Jeff Bezos Originally Wanted Amazon To Be Called Something Totally Different

If you use the word "Amazon" in conversation, most will assume — generally correctly — that you're talking about the e-commerce juggernaut. Neither the mighty lady warriors of Greek mythology nor the awe-inspiring river and rainforest get the attention they deserve in popular culture anymore. It's little wonder that it has become as lexicon-dominatingly well known as it has. With a revenue of $638 billion in 2024, the company is an undeniable powerhouse, with Amazon owning some companies you may not have known about. What is surprising, though, is that the company wasn't originally supposed to be called Amazon at all. Jeff Bezos had a completely different idea for its name. Several of them, in fact.

Bezos has made absolutely no secret of the fact that he, like so many around the world, is an enormous fan of the "Star Trek" universe. USA Today quotes him as telling The Washington Post in an interview that he and his fourth grade friends "would fight over who got to be Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock, and somebody played the computer too ... We made little cardboard phasers and tricorders." That little boy would grow into a man who wanted to name the company MakeItSo.com, three words so commonly spoken in the dulcet tones of Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean Luc Picard. Even outside of the "Star Trek" context, this would have been a fitting slogan for a company now famous for being able to deliver you just about anything, but there were still more potential names that Bezos tried out before settling on Amazon.

Clearly, then, one original plan of Jeff Bezos' was to name his future mega-brand with all the zeal of a Trekkie giving themselves the username WesleyCrusherLover1992. It was a big decision, though, so several different names were tried on for size. Awake.com and Relentless.com were two other options, which both sound quite amusing when you consider that Relentless would go on to be the name of a line of energy drinks.

There was also a brief flirtation with the name Cadabra, under which name the company briefly operated, but in the end, Amazon was ultimately deemed a powerful, take-notice name for the company, under which it went live in 1997. In an interview with Inc. magazine that very year, Bezos waxed lyrical about the importance of getting that name just right. "A lot of it comes down to the brand name," he noted prophetically. "Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world."

Speaking over a quarter of a century ago, the entrepreneur couldn't really have known the extent to which Amazon would dominate the online space, but it absolutely has. While there are certain types of tools and tech that you should avoid buying on Amazon, the online storefront now has an enormous, ludicrously varied stock, impossibly far beyond the relatively simple online book store that Bezos first envisaged. So, too, are some of the Amazon Prime membership perks, which you might not even know you're missing out on.