The Interview: From Amazon to Space — Jeff Bezos Talks Innovation, Progress and What’s Next

Please welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin and his guest, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos, everybody.

Jeff, thank you so much for being here.

We always try to save the best for last, and we couldn't be more thrilled for you to be here.

I said it at the beginning of the day, and I'll say it again in front of you, Jeff.

Jeff is one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs.

We talk a lot about people, we've talked about it all day, about people of consequence on this stage, and there's no question that Jeff has changed the way we live, really.

And it's rare to be able to say that about anybody.

In 1994, he founded Amazon, which started as an online bookseller, you know the story, right out of his garage in Seattle.

Today, Amazon's one of the most five valuable companies in America.

Now he's focused far beyond Earth to outer space through his company, Blue Origin.

He's racing to the moon and then to Mars.

His new Glenn Heavy Lift booster rocket expected to launch any day now, any day now.

And meanwhile, back here on Earth, his Bezos Earth Fund granting $2 billion so far.

And of course, he also owns the storied Washington Post, which has put him in the headlines in recent weeks as well.

It punches above its weight in that regard.

And we're going to talk about it.

We're going to talk about all of that and more.

And in fact, what I want to do, if you'd indulge me, is actually start there with the Washington Post.

And the reason I want to do that, because I think as we all saw the election play out and we saw the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate prior to that, it became, I think, a microcosm of so many different things in our society, that decision.

It became a Rorschach test for people and their politics.

It became a question about trust in the media, about influence, about business interests, and so many other things.

And so I was hoping maybe just to sort of help us with this story, which we all read about.

If you could just, in your own words, take us back to the two weeks before the election when that decision was made and what happened and what was going through your mind at that time.

Well, it was the time when, for some number of years, about that time when the Washington Post would, you know, make an editorial decision and endorse a presidential candidate.

For many decades, the Post very studiously did not endorse presidential candidates.

It's the kind of founder of the modern Post, a guy named Eugene Meyer, whose words are still inscribed in the lobby as you walk in, was against the idea because he thought an independent newspaper shouldn't be endorsing presidential candidates.

And so they didn't do it.

After Watergate, the Post started endorsing presidential candidates.

And so we're talking about this in that time frame.

It hadn't come up before.

And, you know, we just decided that, you know, it wasn't going to help for, well, first of all, it wasn't going to influence the election either way.

You know, we didn't believe there's no evidence that newspaper endorsements influence elections or no independent voter in Pennsylvania at that time was going to say, oh, is that what the Washington Post thinks?

Well, then I'll do that.

So that wasn't going to happen.

And at the same time, you know, we're struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust.

And, you know, the trust surveys have been done for many decades now, and the media has been going down in those surveys for decades.

They've always been able to hang on to the one, you know, small, positive, that they're always above Congress.

And this year they lost even that, falling below Congress, which is not easy to achieve.

Congress was thrilled, by the way, not to be at the very bottom of the list.

And so we just decided that the pluses of doing this were very small, and it added to the perception of bias.

You know, newspapers and media in general, if they are going to try and be objective and independent, they have to pass the same requirement that a voting machine does.

They have to count the votes accurately, and people have to believe that they count the votes accurately.

Both requirements are just as important for a voting machine.

And media is similar.

And there is a strong perception.

Not all of it is the media's fault.

There's a lot of external factors involved, too.

But where we can do something, we should.

Okay, but let me ask you, and you know that there was blowback.

I just want to read you.

This is Marty Barron, who was your former editor of that paper.

He said, this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.

David Remnick said, if Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements, all of them, you could argue the case one way or another.

But he was effectively suggesting that given this scenario with the timing of it.

Look, if I had had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons.

But, in fact, we made this decision.

It was the right decision.

I'm proud of the decision we made.

And it was far from cowardly, because we knew there would be blowback.

And we did the right thing anyway.

Okay, so let me ask you about that, though.

There was blowback.

I think 250,000 people canceled their subscription.

So did you think, when you were doing this, that some people were going to say that actually creates less trust in media?

I mean, part of it was it was aimed at creating more trust in media.

And at the same time, clearly there were other people saying, maybe there's less trust.

No, I don't follow that logic.

You don't?

And so what did you were you surprised at the not really we knew there were we knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way.

As I said, you know, these things punch above their weight.

And were you worried about that at all?

I mean, you can't worry.

You can't do the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR or whatever it is you want to call it.

So you this is this was the right decision.

We made the right decision.

I'm very proud of the decision.

So let me just ask you one related question, which is this.

You said in your opinion piece about all of this.

I thought it was fascinating.

You said when it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am the not not the ideal owner.

No, I'm a terrible owner of the post for the post from the point of view of appearance of conflict.

I there is, you know, I find not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or some Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader.

Right.

Is it meeting with a government official somewhere?

And so there are always going to be appearances of conflict.

And is that?

I'm sure a newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper and did nothing else would probably be from that point of view, a much better owner.

Now, the advantage I bring to the post is, you know, when we, you know, when they need financial resources, I'm available.

I'm kind of, you know, I'm like that.

I'm the doting parent in that regard.

I think embedded underneath the fundamental question is this in The Wall Street Journal wrote about the New York Times writing about it.

It's whether and this was, I think, the question that people had, which was whether you had any worry in your mind about your other businesses about Trump and whether he would ultimately target an Amazon or target a Blue Origin as retaliation against negative coverage, given that you had lived through that.

No, I don't think so.

That was certainly not in my mind.

And I'm also very aware that the post covers all presidents very aggressively, is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively.

