Jeff Bezos' Google investment

It seems there's no love lost between Amazon.com and Google. The two companies have done battle over the years, and are currently locking horns over the future of digital books. Now, a new book is shedding light on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' early involvement with Google. Kara Swisher at All Things D has details from Ken Auletta's upcoming book, "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It." Among the juicy tidbits: Bezos invested $250,000 in then-startup Google in 1998 at 4 cents a share. The Amazon CEO told Auletta that he "just fell in love with" Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at their first meeting in a Silicon Valley garage. While it's not clear what Bezos did with his piece of Google, Swisher notes that his stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.

Auletta's book describes Bezos as one of only a handful of initial investors in Google, Swisher reports. Amazon, of course, attempted to build a rival search engine to Google, called A9, which crashed and burned (the A9 unit is still around but does search for Amazon's ecommerce sites). Bezos was also an early investor in another recent web phenomenon, Twitter.

Auletta's book releases Nov. 3 (there's no listing for an Amazon Kindle version yet).

Follow my updates on Twitter.

About Eric Engleman

ERIC ENGLEMAN is senior technology staff writer for TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal, covering online retail giant Amazon.com. Engleman tracks Amazon's increasingly complex business, spanning ecommerce, Kindle, cloud computing, and more. He's been covering technology and other industries for the Business Journal since 2003.

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