start to unravel until 1999, after Bezos had already left the Street and driven cross-country to Seattle.
Madoff is now serving out a 150-year sentence at a federal correctional facility, and the hedge fund manager he drove out of New York now runs a $740 billion e-commerce company.
Read the full Washingtonian report here.