And, you know, this endorsement or non-endorsement isn't going to.

You did not think that was going to change.

It's a drop in the bucket.

Anything.

No, it won't change anything.

If he likes you, he likes you.

And if he doesn't like you, he's not going to like you anyway.

Well, I don't know.

I mean, that's a different question.

But if we're talking about Trump, I think it's very interesting.

I'm actually very optimistic this time around that we're going to see.

I'm very hopeful about this.

He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation.

And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him because we do have too much regulation in this country.

This country is so set up to grow.

By the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems, like if you look at the deficit and, I mean, you know, the debt, the national debt and how gigantic it is as a portion of GDP, these are real problems and they're real long-term problems.

And the way you get out of them is by outgrowing them.

One, you're going to solve the problem of the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP, not by shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP.

You have to grow the denominator.

And that means you have to grow GDP at, you know, 3%, 4%, 5% a year and, you know, let the national debt grow slower than that.

If you can do that, this is a very manageable problem.

So we need a growth orientation in this country.

This is the most important thing, a growth mindset.

And we are the luckiest country in the world.

We have all these natural resources, including energy independence.

We have the best risk capital system in the world by far.

So, you know, people get confused about why does the United States have so much venture success, so much entrepreneurial success?

Why are the big tech companies here and not somewhere else?

What's really going on with all this dynamism in this country compared to what we see around elsewhere in the world?

And there are a bunch of reasons for that.

But the biggest one, 8 of 10 points there, is that we have better risk capital.

It's not the banking system.

You know, we have a good banking system, but so does Europe.

What's different here is that you can get, you can raise, you know, $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working.

That's crazy.

And, but the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive in many cases.

Or they're at least gambling that that's true.

That risk capital system that we have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other countries to duplicate.

So we have that.

We have, you know, we speak English, and English is turning into the lingua franca of the whole world.

It's a, you know, there's so many advantages here.

But we are burdened by excessive permitting and regulation.

You can't build a bridge.

And all these things, you know what they are.

We see these examples all the time.

We need to be able to build solar fields and everything else.

But so you're optimistic.

I'm super optimistic.

About this president.

And the reason I'm asking is because.

I'm very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda.

Right.

And I think he's going to, I think he has a good chance of succeeding.

What about the idea that he thinks that the press is the enemy?

Well, I think he, I'm going to try to talk him out of that idea.

I don't think the press is the enemy.

And I don't think, you know, he's also, you've probably grown in the last eight years.

He has too.

Like it's, you know, this is not the case.

The press is not the enemy.

I hope you're right.

I hope I'm right too.

Let's go persuade him of this.

No, let's do what I mean about it.

But you and I should go.

Let's go talk to him.

If we could try.

I really don't.

I think that this is absolutely.

I don't think he's going to see it the same way.

But maybe I'll be wrong.

Was that always your thought, by the way?

What I've seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time.

And more confident, more settled.

Let me ask one related question that I want to actually get into space.

But it actually is an interesting segue to space.

Because we were talking earlier this morning to Sam Altman about Elon Musk.

Elon Musk's relationship with the president, interestingly.

And there's been a lot of questions about whether there could be the possibility that Elon, given his proximity, would make things difficult for people who are his competitors.

Elon, in the space context, is your biggest competitor.

Yes.

Does this concern you?

Well, they're certainly very able competitors.

I mean, this is an arena where I have the.

Oh, no, no.

I know he's a great competitor.

No, I'm saying, does it concern you, his proximity?

No, I was headed there.

Oh, sorry.

I'm just saying, they're certainly very good competitors.

And, you know, no doubt about that.

I don't, I take at face value what has been said, which is that, you know, he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors.

I take that at face value.

Again, I could be wrong about that, but I think it could be true.

I think he probably is trying to, you know, I think this Department of Government and Efficiency that he and Vivek are helping Trump with and so on.

Again, I'd like to take, I have a lot of, I've had a lot of success in life not being cynical.

And I've very rarely been taken advantage of as a result.

It's happened a couple of times, but not very often.

And I think that cynicism, you know, why be cynical about that?

Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done, you know, above board in the public interest.

And if that turns out to be naive, well, then we'll see.

But I actually think it's going to be great.

I'm hoping.

I'm glad you could address it.

It's something I think we all want to know.

One, by the way, before I even get to space, Washington Post question, just because there's a lot of media people here.

The big plan to save or fix the Washington Post is you've been a great innovator as it comes to Amazon and everything else.

Do you have a big idea about how the Post is going to change?

Newspapers are going to change?

I have a bunch of ideas.

And I'm working on that right now.

And I have a couple of small inventions there.

So we'll see.

You know, we saved the Washington Post once.

This will be the second time.

I would like to save, let's see, 2013.

So 11 years ago.

It took a couple of years.

It made money for six or seven years after that.

In the last few years, it's lost money again.

And it needs to be put back on a good footing again.

And the first time we did it by transitioning away from advertising to subscriptions and also away from being a local paper to being a national paper.

And there are many more details to it.

But that was the basic formula that was used.

And it was very successful.

And we have a few other ideas.

So stay tuned.

We'll see.

Okay.

Here's my question to you about space, which is I think a lot of us watched you.

This was weeks, just weeks after you stepped down as a CEO of Amazon.

You went aboard New Shepard as its first crew flight.

And I remember watching it on TV, just like everybody else.

This is 2001.

And I know this is something you wanted to do literally since you were a kid.

I mean, I went back and looked.

There were articles and letters and people who said that when you were a child, you were talking about this.

And so I was just curious if you could just take us back to that morning and what that felt like.

