Billionaire David Rubenstein Passed On Facebook’s $30K Startup Pitch, Sold Amazon Before Billions In Gains. 'I Didn’t Take It Seriously' Image via Shutterstock Casey B. Renner Tue, November 10, 2026 at 1:14 PM EST 6 min read AMZN +1.40% CG -1.13% META +0.05% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
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A billionaire investor's biggest regrets go back to the early days of the internet.
Carlyle Group (NASDAQ:CG) co-founder David Rubenstein passed on a chance to invest in Facebook. At the time, founder Mark Zuckerberg was trying to raise $30,000 to launch the site.
"I didn't take it seriously," he told Business Insider in September.
Rubenstein and his partners also sold their stake in Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). He said the shares would have been worth billions if they'd held on.
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Rubenstein said on the "Earn Your Leisure" podcast last month that he heard about Facebook from Evan Rachlin, one of Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates.
Rachlin, who later became Rubenstein's son-in-law, told him the site would help students at Harvard find dates. Rubenstein had seen dating services come and go and didn't think Facebook would last.
Another Harvard student, Eduardo Saverin, helped fund the launch. He left the company in 2005 and later settled a dispute over his stake. Saverin still owned shares when Facebook went public in 2012.
Saverin co-founded venture capital firm B Capital in 2015. He's now based in Singapore, where he backs startups as the firm's co-CEO. Forbes says most of his wealth still comes from his shares in Facebook parent company Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META).
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In Amazon's early days, Jeff Bezos offered book distributor Baker & Taylor a stake in the company for access to its catalog of books in print. Carlyle held a majority stake in the distributor, which has since shut down.
Jeff Bezos offered Baker & Taylor a stake in Amazon for access to its catalog of books in print. Baker & Taylor turned down the shares and agreed to let Bezos use the catalog for five years at $100,000 a year, Rubenstein said on "Earn Your Leisure."
When Rubenstein heard about the deal, he flew to Seattle to see if the original offer was still on the table. Bezos told him that two years had passed since the original offer and that he no longer needed Carlyle's help as much. He ended up with about 1% of Amazon.
Rubenstein also said that Amazon went on to sell far more than books.
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Rubenstein told BI he expected some AI companies to fail, just as internet businesses did after the dot-com bubble burst. He said some AI stock prices were hard to justify given the companies' earnings. Still, he pointed to Nvidia's (NASDAQ:NVDA) results as evidence that the boom was already paying off for some businesses.
As companies build more data centers to run AI systems, they need more electricity. American PowerGen is developing power projects in Texas to serve data centers and other large electricity users.
Rubenstein also said markets had bounced back from crashes before. Investors who rushed to sell everything could miss out on the recovery.
"Probably that's the time to hold on and maybe buy more," he said.
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This article Billionaire David Rubenstein Passed On Facebook's $30K Startup Pitch, Sold Amazon Before Billions In Gains. 'I Didn't Take It Seriously' originally appeared on Benzinga.com
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