Jeff Bezos on Innovation, Thinking and Building for the Future | America Business Forum 2025

For the following interview, Francis Suarez, mayor of the city of Miami, takes the stage of America Business Forum.

Get ready to have some fun.

Love you, man.

Thank you, mayor.

They love you.

Thank you.

So I think, let me just start by saying that the big miracle here is not that we have Jeff Bezos closing day two of the America Business Forum.

The big miracle here is that we're running on time.

So Jeff, you are the ultimate use case for a successful ecosystem.

You're a Miami guy.

You went to high school here in Palmetto High.

Yeah.

You, yes.

Go Panthers.

Let's go.

And you built two of the most successful companies shaping the world today.

Did you ever think you were going to come back to Miami?

Well, this little kid who went, you know, here in high school 40 plus years ago was dreaming at that time of building a space company that would one day take heavy polluting industry off Earth.

And this guy sitting here on stage with you is still dreaming the same dream 40 years later.

That kid was also working at the McDonald's on Dixie and 130 something street.

I recently took Lauren there.

We drove through the drive through, got Big Macs and chicken nuggets.

That was a great job, by the way.

I learned a lot beyond time.

You have to start at the bottom.

I cleaned the bathrooms.

It was, you learn a lot.

The ketchup dispenser got stuck open one day.

Five gallons of ketchup all over the floor.

Then who do you think they asked to clean it up?

This guy.

It's such an incredible lesson.

I think for everybody here, part of the whole sort of genesis of this entire conference is the people in the audience seeing and hearing someone like you tell that story about McDonald's.

Yeah.

Right?

And understanding that they can be up here one day.

And I think we've seen this metamorphosis of Miami from a regional hub to what it is today.

You who have, you know, your most precious asset is your time, but you've chosen to invest that most precious asset here in our ecosystem.

What is it about our ecosystem?

What is it about Miami and that change from a regional center to sort of a big tech conference and tech ecosystem?

Well, Miami has completely transformed over the last 40 years.

It's an incredible city today.

It has the energy and the dynamism.

I love the Latin part of the culture here.

Like there's so much energy.

It's so alive.

And I have personal reasons too.

My dad is Cuban.

He's here in Miami.

It's a...

But this city has such good energy.

You can just feel it.

As soon as I land, I feel that energy.

As soon as the plane gets on the ground, I feel that energy.

You started Amazon out of your garage.

And you saw the internet sort of happening before it happened.

You know, how did you...

What confidence did you have in taking a leap that you could create a company like the one that you created?

Well, you know, all big things start small.

Sure.

So you've got to accept that.

That's the way it is.

And you've got to plant acorn and work hard and water it and nurture it and maybe it grows into a big tree.

For me, I made that decision and I knew that if I didn't try, I would always be haunted by that.

I would always have regret.

I would always wonder what might have been.

Right.

And I think that that's the best way.

When you're making a deeply personal decision about your own life, you can make pros and cons lists.

You can be as analytical as you want.

But at the end of the day, you have to project yourself forward, you know, age 80, you know, we're all living longer now.

Maybe age 90 and say, do I want to be haunted by that regret?

I want to minimize the number of regrets I have in my life.

And when you start thinking that way, that you're looking back on your life from age 90, most regrets are acts of omission.

They're things we didn't do.

Yeah.

I think one of the things I've learned from you and reading what you've said and just being in your presence is you think about things very differently sometimes than everybody else does.

Sort of this first order thinking that you have.

And so oftentimes people in a sort of disruptive modern day world are thinking about how do you predict the future?

And what you said was diametrically opposite.

You said, what are the things about the future that we know are not going to change?

Yeah.

You gave examples.

That's exactly right.

You said, you know, we're not going to want to get packages slower.

Yeah.

We're not going to want things with less quality.

We're not going to want to pay more for those things.

That's right.

And you can build a business around knowing the things that aren't going to change.

Tell us a little bit about that thinking and sort of.

So, you know, we live in a very dynamic world and everything changes.

Technologies change.

Your competitive set changes.

So many things are changing every day.

You can't build a strategy on those.

You have to build a strategy around stability.

So you have to find the things that are not going to change.

And say 10 years from now, what's going to be the same?

And those, most of those things are going to be customer needs.

So as you were saying, examples are for Amazon would be, you know, low prices, fast delivery.

Nobody 10 years is going to say, I love Amazon.

I just wish they delivered a little more slowly.

That's impossible.

Of course.

And you can use this for a thing.

You know, at Blue Origin, we have a rocket launch coming up this Sunday.

I'm very anxious about it.

I know, I know.

That's why I was trying to break the ice a little bit here for me.

I'm excited and anxious.

Of course.

It's the second time we've launched the vehicle.

It's a giant vehicle.

