Beyoncé may have made the greatest music video of all time (according to Kanye, at least), but when it comes to investing, Jackie and Mike Bezos rule the roost.

Back in 1995, they showed faith in their then 31-year-old son, Jeff, by investing  $245 573 (now around R3,2 million) into his fledgeling e-commerce website.

You may have heard of it – it’s called Amazon.

Jeff, according to Bloomberg, was pretty honest about the risks involved:

“I want you to know how risky this is,” the son told his parents, “because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

I reckon they’re stoked with their decision, because their stake in the company is now worth close to $30 billion. That’s an investment return of around 12 000 000%, for those who like percentages, and would make them richer than Paul Allen, the 30th-richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

An extra prezzie under the Christmas tree for Jeff, then.

More on their shares:

The parents’ holdings haven’t been publicly disclosed since the end of 1999. While it’s unclear how much they still own, continuing donations of Amazon stock to their charitable foundation suggest they still control a healthy chunk of the world’s second-most valuable company.

They’ve donated 595,027 shares to the Bezos Family Foundation from 2001 through 2016, according to filings available on GuideStar, which collects data on nonprofits. The 25,000 shares they gifted in 2016 were worth about $20 million at the time. The foundation focuses on education for young people.

If they haven’t sold or donated anything else, the pair would own about 16.6 million shares, or 3.4 percent of the firm, making them the second-biggest individual owners after their son.

If you students out there haven’t yet decided to forward this to your parents to secure a little business loan, you’re missing a trick.

Let’s crunch a few numbers:

That’ll do just fine. A reminder that you can buy shares in Amazon, and other big name US companies, without any hassle at all.

‘Ol Mike is obviously fond of downplaying things:

“We were fortunate enough that we have lived overseas and we have saved a few pennies so we were able to be an angel investor,” Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who also goes by Miguel, said in Philadelphia. “The rest is history.”

Before you’re left wondering whether Jeff left his siblings high and dry, relax:

The filing also suggests a windfall for Jeff Bezos’ siblings Mark and Christina. They each bought 30,000 Amazon shares for $10,000 in 1996. If they haven’t sold any of those shares, their stakes would be worth about $640 million apiece.

Great – all I got was years of verbal abuse and some hand me down clothes.

One word of cautionary advice before you move on:

“Extraordinary returns don’t come around often” said [Eduardo] Gruener, a wealth adviser.“Replace Amazon with nearly any other name in the market and the ending may have turned out as a nightmare.”

Live a little, parents.

[source:bloomberg]