Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Amazon (Company) trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Amazon started in July 1994 as Cadabra, Inc., run from Jeff Bezos's rented garage in Bellevue, Washington, and sold its first book a year later. Three decades on it is the world's biggest online retailer, the biggest cloud provider through AWS, and the owner of Whole Foods, MGM, Twitch, Ring and Audible. Its history is full of small, strange details: the lawyer who misheard the name, the one-cent-per-share first profit, the campus named after a dog. These 50 questions cover the founding story, the 1997 IPO and the Barnes & Noble lawsuit, the launch and price history of Prime, the Kindle's codename, where Alexa got its name, the origins of AWS and its 57-person team, Amazon Go and Prime Air, the HQ2 contest and the acquisitions of Whole Foods and MGM. Easy questions stick to products and milestones; the expert tier asks about first hires, drone models and damages awards. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or use it for a tech-themed quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What kind of product did Amazon sell when its website launched in 1995?
Books
Bezos picked books from a shortlist of five because of the huge number of titles in print and their low unit price.
Q 02The curved arrow in Amazon's logo links which two letters?
A to Z
It signals that the store carries everything from A to Z, and the arrow doubles as a smile.
Q 03Under what name was Amazon originally incorporated in July 1994?
Cadabra
Bezos switched to Amazon within months, partly because a name starting with A would top alphabetical lists.
Q 04In which year was Amazon founded?
1994
Bezos had just left his vice-president job at D. E. Shaw to chase the internet's projected 2,300% annual growth.
Q 05Who replaced Jeff Bezos as Amazon's CEO in July 2021?
Andy Jassy
He had run Amazon Web Services from its inception and been its CEO since 2016.
Q 06In which year did Amazon buy the Whole Foods Market supermarket chain?
2017
The deal was read as a direct challenge to Walmart's grip on bricks-and-mortar retail.
Q 07On which stock exchange did Amazon list its shares in May 1997?
NASDAQ
The IPO was priced at $18 a share under the symbol AMZN.
Q 08Amazon's developers said the name Alexa is reminiscent of which ancient institution?
Library of Alexandria
They also liked that the hard X consonant made the wake-word easier to recognise.
Q 09Whole Foods Market is headquartered in which city?
Austin, Texas
The first store opened there in 1980 and was wrecked by a flood the following year.
Q 10Amazon's rule says a team should be small enough to be fed by what?
Two pizzas
In practice that means teams and meetings of roughly six to eight people or fewer.
Q 11Which audiobook company did Amazon buy in March 2008?
Audible
Amazon also owns Brilliance Audio, which it picked up in 2007.
Q 12In which year did Amazon announce Alexa alongside the first Echo speaker?
2014
By January 2019 Amazon said it had sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices.
Q 13Which video-doorbell maker did Amazon buy in 2018?
Ring
The same year Amazon also bought the online pharmacy PillPack.
Q 14Amazon was founded in a garage in which Washington city?
Q 21Amazon's HQ2 ended up solely in which location after New York was dropped?
Arlington, Virginia
The Crystal City area is marketed as National Landing; Amazon plans 25,000 staff there by 2030.
Q 22On which TV programme did Bezos reveal drone-delivery plans in 2013?
60 Minutes
The service, Prime Air, did not begin real deliveries until 2022.
Q 23What did Bezos call the thought experiment that convinced him to start Amazon?
Regret minimization framework
He wanted to avoid regretting, in old age, never having tried the emerging internet.
Bellevue
Bezos had picked the Seattle area for Microsoft talent and a nearby book warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon.
Q 15Bezos dropped the original company name after a lawyer misheard it as what?
Cadaver
He then picked a new name from the dictionary, wanting something exotic and different.
Q 16Which bookseller sued Amazon in 1997 over its "world's largest bookstore" claim?
Barnes & Noble
The suit argued Amazon was not a bookstore at all but a book broker; it settled out of court.
Q 17In the fourth quarter of which year did Amazon report its first ever profit?
2001
The profit was just one cent per share on revenue of more than $1 billion.
Q 18What was the annual fee when Amazon Prime launched in the US in 2005?
$79
Each later figure was a real price hike: $99 in 2014, $119 in 2018 and $139 in 2022.
Q 19In which year was the original Kindle e-reader introduced?
2007
Its 6-inch 167 PPI display stayed on every basic Kindle until 2022.
Q 20The Kindle's name was picked as a reading metaphor; what does the verb mean?
To light a fire
Branding consultants suggested it as an apt image for intellectual excitement.
Q 24Which book-cataloguing website did Amazon buy in March 2013?
Goodreads
Amazon later folded its older book site Shelfari into Goodreads in 2016.
Q 25What does Amazon subsidiary Zoox do?
Operates robotaxis
Amazon also owns eero (mesh Wi-Fi) and Kuiper Systems (satellite internet).
Q 26Kuiper Systems, an Amazon subsidiary, provides what?
Satellite internet
Its sibling Lab126 handles hardware R&D such as the Kindle.
Q 27What is the name of Amazon's first household robot, announced in 2021?
Astro
It is powered by Alexa and can be remote-controlled to check on pets or home security.
Q 28In 2013 Amazon teamed up with which carrier to start Sunday deliveries?
US Postal Service
It began in Los Angeles and New York before spreading to Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix.
Q 29Which co-founder sold Whole Foods to Amazon in 2017?
John Mackey
He was the last remaining co-founder of the chain he started in 1980.
Q 30In which year was Amazon's acquisition of MGM finalized?
2022
The deal cleared the European Commission two days before the FTC review deadline expired.