It's called New Glenn.

But I can use this method.

What do we focus on for something like that vehicle?

It's the same kinds of things that we know our customers will want.

Nobody's going to say 10 years from now, I love New Glenn.

I just wish it was a little more expensive.

Or I love New Glenn.

I just wish it was a little less reliable.

Like in the context of being a mayor of a city, the same thing works.

You can say, look, 10 years from now, is anybody going to say, I love Miami.

I just wish the crime was a little worse.

Or I love Miami.

I wish that the ambulances came more slowly.

Or that the taxes were a little higher.

You see what I'm saying?

Like, yeah, the taxes were higher.

These things are so fundamental.

Sure.

And when you pin them down, you can put energy into them, making them better and better and better.

If the ambulances take 11 minutes to come, then maybe you work on getting it to be 10 and a half minutes, and then 10 minutes and nine minutes.

And that's how you could make a city great.

And that's one of the things that people, I think, oftentimes in business, people make this mistake.

They focus too much on what's changing instead of what's not changing.

So sometimes intuition and data align.

And that makes it easy to make decisions.

But oftentimes the data and the anecdotal evidence or the intuition are misaligned.

Yeah.

How do you sort of navigate that?

And what's your instinct propel you to do in those cases?

Well, there are a couple.

It's a very interesting question.

And sometimes, you know, look, first of all, if you're running any organization of any scale whatsoever, it is essential to have data and to rely on data.

Of course.

If you're not, that's so basic and so fundamental.

But the data doesn't tell you anything, everything.

It doesn't tell you everything.

And so if, for example, it often doesn't tell you about changes or things that you're missing or things that you're not measuring properly.

And so that's where anecdotes come into play.

And that's where intuition and gut instinct and heart come into play.

And a lot of those things are new.

You know, the biggest things that we've done at Amazon, and it's going to be true in space for Blue Origin as well.

It's true in AI.

A lot of them come from instinct and hunches.

Nobody, if you take Echo and Alexa, which has been a fantastically successful product for us, it's installed in hundreds of millions of endpoints.

Nobody was asking for a black cylinder that's always on, that you can talk to, and apps for music, and to turn your lights on and off and set timers.

And we didn't know if people would want that.

You just have to kind of use your intuition.

AWS, again, nobody was asking for that.

We had to use our intuition.

Third-party marketplace.

You know, we've been working on doing cloud computing in space at Blue Origin because cloud, you know, there's a lot, you get eight times as much solar power per unit of area in space as you do on Earth.

And so, in principle, you could make data centers in space that would be very efficient.

So that's something that, you know, Blue Origin is working on.

A lot of other companies are working on that.

But that's not something you can be sure is going to work.

Of course.

You don't know what launch costs are going to be and other things.

So technically it works, but there's a lot of, a lot of mysteries about it too.

And this is, I think, when you're talking about invention, you have to be a wanderer.

You have to wander.

Because, you know, if you're not wandering, you're going in a straight line.

That means you know where you're going.

And a lot of the most important discoveries and most important inventions don't come from knowing where you're going.

Let's transition a little bit to Blue Origin.

You were just talking about this impending launch.

Yeah.

All the people that are working together.

All the pressure, the expenses, et cetera.

Why is space exploration so important to you?

Well, for me, there's a bunch of reasons for, you know, but literally since I was a kid, literally a kid here in Miami, I have been thinking that ultimately if we want to keep growing our civilization and using more energy per person and so on and so on, we're eventually going to have to move all of our heavy industry off earth.

And that will happen.

I know it sounds a little fantastical.

Maybe it sounds like science fiction to some degree.

But it will happen.

I don't know how soon it will happen.

It's a job that I won't finish.

Probably my children's children won't finish.

You know, this is something that multiple generations will work on.

But it will happen.

And, you know, I just mentioned one of the first steps there is that, you know, we already put a lot of communications in space.

We can start to build factories in space.

We can start to build data centers in space.

We will ultimately get the materials, not even from earth, but get the materials from the moon and near earth objects and asteroids.

We have unlimited energy in space and unlimited material resources in space.

And this planet is so beautiful and so unusual, this is the one that we're going to want to protect.

There's no plan B.

We have spent robotic probes to every planet.

This is the good one.

Listen, it sounds fantastical, but so did this conference to many people.

Yes, a lot of things that we have today sound fantastic.

Go back in time a hundred years and show somebody your iPhone.

Very fantastic.

They'll freak out.

So, Amazon, Blue Origin, two very different companies.

Yeah.

Talk to me about your mindset and how you sort of pivoted from one thing to the other and how your brain works to be able to come up with something like this.

Well, fundamentally, I'm an inventor.

It's the thing I do the best.

It's the thing that I enjoy the most.

