The Interview - 'Dealbook Summit': Jeff Bezos Talks Innovation, Progress and What’s Next

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

Read more about highlights from the DealBook Summit at https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/business/dealbook-summit-news.

Hi, it's David Marchese. We're taking a break this week, but we'll be back with a new episode next Saturday. In the meantime, I wanted to share a great conversation with you from this year's New York Times Dealbook Summit, which took place earlier this month. My colleague, Andrew Ross Sorkin, sat down with Jeff Bezos, who talked about owning The Washington Post, his desire to work with Trump, and the parental love he feels for Amazon. Enjoy the conversation, and happy holidays. 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. This is Andrew Ross Sorkin with the New York Times, and you're listening to interviews from our annual Dealbook Summit live event, recorded on December 4th in New York City. 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 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 make an editorial decision and endorse a presidential candidate.

For many decades, the Post very studiously did not endorse presidential candidates. 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 independent newspapers shouldn't be endorsing presidential candidates. And so they didn't do it. After Watergate, the Post started 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 timeframe. It hadn't come up before.

And we just decided that it wasn't gonna help. Well, first of all, it wasn't gonna influence the election either way. We didn't believe, there's no evidence that newspaper endorsements influence elections. 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, we're struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust. And 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 small positive that they're always above Congress. 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 precision. Not all of it is the media's fault. There's a lot of extra factors involved too. But where we can do something, we should. Okay, 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 cancelled their subscription. So did you think when you were doing this that some people were going to say that actually it 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 were you surprised at the? Not really. We knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way. As I said, these things punch above their weight. And were you worried about that at all? I mean, do you... 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 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 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. There is, you know, probably not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or some Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader isn't 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 when they need financial resources, I'm available. I'm like that. I'm the doting parent in that regard.

I think embedded underneath the fundamental question is this. And the Wall Street Journal wrote about it. The New York Times has been writing about it. 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. So 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. His he seems to have a lot of energy deficit, 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 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. 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 three, four, five percent a year, and 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 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, eight of 10 points there, is that we have better risk capital. So it's not the banking system. We have a good banking system, but so does Europe.

What's different here is that you can get, you can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That's crazy. 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 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 tie it. All these things, you know what they are.ed 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 you're optimistic about this president. And the reason I ask is because- I'm very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda, and 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 gonna 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. Have you talked to him? Let's go persuade him of this. No, let's you and me talk to him 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 gonna 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. And 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 a great competitor. No, I'm saying does it concern you his proximity? No, I was headed there. But I'm just saying there are certainly very good competitors and no doubt about that.

I take at face value what has been said, which is that 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 efficiency and that he and Vivek are helping Trump with and so on. Again, I'd like to take, 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 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 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 gonna change? Newspapers are gonna 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, I'd like to saved, 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. 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. We'll be right back. 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 the CEO of Amazon, you went aboard New Shepard

as its first crew flight. And I remember watching it on TV just like everybody else's in 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 my eggs. Put all of my eggs in the space basket. You have a huge investment in space. Yes, but it's not all 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 nine to seven and reading documents. And most of it is Bloorage, 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 four minutes. You go up above the Karman 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 it's, there's the nothingness and he described it as death and said, said look this is the one little Pool of life that we in this entire solar system. It's truly incredible and you get it is a profound Experience that's hard to describe but that morning something else happened to me that is was very personal

we're getting ready to go at 445 in the morning and you know to me that was very personal. We're getting ready to go at 4.45 in the morning, and 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 everybody of course is awake and there to say goodbye. But they thought they were saying goodbye forever. And which was surprising to me. I wasn't expecting this, but they were 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 sister and my mom and my dad and these close friends, 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. That was a kind of an unexpected, the overview effect. I talked to astronauts, I knew I was gonna 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 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 come from being up there and looking at that? Or 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 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's all about. That's the big super heavy launch vehicle that's out. It's literally on the pad now waiting for regulatory approval, it needs its final regulatory approvals to launch, so we're very, very close. And if we can lower the costs 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 it can kind of be, it can sort of think of it as zoned residential and light industry. And if you wanna 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 wanna 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, 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 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. 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, air-conditioned... It's fantastical. No, I know. spaceship, air conditioned planet, and kind of pave the whole thing and turn it. That's a bad future. We don't need to do that. Turning Earth into, you know, change 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 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 have a ranch in West Texas. It's actually also where the launch site for the suborbital

vehicle is. And on that ranch, in many different places, you can go and find arrowheads and ancient pottery. And some of the pottery is 7,000 years old. 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?

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 getting the moon and then using the moon. In fact, the phrase that one of your colleagues said was, we're of going getting the moon and then using the moon in fact the phrase that one of your Colleagues said was we use the moon the moon is gonna be like JFK

the airport No, like JFK the airport because we're gonna send stuff to the moon and then from the moon Then we're gonna go to Mars. It's like a pit stop on the along the way and I thought that was sort of very interesting Yeah, the long process. It 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. Dave Limp, who we just hired to run Blue Origin for you as the 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.

