Kress history

In 1968, he changed the name of the company to the Kress Corporation.

His father joined the company in 1969.

Kress Corporation then built its first coal hauler in 1971.

In 1993 Bezos married Mackenzie Tuttle, whom he had met at D.E. Shaw.

In 1994 he quit D.E. Shaw and moved to Seattle, Washington, to open a virtual bookstore.

It sold its first book in 1995.

In June 1998 it began selling CDs, and later that year it added videos.

In 1999 Bezos added auctions to the site and invested in other virtual stores.

Aside from Amazon, Bezos founded a spaceflight company, Blue Origin, in 2000.

Ralph H. Kress, father to Ted Kress, was inducted into the Mining Hall of Fame in 2001.

Following the death of Edward S. Kress in 2003, Rita Kress took ownership of the company and in the years since, continued to expand and enhance the company’s product line and customer care efforts.

As more companies battled for Internet dollars, Bezos saw the need to diversify, and by 2005 Amazon offered a vast array of products, including consumer electronics, apparel, and hardware.

In late 2007 Amazon released a new handheld reading device called the Kindle, a digital book reader with wireless Internet connectivity, enabling customers to purchase, download, read, and store a vast selection of books on demand.

Amazon announced in 2010 that sales of Kindle books had surpassed those of hardcover books.

Bezos bought The Washington Post and affiliated publications for $250 million in 2013.