I'm a good brainstormer.

I love problem solving.

And it's, to me, that creation of new ideas is what drives the world forward.

You know, somebody 10,000 years ago, or whatever it was, invented the plow.

And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world wealthier.

And that's what happens.

Every discovery, every invention, somebody invented penicillin, and they made the whole world better.

And this, they discovered it, and they perfected it, and then they expanded it to other antibiotics.

And this is like, we're sort of one invention at a time.

The world gets more prosperous.

And that's my mindset.

That's how I think about the world.

It's, I don't think there's any problem if we apply human ingenuity to it that we can't solve.

And it's fun to do that, too.

So, here's the inevitable pivot.

AI.

Everybody's talking about it.

You can't have a conversation without it.

Yeah.

You can't even give a key to the city, apparently.

And rightly so, by the way.

Right.

What about AI is exciting you?

You get to see things that, you know, probably nobody else gets to see.

What's exciting?

We're heavily involved in AI.

I spend a lot of time at Amazon and at Blue Origin, and with some startup companies that I'm investing in.

It's, it is everything it's cracked up to be.

You know, investors right now are investing in everything, the good ideas, the bad ideas.

But the fundamentals of what are happening are very powerful, and it will impact every industry.

And it will make every industry more productive.

You'll see, you know, medicine will, you know, diagnosis will get better.

So, will drug discovery get better?

But literally, you can go through every single industry, and it's going to, every manufacturing industry, everything is going to get better.

And Miami should have a AI application that reads your building permit for a new house or a new building.

And it should give you a yes or a no in 10 seconds.

And if the answer is, and if, and if the answer, and if the answer is no, if the answer is no, it should tell you the six things you have to change to get a yes.

And why does it take months and months and months to get a building permit?

It doesn't make any sense.

He just described a business that I would love to create.

Exactly.

This is, this is a business opportunity.

No, this is, this is a $100 billion business, by the way.

It's a huge business.

And most of the regular, right, most things like, have you ever noticed with any kind of permitting process in government, but at the state level, the municipal level, or the federal level, they almost always say yes, they just make you wait a long time.

That's right.

So, like, if they're going to say yes, can we do that quickly?

Of course.

And maybe with AI, it can just read all the plans.

Yeah.

And it knows all the codes.

Spit it out.

Spit it out.

Yep.

And let me tell you, what people don't realize is, and you understand this, is a big building in Miami is a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

So you're talking about half a billion, a billion dollars.

Huge.

In lending costs.

Yes.

The daily carrying cost, one day of interest, $200,000 to $400,000 per day.

Yes.

So every day that it takes, it costs the developer, the ultimate user, $400,000 a day.

Yes.

And that doesn't count the frustration.

Of course not.

Which is infinite.

Which is infinite.

Infinity.

I have some white hairs as a result of some of this stuff.

No, and by the way, Miami is amongst the best.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, but I'm just saying, this is the possibilities of this technology.

Absolutely.

Want to build it together?

I'm very busy, but somebody out here is going to do this.

That's true.

That's true.

So it's going back to this sort of nexus between Amazon and Blue Origin.

What were the lessons that you learned from building Amazon that you could apply to making Blue Origin a successful company today?

This is such a good question.

For me, the lessons, the big things are the same.

So Amazon was really built on just a small number of principles.

The first one is absolute customer obsession.

Yeah.

And I really mean that customer obsession instead of competitor obsession.

So we pay attention to customers, I mean to competitors, but we don't obsess over them.

We obsess over customers.

And Blue Origin is the same.

The second thing is an eagerness to invent.

That you want to be pioneering.

That you want to do new things.

And there's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now.

Because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities.

And we're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now at the rapid rate of change.

And by the way, rapid change is good for startup companies and bad for incumbents.

That's right.

It's hard for incumbents to move fast.

And so this is the best time ever that I, in my lifetime, probably ever to start a company and do something inventive.

So second thing that Amazon, that translates to Blue Origin, eagerness to invent.

The third thing is long-term thinking.

That is a giant lever.

I once asked Warren Buffett, why don't more people copy your investment strategy?

It's not that difficult to understand in principle.

And he said, oh, Jeff, that's easy.

My approach is a get rich slowly scheme.

Yeah.

People don't like those.

Exactly.

And so, but there's a lot of truth in that for everything, which is if you can think in terms of seven years instead of three years.

Right.

And you can defer gratification and think long term, that will give you a head start against all of your competitors, because most people can't do that.

And then the last thing that translates to Blue Origin really well, all of these do, is what we tell, taking professional pride in operational excellence.

And so, I'm talking about the details that nobody but you will ever know.

You know, when you're working on something, whoever did this conference, I can tell because it's so well produced, has professional pride in operational excellence.