And the scale of 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 to my god this is insane Tom Brokaw interviewed me one time about Amazon's losses and he said he looked at me and he said you can't 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 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 with 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, I think this is 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 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 when you look at it, you say it's confidence, but maybe it's just trying to compensate for that, accepting that that's a human bias and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that 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. This is not something, this is something maybe a wise and old man would say.

But I only say because I remember it was very early. 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?

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, roughly 40 of them said no, and a little over 20, 22 or so said yes. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. Everybody said 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 nos were hard-earned notes. They weren't just no. They were me, 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 think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better than the odds were. Better than the real odds. What do you think the real odds are in space with Blue Origin? Well, Blue Origin doesn't have the same level of financing risk because I can finance Blue Origin with my Amazon stock. So Blue Origin has a lot of runway. Blue Origin is going to do some very amazing things here.

By the way, Amazon is doing amazing things. I saw some of our announcements yesterday, I hope, but the Nova foundational models are truly incredible. There's a bunch of stuff going on. The world is so interesting right now. We're in multiple golden ages at once. And 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'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 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 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 I had plenty of incentive. It was, you know, 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. I just felt, how could I possibly need more incentive than owning such a... 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 more equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. And so I never, I just would have felt icky about it and I really, I'm actually very proud of that decision. I sometimes wish that there were a, 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 Amazon's market cap is 2.3 trillion today. I own about 200 billion-ish of it. So if you take 2.3 billion and subtract out the piece I kept for myself, then 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 that's a better list. You know, how much wealth have you created for other people?

You know, people like Jensen in Nvidia, he's going to be very high on that list. And that would be a pretty cool list. Somebody should do that list. I think that is a very cool list. How does the idea of your own influence sit with 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 George and given all the other things that you're investing in and can do, the Washington Post? It's a fair question. 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, I wake up and follow my curiosity. I've always been a wanderer and I even organize our Amazon meetings. I want crisp documents and

messy meetings. I want the meetings to wander. 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. This is the boss. What about everybody else? They have to wait for me. But, but that, you know, this is,

you know, it's, but I actually would, 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 these six page memos, we do a half hour study hall, we read them, and then we have a messy discussion. So I like a memo should be like angels singing up from high, it's so clear and beautiful. And then the meeting could be messy. How messy can it be? And I completely... No, no, I asked 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. I mean that because you don't know whether you really can raise your hand and say, this

idea is completely insane. 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, a lot. I could just feel it.

Like you can tell the little tiny cues. And I turned to them and said, did you guys rehearse this meeting? And they were like, 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 to go visit 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 we do for the CEO. Internally, you're seeking truth, not a pitch. I don't want to be pitched.

And you don't want any of your senior executives to be pitched. And that's why messy is good. 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. Like you want to be part of the sausage making. Like show me the ugly bits. And I

always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? I want to try to get to the controversy. Like let's make this meeting messy. Help me. Help me make it messy. How hard was it for you to leave Amazon? I go last too. Oh, yes. I've heard about this. Everybody, we try to go in kind of seniority order. So the most junior person goes first, 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 gonna change my mind.

So let's not waste a lot of time. I don't wanna, it shouldn't be a charade. That's a very rare case. I'm 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 change my mind a lot. People talk to me and I take in the information and I 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.

I can't tell you how many people tried to talk me out of Fulfillment by Amazon as an example. I just knew and I was like, you guys, you will never talk me out of fulfillment by Amazon as an example. I just knew, and I was like, you guys, you will never talk me out of this. We're going to do this. I will do this through sheer force of will if need be. Do you think that you have, this is actually something that I think a lot of people contend with. Do you think you have to project confidence?

No, I don't. You know, I've gotten, well, I guess it's a little bit of a personal story, in a way, but I have gotten more intimate, I would say, as I've gotten older. So maybe the last 10 or 15 years. My upbringing, I have have really supportive family. 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, all the positive emotions were allowed. Optimism, happiness, joy. But the only negative emotion that was kind of tolerated in that unspoken family dynamic and only occasionally was anger. Sadness, fear, anxiety, these things were looked down on. And that's probably, 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.

And you need optimism. You know, without optimism, optimism and energy, I don't know how some glum EOR type founder could ever lead a company to success. I mean, you've got to have some optimism, you've got to have some energy. It's got to be a little contagious. There's going to be a lot of bad days. You've got to lift people up. So you need that.

But what I have figured out over the last, you know, as a sort of like, I started with my own family and my close relationships, my children and my brother and sister and parents and so on, 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 with them

and found it very meaningful. I could deepen those relationships very significantly. And then I realized those were valid emotions at work too. And so it turns out, they're more precise. All of your emotions are sort of an early warning system. If you're stressed, for me, that's kind of an early radar that is detecting that there's something

I'm not taking action on. It's an important indicator. And it turns out if you're channeling all of your negative emotions into frustration or anger or something like that, you're not being very precise. And it's much better now, like I've had, I'll have a meeting and it 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 really scared and then you can start talking about okay what is what's making you scared. That's you get more in touch it actually help you but not just your family relationships you're close into relationships but I think it helps you at work too. Let me ask you an Amazon question. Amazon is your baby. For sure. You stepped away from that.