Because you have now put all of your eggs now in the space basket.

And what that was like and how that might have even shifted your thinking about this.

What do you mean put all of my eggs in the space basket?

You have a huge investment in space.

Yes, but it's not all of my eggs.

Not all of them.

Yeah, no.

I still have a huge investment in Amazon.

I still spend a lot of time there, too.

I've actually never worked harder.

This retirement thing I've turned out to be extremely lame at.

And so I'm waking up every morning and doing meetings from 9 to 7 and reading documents.

Most of it is Blue Origin, but quite a bit of it is still Amazon, too.

That morning, we're going to space.

And I'll tell you about the overview effect, which everyone goes.

We've now sent 6%.

New Shepard is our tourism vehicle.

It takes people up in space.

The whole journey takes 11 minutes.

You're in space for 4 minutes.

You go up above the Kármán line, 100 kilometers up.

You see the curvature of the Earth, the thin limb of the Earth's atmosphere.

It truly is a life-changing, transformative thing.

Every astronaut, everybody who's ever been to space has felt this.

And it has a name.

It's called the overview effect.

Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 astronaut and later Moonwalker, has a beautiful quote.

When he saw the Earth from space, he looked back and said, I realize you don't go to heaven when you die.

You go to heaven when you're born.

And that's how beautiful this planet is.

And you may have seen William Shatner when he flew on New Shepard and he came back.

He saw everything, the blackness and how there's the nothingness.

He described it as death and said, look, this is the one little pool of life in this entire solar system.

It's truly incredible.

And it is a profound experience that's hard to describe.

But that morning, something else happened to me that was very personal.

We're getting ready to go at 4.45 in the morning.

And, you know, my whole family is there, some close friends, extended families, 35, 40 people there.

And, by the way, I'm going on the first human flight of this vehicle.

And so it's never flown people before.

And my poor mother, what's worse is I'm bringing my brother with me.

So it's me and my brother.

And we wake up getting ready to go to the launch site.

And kind of, you know, we weren't really expecting it.

But everybody, of course, is awake and there to say goodbye.

But they thought they were saying goodbye forever.

And it was surprising to me.

I wasn't expecting this.

But they were genuinely terrified for us.

And, but it was, paradoxically, for my brother and me, we, it felt really good to us because we got to see how loved we were.

And it was very, you know, my kids and my, my sister and my mom and my dad and these close friends, it, it's easy to know what's going on inside your own head.

It's easy to know that you love people.

It's not really, it's not, to know how much you're loved by others is not always as obvious.

And to see that concern was very meaningful, very emotional.

It was a kind of an unexpected, the overview effect.

I talked to astronauts.

I knew I was going to in store for something special.

But it was very interesting to have that feeling from my family, too.

Did that change the way you thought about everything you're doing with this, with Blue Origin, in terms of what this is all about?

You've said that the reason we've got to go to space, in my view, is to save Earth.

Is that, is that come from being up there and looking at that?

Was that something you were thinking about?

For whatever reason, since I'm a teenager, and in fact, there's a high school newspaper article, Miami Palmetto Senior High.

They wrote an article about my space plans, which I would tell everyone who would stand still long enough about.

And those plans included what I still think, what I am still working on, which is moving all polluting industry off Earth.

And so my view, but I know that sounds fantastical.

So I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment.

But it's not fantastical.

This is going to happen.

And we need to lower the cost of access to space low enough.

And that's what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about.

That's the big, super-heavy launch vehicle.

It's literally on the pad now, waiting for regulatory approval.

It needs its final regulatory approval to launch.

So we're very, very close.

And if we can lower the cost enough, and we will.

I mean, it may take, who knows how many years it will take, but we can set up the preconditions where the next generation or the generation after that will be able to move polluting industry off Earth.

And then this planet will be maintained as it should be.

And, you know, it can kind of be, it can sort of think of it as zoned residential and light industry.

And if you want to use large amounts of energy and large amounts of pollutants and so on, you go do that off Earth.

And so we get the best of both.

We get to have this energy-intensive civilization and use ever more energy per capita and get all the benefits that we get from that, which are many, by the way.

You don't want to go back in time.

And it's really important to think about, you know, when people talk about the good old days, that is such an illusion.

You know, almost everything is better today than it was.

You know, infant mortality is better.

You know, global illiteracy is better.

You know, global poverty is far better.

Things really are better today.

There's one exception to that.

Which is?

The natural world.

The natural world, if you go back in time, 500 years, we had pristine oceans, pristine rivers, pristine forests.

And that is, you know, that's part of the trade we've made, is we're kind of, you know, we're using up the natural world here.

But space has infinite, for all practical purposes, infinite energy, infinite raw materials.

So it's a very interesting philosophical choice, because one of the things that you're talking about, trying to save the Earth.

And I was going to say that a number of other people, including, I think, Musk and others, say that we need an escape hatch from Earth, right?

We need to all move to Mars, because Earth is not going to be saved.

Do you see that?

No, we have to save.

So first of all, there is no plan B.

We have to save Earth.

So we've sent robotic probes to all of the planets in this solar system.

This is the good one, and we must save it.

We cannot, look, we can live, we can choose how we want to live.

We could, it is not impossible, if you think about climate change and so on, some of the issues that we face here, because of the way we're doing things currently.

You could imagine a world with enough technological sophistication where we can turn Earth into sort of a giant spaceship, you know, like air-conditioned.

It's fantastical.

No, I know.

No, but I would say air-conditioned planet and, you know, kind of pave the whole thing and turn it.

That, that's a bad future.

We don't need to do that.