And that means that the things that you cannot see, because they're on the inside, like nobody's ever going to see it.

And just, you're the only one who's ever going to know that you did that thing right.

Your boss is never going to know.

Maybe your customers won't even know.

But you know.

That's right.

I got to give Nacho some credit for the professional production.

And that's, if you do those four things, I think you'd make any business successful.

So, Amazon has become a massive company.

And as with all big bureaucracies, our city has 5,000 employees, a billion and a half dollar annual revenue, four labor unions, all the bureaucracies that you can imagine.

How do you maintain that sort of day one mentality, the scrappiness, you know, the inventiveness, like you said, the sort of ability to pivot, make decisions, be decentralized.

How do you maintain that hunger?

Well, first of all, you have to talk about it a lot.

So, you have to say, literally, we have a building at Amazon headquarters.

We named day one.

Okay.

And you've got to talk about beginner's mind and keeping, being fresh.

It's really important.

You know, what's, to really move the needle forward in the world, you have to invent.

And to invent, you have to be an expert.

But you have to be an expert who has a beginner's mind.

So, you have to know the domain very, very well.

Learn all the details of what's already known.

And then, somehow, be able to step back and say, now, let's assume I'm a little toddler.

And I'm just seeing all of this for the first time.

What would it look like?

That's very important.

You have to be able to be decisive and make decisions quickly.

And that's a very hard thing to do as organizations get larger because so many people have opinions.

The thing to realize there is most decisions are reversible.

Very rarely are they high-consequence, irreversible decisions.

By the way, when they are, you should go slowly.

Of course.

But most decisions can be made by a single high-judgment individual.

And if they go the wrong direction, you stop, you back up.

It's a two-way door.

You come in, you look at it again, and you change your mind.

People, changing your mind is not a weakness.

In politics, people call you a flip-flopper if you change your mind.

But how foolish would it be to get new data, to have new analysis, to see something in a fresh way, to have that beginner's mind, have a better idea, and not change your mind?

I've noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot.

When the story of Jeff Bezos is written, you're a young guy.

You're in great shape.

It looks like you can live forever.

But when that, sort of looking forward, it's a little cliché to talk about headlines in the future, but when that story is written, not by the Washington Post, of course, by whatever publication, what do you want the headline to say about you and your impact on the world?

I want the headline to be world's oldest man.

All right.

How about world's oldest man and still inventing?

That's right.

Amazing.

They love you here in Miami, man.

It's good to be home.

You know, it's just really a privilege to be able to do this with you.

We said we were going to come out here and have some fun.

We're doing it here in my hometown.

It's really, for me, a privilege to be able to spend this time with you, to share you with our residents, your place of birth.

You're one of our sons.

So...

Thank you, Mayor.

Please stand up.

We've got to get the cameras out, man.

On behalf of the citizens of the city of Miami, as mayor of this incredible city, this is one of the most incredible moments of my life, to be able to give someone who I admire so much, someone who is a public school student.

How many public school students from Miami are in here?

You, too, can be like Jeff Bezos, the oldest man ever to live.

Jeff, thank you so much.

Nacho, please join us here.

Thank you.

Oh, hey.

Thank you, Jeff.

It was amazing.

He's the guy that produced this, so...

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

I can tell you have operational excellence.

Amazing.

Thank you, Jeff.

It's an honor.

Congratulations.

Actually, I've got to tell you, Jeff, you're a true inspiration for my generation.

You know?

All of us, in the beginning, when we were kids, wanted to be athletes, you know, or go to Hollywood.

And after you, it's like everyone wants to be like a business titan, you know, and be the next Jeff Bezos.

And it's also exciting because you have also shown us that you can balance work and life.

We don't want to be in a factory 24 hours, you know?

We want to be, have a life, have a family, play sports, be in shape.

Harmony.

Harmony.

Yes.

Harmony.

Reject balance.

Seek harmony.

Balance implies a trade-off.

If you're happy at home, you're happy at work, if you're keeping care of yourself, you have more energy, it's harmony.

You're an example of all that.

Guys, thank you so much for coming these last two days.

I hope you really enjoyed our conference.

Jeff Bezos, the best Miami we've got.

My brother.

Thank you.

Appreciate you.

Amazing.

Hope you have fun.

Thank you for this.

Thank you, Francis.

Thank you, Miami, and all people watching across America and in the world.

Thank you for making this dream come true.

Thank you.

Bye, everybody.

What a way to close.

What a way to close.

Final picture.

Final picture, yeah.

What's that?

Final picture.

Oh, yeah.

Here, let's open this up.

Yes.

The hardware.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys.

Appreciate you.

I'm fine.

Amazing.

That was amazing.

Thank you, Jeff.

Really amazing.

I now understand.

Thank you.