Imagine trying to convince your parents to give you $250,000 to start a bookstore that doesn’t really exist, in an imaginary place called “the Internet” which no one has heard of or knows how to get to, and you basically have Thanksgiving dinner in the Bezos house in 1995. Jeff somehow convinced his parents to throw in $245,000 to get him started, and that stake is now worth $30 billion, a 12 million percent return.