That, that, turning Earth into, you know, to take the whole thing and turn it into a human construct and destroying this natural ecosystem when it's so unique and such a gym, that's not the right way to do it.

So we should move all that off Earth, and, and, and we will, because we won't do it the wrong way.

And you know why we won't?

Because humans value beauty and art.

I, I have a ranch in West Texas.

It's actually also where the launch site for the suborbital vehicle is.

The, and on that ranch, you can, in many different places, you can go and find, you know, arrowheads and ancient pottery.

And some of the pottery is 7,000 years old.

And it is, you know, and that was a hard, scrabble, subsistence-level life.

And that pottery is decorated.

So here are these people who are in a desert environment, scraping for water, food, and yet they're taking the time to paint their pottery.

What does that tell you about our values?

And what we, you know, humans value beauty and art.

We're not going to destroy this planet.

Let me ask you two other related space questions.

I had the opportunity to go tour Blue Origin in the fall.

And one of the things that everybody down there talks about is this idea of going, getting to the moon and then using the moon.

In fact, the phrase that one of your colleagues did was, we're going to use the moon.

The moon is going to be like JFK, the airport.

No.

Because, no, like JFK, the airport.

Because we're going to send stuff to the moon and then from the moon, then we're going to go to Mars.

It's like a pit stop along the way.

And I thought that was sort of a very interesting thought process.

There's a very strong argument to be made that the moon is a good stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.

And the reason for that, because the moon has a much lower gravity level than the earth, and because it has a lot of very important minerals, and also water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles of the moon.

And ice can be converted, water can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, which happen to be the very best, highest performing rocket propellants.

And so you can, it takes, to raise a kilogram of mass from the earth takes 28 times as much energy as raising that same kilogram from the moon.

So to the degree that you can get raw materials from the moon, which, again, we're talking about a couple of generations in the future.

But to the degree that you can get raw materials from the moon instead of from earth, those materials will allow you to build spaceships and to fuel those spaceships and to build solar arrays and all these other things that you want to do.

But using lunar resources instead of earth resources, and then it would provide a very convenient stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.

So Dave Limp, who you just hired to run Blue Origin for you as a CEO, said, apparently when he was interviewing with you, he said, Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?

Yeah.

What did you tell him?

It's a business.

It's not a very good business yet.

How big a business can it be?

No, look, I think it's going to be, from a business point of view, from a financial returns point of view, I think it's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in.

But it's going to take a while.

So bigger than Amazon?

Yeah.

So let me ask you a different question, which is, I remember just being down there.

The scale of everything, I wish you could all just go and see it, is so remarkable.

You sort of look at the scale, and you can't even understand what is happening around you.

It's sort of so hard to fathom just the size of it all.

And it made me think about confidence.

We were actually talking to Serena Williams earlier today about confidence.

And I was thinking to myself, it's easy for her.

She just has to be the best in the world.

Well, but this is going to go to you, too, which is, you know, when you started Amazon, that was a business that had to scale, and you had to see the scale to work.

I remember for years, I was covering it.

I would be writing about when you were losing money, left, right, and center.

Everyone thought this whole thing was crazy.

We lost money for 11 years.

The scale of it, people think, I thought it was insane.

Yes.

And if you go down to Florida, to Cape Canaveral, and you see the scale of this thing, you say, my God, this is insane.

Tom Brokaw interviewed me one time about Amazon's losses, and he looked at me, and he said, Mr. Bezos, can you even spell profit?

And I said, yes, P-R-O-P-H-E-T.

So where do you think your confidence, though, comes from to create a business that requires such scale?

Most people like to, you know, they take one foot, and they put the other foot, and they want to be able to see where they're going.

And I would argue, in the case of Amazon, in the case of space, you can't see where, I mean, maybe you can see where you're going.

But a lot of people actually struggle to see it.

Well, I think, first of all, a very good question, very interesting question.

And I'm not sure I know the right answer, or maybe there are many answers, so let's start with that.

But one observation I would have is that I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity.

And so I think entrepreneurs in general, you know, would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature.

The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive.

And so you're, when you look at, when you say it's confidence, but maybe it's just trying to compensate for that, that accepting that that's a human bias and trying to compensate against it.

The second thing I would point out is that, you know, thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now, when do you think you learned this, though?

Because you were doing this at a very young age.

And this is not something, this is something that maybe a wise and old man would say.

But I only say, because I remember it's very early.

I remember watching, I remember watching on 60 Minutes, this is maybe 1999, and at the end of the interview, they were asking you about whether this whole thing could work or not.

And you said, it's not a fear that it can't work, it's a fact that it might not work.

Right.

That is true.

No, but I remember seeing that, thinking, and you just said it in this sort of matter-of-fact kind of way, which is to say, did you say to yourself, there's a massive risk, this is not really going to happen?

I took, to raise the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon.

So I sold 20% of the company, at a $5 million valuation, I sold 20% of the company for a million dollars to 22 angel investors, roughly $50,000 each.

And I had to take 60 meetings, so whatever, you know, roughly 40 of them said no, and a little, 20, 22 or so said yes.

And it was the hardest thing I've ever done, basically.

This was 1995-ish, 1995, and the first question was, what's the internet?

Everybody wanted to know what the internet was.

And by the way, the 40 no's were hard-earned no's.

Like, they weren't just no, they were me, you know, at multiple meetings, working really hard, trying to get people to write that $50,000 check.

And the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then.

And what I do remember, in those meetings, I would always tell people, I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment.

And in retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive.

But I thought, but I think it was true.

In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better than the odds.

Better than the real odds.

