Amazon was founded in 1994. But it didn't actually start selling books until 1995. An online bookstore, that was the whole idea. And the response was wild — hundreds of thousands of people logged on, millions signed up.
But there was a problem. Nobody was actually buying.
They dug into why, and found the answer. People got all the way to picking a book, but checkout was too complicated and annoying. Back then, paying online meant typing in your card number, expiration date, billing address, security code… every single time.
So the story goes that Jeff Bezos called his engineers together and said one thing: "Make it so one click finishes the checkout." And that's how one-click checkout launched in 1999.
At the time, the #1 e-commerce company in the US was eBay. 40% of eBay's transactions were already going through PayPal. So eBay decided to just buy it. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.
One of PayPal's co-founders was Elon Musk. When eBay bought PayPal, about $175 million landed in Musk's hands. And he poured roughly $100 million of that into founding SpaceX. That was 2002.
Amazon sold books online → checkout was a pain, so they built one-click → eBay bought PayPal → the payout from that sale funded Musk's SpaceX → and humanity got its first reusable rocket.
A payment button built just to sell one book ended up leading to a rocket.
At some point, tracing these chains became a habit for me. I see one piece of news and think "wait, where did this actually start?" and end up going backward through it. Because that's the only way I can see, even a little, what's coming next.