Amazon was initially called Cadabra before it adopted the name of the South American river and became a market-cap giant.
Jeff Bezos founded the company in 1994 as an online bookstore. The original legal name was Cadabra, short for “Abracadabra,” but Bezos changed it after a lawyer misheard the word as “cadaver.” The name Amazon was chosen partly because it suggested enormous scale, like the Amazon River.
The company began operations in 1995 by selling books online, then expanded into music, electronics, household goods, cloud computing, advertising, and logistics. Amazon Web Services became a particularly important business because it provided cloud infrastructure to organizations worldwide.
A common mix-up is the name Relentless. Bezos registered that domain and the address still redirects to Amazon, but Relentless was not the company’s original name. Cadabra was the early name before the Amazon branding was adopted.