What do you think the real odds are in space with Blue Origin?

Well, Blue Origin is, you know, has, doesn't have the same level of financing risk.

So, you know, because I can finance Blue Origin with my Amazon stock.

So, it's, I think Blue Origin has a lot of runway.

Blue Origin is going to do some very amazing things here.

And it's, you know, and by the way, Amazon is doing amazing things.

I saw some of our announcements yesterday, I hope.

But, you know, the Nova foundational models are truly incredible.

There, you know, it's, there's a bunch of stuff going on.

The world is so interesting right now.

We're in multiple golden ages at once.

And, you know, I'm also very interested in robotics.

I'm not doing that directly, but I'm doing it, I'm investing in a number of robotics companies.

I'm a big believer in it.

I think there's never been a more extraordinary moment to be alive.

We're so lucky.

I want to go back to Amazon for a second.

Well, actually, I want to go back.

You just mentioned the fundraising for Amazon at the outset.

Yes.

One of the things that I noticed recently, and you may, you'll infer why I'm even asking you this, is throughout your whole career at Amazon, it appears to me like you paid yourself about $80,000 a year in total.

Yeah.

Cash comp.

And never took additional equity in the company the entire time.

No, I never did.

And I asked the comp committee of the board not to give me any comp.

And I, the, my view was, I was a founder, I already owned a significant amount of the company, and I just didn't feel good about taking more.

I felt, um, I had plenty of incentive.

It was, you know, I, I owned, you know, more than 10% of the company, you know, more, earlier, you know, before it was diluted by various things, more than 20% of the company.

And it was, I just felt, how could I possibly need more incentive than owning such a, you know, most founders own big chunks of the company.

They don't really need, they're more like owner-operators.

The way they increase their wealth is not by getting, you know, more equity.

They just want to make the equity they have more valuable.

And, uh, and so I never, I just would have felt icky about it.

But, and, uh, I really, I'm actually very proud of that decision.

I, I, I sometimes wish that there were a, um, and maybe you can do this, Andrew, or maybe the Washington Post will do this, but somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they've created for other people.

And so, instead of the Forbes list, it ranks you by your own wealth.

So, you know, Amazon's market cap is 2.3 trillion today.

I own about, you know, 200 billion-ish of it.

So, if you take 2.3 billion and subtract out the piece I kept from myself, then, you know, I've created something like 2.1 trillion of wealth for other people.

That should put me pretty high on some kind of list.

And, uh, and that's a better list.

You know, what, uh, how much wealth have you created for other people?

You know, people like Jensen and NVIDIA, he's going to be very high on that list.

And, uh, that would be a pretty cool list.

Somebody should do that list.

I think that is a very cool list.

How does that, how does the idea of your own influence sit with you?

Do you, do you think about that?

Do you appreciate that, that you are one of the most powerful people in the world, frankly, given your connections to Amazon, given what you're doing with Blue Origin, given all the other things that you're investing in and can do, the Washington Post?

You know, I don't, it's a fair question, but I don't, I don't think about it that way.

I don't wake up and think, you know, how am I going to exercise my power today?

You know, um, it's, it's, I wake up and follow my curiosity.

I've always been a wanderer.

And, uh, I even organize our, you know, our Amazon meetings.

I want crisp documents and messy meetings.

And I want the meetings to wander.

Uh, the only meeting I'm ever on time to is my first one, because I won't finish a meeting until I'm really finished.

Well, you can do that because you're the boss.

What about everybody else?

They have to wait for me.

But, but that, you know, this is, um, uh, you know, it's, but I, and I actually would, and I, I try to teach, like, really wander in the meetings.

There's certain kinds of meetings that are like a weekly business review or something, where it's like a set pattern and you're going through it.

That can have an agenda and it can be very crisp.

That's a different kind of meeting.

But most of the meetings that are useful, we do, we do these six page memos, we do a half hour study hall, we read them.

And then when, then we have a messy discussion.

So I like, uh, the memo should be like angels singing it from high.

It's so clear and beautiful.

And then the meeting can be messy.

How messy can it be?

And I completely, no, no, I ask that because culturally right now, and there's so many people in the room here who go to meetings and we don't know how messy they can be.

No, I mean that because you don't know whether you really can raise your hand and say, this is totally, this idea is completely insane and should not be happening.

No, in fact, I am very skeptical if the meeting is not messy.

One time, it doesn't happen very often because it's kind of verboten at Amazon.

But I could tell in the meeting that the team had rehearsed the meeting.

That happens.

And I was, and I, I could just feel it.

Like I, it could, you can tell the little tiny cues.

And I, I turned to them and said, did you guys rehearse this meeting?

And they're like, uh, yes.

I was like, don't do that again.

You don't need to.

Because here's what, maybe you would rehearse a sales meeting, right?

If you're going, you know, if you're going to go visit, you know, a customer and you're trying to sell them a new product or something, maybe you want to have all your ducks in a row and you want to put your best foot forward.

But that's what people do for the CEO.

Internally, you're seeking truth, not, not a pitch.

I don't want to be pitched.

And you don't want any of your senior executives to be pitched.

You want, and that's why messy is good.

And, and, uh, and you also want to be early.

It's like, you don't want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you.

Right.

Like you want to be part of the sausage making, like show me the ugly bits.

Like, and I always ask, you know, are there any dissenting opinions on the team?

You know, who, what, you know, I want to try to get to the controversy.

Like what, let's make this meeting messy.

Help me, help me make it messy.

Um, how hard was it for you to leave Amazon?

I go last too.

Oh, you go, yes.

I've heard about this.

