FORTUNE GLOBAL 500Jeff Bezos on how his garage startup became the largest company in the world
Jeff Bezos won’t pretend he didn’t see this day coming. Sure, when he was sitting in his Bellevue, Washington, garage in 1995, at a makeshift desk made from a wooden door, he probably wasn’t imagining that his nascent online bookshop would grow into the largest company in the world. Instead, he may have been puzzling over how to set up extension cords to keep his computers and servers running without tripping his home’s circuit breakers. Or he may have been mulling over changing the name of his tiny startup, then called Cadabra, to Amazon.
And anyhow, Bezos said, sitting at that original door-desk in his study in Washington, D.C., bigness was never the point. “I don’t want us to take pride in being big,” Bezos told Fortune. “I want us to take pride in servicing customers. And it turns out, if you service customers really well, that will drive growth.”
See the Fortune Global 500 here:
The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies generated $43.1 trillion in combined revenue in 2025, up 3.2% from the previous year. Together, they employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP. The Global 500 earned $3.39 trillion in profit in its most profitable year ever. Amazon overtook Walmart at the top of the list this year, ending the latter’s 12-year run.
