Amazon Turned 25 Years, But Why It Will Die In Just 5 Years As Per Jeff Bezos

It's been 25 years since Amazon was founded, back on July 5, 1994. In that time, it's grown from a simple online book marketplace to a global e-commerce giant.

But even Jeff Bezos doesn't believe that'll last forever. He says, it's only a matter of time.

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In fact, in just over two and a half decades, Amazon has gone from a local business to the most valuable company in the world. And Bezos for his part is now the richest man alive, even after a recent (expensive) divorce.

And yet for some reason, the CEO seems convinced his company is going to die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even next year. But it will happen. And this is something Bezos has stressed over and over through the past few years.

Three times in the past six years he's talked about Amazon's fated doom. The first was in 2013, when he said on '60 Minutes' that "Companies have short lifespans... and Amazon will be disrupted one day." When asked if that worried him, he added, "I don't worry about it because I know it's inevitable. Companies come and go, and the companies that are the shiniest and most important of any era - you wait a few decades and they're gone."

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Then in 2017, Bezos made another comment about the end of the company, this time in a direct letter to shareholders. In it, he mused about the company's inevitable future decline. "Day Two is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day One," Bezos said. "An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come."

Finally, in 2018, Bezos once more told his staff in an all-hands meeting, "I predict one day Amazon will fail." When asked about Sears going bankrupt he added, "Amazon is not too big to fail ... In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail."

"Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years," he said.

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It's not like Bezos is defeatist either. In fact, he seems to be motivated by what he sees as inevitable failure. He's previously stated that he considers his job to be delaying that inevitability as long as possible. And with Amazon turning 25, it's fast approaching his own 30-year benchmark.

All he hopes, he's previously said, is that he dies before the company does.