Everybody, we try to go in kind of seniority order.

So the most junior person goes first and the most senior person goes last.

And it helps with groupthink.

Because if you say what's going to happen, what happens if you have already come up with your view though?

Well, I don't want to torture people.

So in that rare case where I actually know that nothing can change my mind, I will just say, look, guys, nothing here is going to change my mind.

So like, let's not waste a lot of time.

I don't want to, it shouldn't be a charade.

Um, but, but that, those aren't, that's a very rare case.

I've actually personally very easy to influence.

Something I've realized later in my life or just maybe starting 10 years ago or so, I realized I'm a very easy person to influence.

I changed my mind a lot.

You know, people talk to me and I take in the information and I, the change, I can be easily, but a couple of percent of the time, no force in the world can move me because I'm so sure of something.

There were things, you know, I, I can't tell you how many people tried to talk me out of fulfillment by Amazon as an example.

And I just, I just knew.

And I was like, you guys, you will never talk me out of this.

Do you think we're going to do this?

I will do this through sheer force of will if need be.

Do you think that you have, that this is actually, um, something that I think a lot of people contend with.

Do you think you have to project confidence?

No, I, I don't.

I, you know, I've gotten, um, well, I guess it's a little bit of a personal story in a way, but I have gotten, um, more intimate, I would say in the last, you know, as I've gotten older.

So maybe the last 10 or 15 years and, uh, my, my, in my, my upbringing, I have, you know, I have, I have really supportive family and, um, but in our family, there were some unspoken rules, which I think probably most families have unspoken rules of one kind or another.

And in mine, uh, all the positive emotions were allowed, optimism, you know, happiness, joy, uh, and, but only really, the only negative emotion that was kind of tolerated in that unspoken family dynamic and only occasionally was anger, sadness, fear, uh, anxiety.

These things were looked down on.

And that's probably in this, in the scheme of things, kind of probably pretty helpful for founding a company.

You know, it's like you probably mostly want to be focused on positive things anyway.

Um, uh, and you need optimism, you know, without optimism, optimism and energy, I don't know how, how some glum Eeyore type founder could ever lead a company to success.

I mean, you gotta have some optimism, you gotta have some energy.

It's gotta be a little contagious.

There's going to be a lot of bad days.

You gotta lift people up.

Um, so you need that.

Um, but what, what I have figured out over the last, you know, as a sort of like, especially, I started with my own family, uh, and my close relationships, my children and my brother and sister and parents and so on, as I realized, like, I'm not really being intimate with them if I'm not sharing when I'm sad or sharing when I'm scared or these kinds of things.

And so I started working on that, uh, with them and found it very meaningful.

Like it deepened those relationships very significantly.

And then I realized those were valid emotions at work too.

And so it's, it turns out like they're more precise.

All of your emotions are sort of an early warning system.

You know, if you're stressed for me, that's a, uh, kind of an early, you know, a radar that is detecting that I'm, that there's something I'm not taking action on.

And there's, it's a, it's a, it's an important indicator.

And, uh, and it turns out if you're, if you're channeling all of your negative emotions into occasional, into frustration or anger or something like that, you're, you're not being very precise.

And it's much better now, like I've had, you know, I'll have a meeting and listens for a while.

And when it's my turn to talk, I'll say, I'm scared.

And that's more effective.

People are like, you're, what are you scared of?

And then you can start talking about, okay, what is, what's making you scared?

That's, um, you get more in touch.

It actually helped you probably not just your family relationships, your close intimate relationships, but I think it helps you at work too.

Let me ask you an Amazon question.

Uh, Amazon is your baby.

For sure.

Um, you stepped away from that.

Yeah.

Um, what did that feel like?

How hard was that for you?

And what is it like now?

Well, um, I, even when Amazon was a tiny company, for whatever reason, I always had in my mind that I wanted to build a company that would outlast me.

And so I've always been thinking about it in that framework and, uh, how it could, could, could kind of grow up into a young adult and be set off into the world, uh, uh, successfully and independently.

Um, and that's very different.

You know, um, you, you, you, you can do things, you can build companies in different ways.

You don't have to do that.

You know, you can, there's, you can have, be the genius with a thousand helpers and you can, and that's also can be very successful.

There's nothing wrong with it.

It's just, it wasn't what I wanted to do.

And I, uh, you know, it was, I felt like a parent sending, you know, or maybe like with your kids become, go off to college or maybe when they graduate from college and you're hoping that you've created this independent child, you know, now adult, young adult who can go

off in the world.

You don't, you don't want them to be dependent on you.

If they are, you've failed.

And I've also, I've always preached inside the company and to myself that no one is indispensable.

I think it's most important for CEOs to look at themselves in the mirror every day and see, I'm not indispensable.

And if you, if you, so I, I want Amazon to go off without me.

And I'm still at Amazon, by the way, I haven't left fully and I am a parent and I will, but I'm a 60 year old man and my mom and dad still worry about me.

Right.

So you never stopped being a parent.

My heart is in Amazon.

My curiosity is Amazon.

My fears are there.

My love is there.

I'm never going to forget about Amazon.

I'll always be there to help.

Um, and right now I'm putting a lot of time in it because it's all, I, you know, I can help and it's super interesting.

So why not?

But this is the right way in my view to think about it.

You know, big leaders only have to do a few things.

It's big leaders have to identify the big ideas.

They have to enforce tough execution against those big ideas and they need to grow the next generation of leaders.

That's really it.

So two things.

And so my job, part of my, one of my jobs right now is to make sure Andy, you know, Andy Jassy and the whole leadership team are successful.

I take that job very seriously.

Well, that's what I was going to ask.

As a parent, your parents, your kids can go off and pretend they do things you don't want the kids to do.

I just, I've got kids in college age and just out of college and I still have to Venmo the money every once in a while.

It just happened.

Just, um, we'll talk about what you subscribe and save to in just a moment on your app.

But, um, help us, help us with this.

You just said you're very, you're very involved with it right now.

What is it that you're doing at Amazon?

AI.

AI.

Yeah.

So I mean, there are a few things, but it's a small thing, but it's 95% AI.

And where do you think?

It's just so, because there, we're literally working on a thousand applications internally.

So AI, you have to remember AI, modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer.

It, it, it, it will, it, it can be used to improve everything.

It will be in everything.

Um, this is most like electricity.

I, I went to a, um, brewery in Luxembourg many years ago now.

In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS.

The, the, and the brewery was 300 years old, this company making beer for 300 years.

A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries, by the way.

I don't know why this is.

And they were very proud of their history and they had a museum.

And in that museum was an electric power generator, a hundred years old.

And because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid.

So they had to build their own power station.

So they made their own electricity.

And at that time, that's what everybody did.

If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator.

And I looked at this and I thought, this is what computation is like today.

Everybody has their own data center.

And that's not going to last.

It makes no sense.

You're going to buy a compute off the grid.

That's AWS.

We had, we were doing it internally at Amazon for ourselves and the APIs were created.

There's a, that, that's a very interesting story in its own right.

But the, this is, you know, these kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute, and now artificial intelligence, they, they go everywhere.

There isn't, I guarantee you, there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI.

And where do you think Amazon is in this?

We've been talking about large language models all day.

We talked to Sam and we talked to Sundar.

Clearly AWS has a big opportunity, but on the language model piece, it doesn't have its own.

Does it matter?

Well, you've been so busy.

Yeah.

Andrew.

That you did not see.

I did see yesterday.

Our announcements yesterday.

I did see the announcements.

About Nova.

Yes.

Well, that is a large language model and it is our own.

And do you believe that that model is competitive with these other models?

It is absolutely competitive.

So it is, it benchmarks extraordinarily well.

It's a world-class foundation model.

It's a frontier model.

And, and it's very, very price performance.

Do you think that all these things we were talking about earlier become commoditized though?

The models themselves?

I don't think they'll be exactly commoditized, but I think there will be, I think models will end up being specialists at certain, they'll be better at slightly different, some will have lower latency, you know, some will be, you know, better at calling APIs.

There's, there's a, there will turn out to be a bunch of flavors.

Just like you, you might not consult, you know, if you're phoning a friend and consulting somebody, you're not always going to consult the same person for everything.

It won't be exactly like that because this kind of intelligence that we're creating is a little alien.

It's very different from human intelligence in certain ways.

And, you know, so there, I think even, you know, even, even a single application is likely to call multiple AI models depending on what, you know, some of them will be lower cost because they have a small number of parameters and then every once in a while you'll have to call the really big model.

The big models are mostly going to be used, I don't know, yeah, probably mostly, but they'll certainly be often used as teacher models.

So, you know, this is what we announced yesterday with Nova, there are four classes of model.

There's the, the giant, you know, frontier model, but that model, you know, we distill down to the smaller models that are more cost effective, have lower latency, and can provide different levels of intelligence.

So that's a really, you know, this whole thing is, is fascinating.

It's, by the way, also one of the ways, it's very interesting to think about how alien, this kind of, it's, it's, you know, in some ways, these models are already smarter than humans because they're more multidisciplinary.

Right.

And, you know, it's very difficult for a human to, you know, be an expert in, you know, even if you're a doctor, you really have to specialize, you know, you can be.

Does it excite you or scare you?

Oh, it excites me.

I'm not, are you, no, I'm not worried.

No, I'm not scared.

I just want, I do, we do talk about sort of human, you know, what it's going to mean to be a human when this is all.

Well, I, you know, so I've had this conversation about, with various people about what it means to be human and, and people say, well, you know, if AI is smarter than us, better than us at various things, won't that take the meaning out of your life?

Or, you know, some question along those lines.

And I said, look, I consider myself to be a very good writer, but I know people who are much better writers than I am.

And, in fact, I don't think there's any single thing that I'm the best in the world at.

If I go down, if I'm really, really honest with myself, there, I can always find somebody, I know, I know people who are better than me at math.

I know, you know, people who are better than me at dancing, that's for sure.

So, you know, they're like, literally, I go right down the line and I can always find somebody better.

And, and yet that doesn't take meaning.

If you're, if meaning only, if you only get meaning because you're the best in the world at something, then very few of us are going to have meaning in our lives.

There isn't going to be a lot of meaning.

Really, your meaning is coming from your relationships, you know, uplifting people.

So, like, if you, if you think about it, by the way, the uplifting can be very local.

It's like if you're just uplifting your brother and sister, you're uplifting your kids, you're uplifting, you know, your friends and the people in your community, you're going to get meaning from that.

Do you think technology has made that better or worse?

We were talking to Prince Harry earlier.

He clearly thinks it's social media.

And I don't, are you on social media?

I am on social media sometimes.

And.

You say sometimes.

Well, I, I am not addicted to social media.

I go in and look and, and I try to mine it for ideas sometimes.

And, and it, it, it is, uh, it's a lot of work to find the little nuggets of there, where there are some, like, I, I follow a bunch of people who I think are really smart.

And, uh, and if I, some, if I can stay just on those, but invariably the algorithm captures my attention and takes me down a different path.

I've seen you, you were very good at compartmentalizing, meaning I, I, you will put the phone down.

I never, I never pick up my.

Is that a natural act though?

It's easy for me.

I'm very, I'm a, um, I'm a serial multitasker.

So I'm very, very focused.

When I was in Montessori school, they told my mom that, um, I was problematic because I wouldn't switch tasks.

And my teacher would have to pick my whole chair up and move me in my chair to the next task.

And so I, you know, it's, I'm, it's easy for me.

If I'm at dinner with friends, I'm at dinner.

I do not want, I don't, it's not hard for me.

That is not hard for me.

I'm a good focuser.

That's hard for me.

Um, two other things before we go.

Uh, there are these different buckets.

Obviously we've talked about the origin, which you spend a lot of your time on now and Amazon.

And then I see you making investments in robotics and AI and other things.

And obviously, um, uh, the earth fund.

How do you, what is the day like for you?

What do, how do you sort of see it?

I, I, I work from about nine to seven in meetings.

I mean, it's meetings from nine to seven.

It's, um, and then I have a bunch of documents I read outside of that.

Um, I get energy from that.

It is, um, I've always done that.

Um, you can't, you know, you can't start a company unless you're going to work really hard and not all the work is fun.

That's why they call it work.

Um, a lot of it is fun, but I always tell people, if you can get half your job to be fun, you're crushing it.

Um, you know, that you got to have your expectations set, right?

If you, if you come out of college and think like a hundred percent of your job is going to be fun, you're setting yourself a disappointment.

Um, here's my final question for you.

You don't do this that often.

You mean do these interviews?

Do interviews.

No, very, very infrequently.

Very rare.

And I'm curious because I do, you must read about yourself occasionally, um, a little bit through social media.

Oh, I definitely see things sometimes like with the non-endorsement decision.

That wasn't very nice of some people.

So, so I'm actually just, I'm curious what you think the world misunderstands about you.

We all read about you all the time.

Uh, we see you in pictures and all sorts of things everywhere.

Um, and I'm curious what you think when, when you sort of see the projected version of Jeff Bezos and the real Jeff Bezos, it's actually the reason I wanted you to be here today.

Um, because I've had the opportunity to get to know you over the years.

Um, I'm curious though, from your vantage point, what you see as the thing that, that the public doesn't.

Well, what an interesting, I wasn't expecting any questions like this.

Let me think about this.

It's, um, I, you know, I, I gave up on being well understood a long time ago.

I kind of thought, I realized it was a, um, it's kind of, it would take so much energy and you'd probably still fail, you know, so like, to be understood is too difficult.

It's as a public figure, it's hard enough, by the way, to be well understood by your loved ones, you know, by your kids and your, and your, and your close family members and your closest friends.

Even that is difficult.

Like, you know, it takes a lot of energy.

And I think to be well understood by the world, I might, I would posit to you that if you think you understand any public figure, you probably don't.

There may be some exceptions where the people, I don't know, maybe like Oprah, when she had her show, because she really was, you, she were, you're talking, you saw her so often and, and in so many different circumstances that maybe you got a real sense of her and, you know, I know her and she does seem like the woman on her show.

Like it, so there, I think there are these rare cases where people end up defining themselves, but mostly you end up defined by a small set of things that catch as a public figure that catch people's attention.

And, um, and they, they tend to, they just dominate the entire conversation.

You know, like I, you know, in my case, it would be wealth or something like this.

People would, would say, you know, it's very hard if you're, you know, um, I had a, a very funny moment on stage with Bill Gates once, uh, it was shortly after I had become the wealthiest person in the world.

And I had taken that title from Bill, a title, which I had, you know, I tell you, I promise you, I had never sought.

And, um, and, uh, we were being interviewed, the two of us by, uh, I can't remember who the moderator was, but he said, uh, uh, Bill, how do you feel about this guy stealing your number one, uh, wealthiest person title?

And before Bill could answer, I looked at Bill and said, you're welcome.

Um, because of course it's not, it's actually just a, uh, it, it, that particular, uh, thing

is, tends to be dominant in our culture.

It kind of people over-focus on it and then they think you're focused on it, which isn't really true.

Um, it's, you know, in my case, I think of myself as an inventor.

That's what I am.

And I wake up every day and I follow my curiosity and I explore and I really am an inventor.

I'm very good at that.

I'm a very good lateral thinker and I love problems and I love a whiteboard and I love having a team of other smart people.

And we work together and we find unusual solutions to things.

And that's how I think of myself.

So like, if I could somehow have a Forbes list of inventors and if I could climb my way to the top of that inventor list, that's what would make me, then I'd be understood or at least in part, but I don't somehow, I think you have to decide too, as a public figure, how much energy do you want to put into being understood?

Because you can spend a lot of time and it probably still wouldn't work.

So, you know, it probably helps to do an occasional interview like this.

I did Lex, I did Lex Friedman and, um, I've done a couple of things.

And so you don't want to be so mysterious that nobody ever sees you and they, you know, you want to be the, uh, the, uh, Howard Hughes or whatever.

You don't want to be a recluse completely.

But I also, I really value my time.

I work very hard.

I care deeply about the things I work on.

And every minute I'm doing something like this is a minute I am not doing something else.

Not that I'm not happy to do this.

I am.

And, and I have enjoyed it and you're very good at it.

Um, thank you, Jeffrey Bezos.

Jeff Bezos.

Thank you so much.

Uh, thank you for your time today.

We very, very much appreciate it.

That was just a fact of the conversation.

Thank you so, so much.

Um.