Yeah. What did that feel like? How hard was that for you? And what is it like now? 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 how it could kind of grow up into a young adult and be set off into the world successfully and independently. And that's very different. You know, you can build companies in different ways. You don't have to do that. You know, you can be the genius with a thousand helpers, and that's also can be very successful. There's nothing wrong with it. It wasn't what I wanted to do. And I felt can be very successful. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just it wasn't what I wanted to do. And 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 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 say, I'm not indispensable. So 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. But I'm a 60-year-old man, and my mom and dad still worry about me. Right, so you never stop thinking of my parent. My heart is in Amazon, my curiosity is in Amazon, my fears are there, my love is there. I'm never gonna forget about Amazon.

I'll always be there to help. And right now, I'm putting a lot of time in it, because I can help, and it's super interesting, so why not? But this is the right way in my view to think about it. Big leaders only have to do a few things. 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. That's what I was going to ask. As a parent, your kids can go off and pretend they do things you don't want the kids to do.

Absolutely. I've got kids in college age and just out of college. And I still have to Venmo them money every once in a while. It just happened. Every once in a while, it just happened. Um... laughter We'll talk about what you subscribe and save to in just a moment on your app. But help us with this. You just said 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 95% AI. And where do you think? So it's just so because we're literally working on a thousand applications internally. So AI, you have to remember, AI, modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything.

This is most like electricity. I went to a brewery in Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS. 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, 100 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 compute off the grid. That's AWS. We were doing it internally at Amazon for ourselves and the APIs were created. That's a very interesting story in its own right. But these kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence, they go everywhere.

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, 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, Andrew, that you did not see 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 it's very, very price performant. 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, some will have lower latency, some will be better at calling APIs. There will turn out to be a bunch of flavors, just like you might not consult, if you're phoning a friend and consulting somebody, you're not always gonna 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 these these these transformers is largest generative AI You know so there were I think even you know even Even a single application is likely to call multiple AI models depending on what, some of them will be lower cost because they have a small number of parameters and 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 what we announced yesterday with Nova, there are four classes of model. There's the giant frontier model, but that model, you know, we distill down to the smaller models that are more cost effective, have lower latency, and provide different levels of intelligence. So that's a really, you know,

this whole thing 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, in some ways these models are already smarter than humans because they're more multidisciplinary. It's very difficult for a human to be an expert in, even if you're a doctor you really have to specialize. You know, you can be excited or scare you.

Oh, it excites me. I'm not. Are you? 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 know. So I've had this conversation about with various people about what it means to be human.

And people say, well, if AI is smarter than us, better than us at various things, won't that take the meaning out of your life? Or 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'm being really honest with myself, I can always find somebody. I know people who are better than me at math. I know people who are better than me at dancing, that's for sure. So, you know, literally I go right down the line and I can always find somebody better. 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 is something that very few of us

are going to have meaning in our lives. There isn't going to be a lot of meaning. And really your meaning is coming from your relationships, you know, uplifting people. So like if you So 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 your friends and the people in your community, you're gonna 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. Are you on social media? Are you on social media? I am on social media sometimes. You say sometimes. Well, I am not addicted to social media. I go in and look and I try to mine it for ideas sometimes and it's a lot of work to find the little nuggets.

There are some. It's a lot of work to find the little nuggets of, there are some, like I follow a bunch of people who I think are really smart, and 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're very good at compartmentalizing. Meaning you will put the phone down. I never pick up my,

Is that a natural act though? It's easy for me. I'm a serial multitasker, so I'm very, very focused. When I was in Montessori school, they told my mom that 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, you know, it's easy for me. If I'm at dinner with friends, I'm at dinner. I do not want, it's not hard for me. That is not hard for me. I'm a good focuser. That's hard for me. Two other things before we go. There are these different buckets.

Obviously we've talked about Blue 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 the Earth Fund. How do you, what is the day like for you? How do you sort of see it? I work from about nine to seven in meetings. I mean it's meetings from nine to seven.

And then I have a bunch of documents I read outside of that. I get energy from that. I've always done that. You can't start a company unless you're willing to work really hard and not all the work is fun, that's why they call it work. 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. You've got to have your expectations set right. If you come out of college and think like 100% of your job is going to be fun, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Here's my final question for you. You don't do this that often.

You mean do these interviews? No, very, very, very, very, very rare. And I'm curious because I do, you must read about yourself occasionally 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 I'm curious what you think the world misunderstands about you. We all read about you all the time. We see you in pictures and all sorts of things everywhere. And I'm curious what you think when you see the projected version of Jeff Bezos and the real Jeff Bezos, it's actually the reason I wanted you to be here today because I've had the opportunity to get to know you over the years.

I'm curious though from your vantage point what you see as the thing that the public doesn't. Well what an interesting, I wasn't expecting any questions like this. Let me think about this. It's, I, you know, I gave up on being well understood a long time ago. I kind of thought, I realized it was a, it's kind of, it would take so much energy and you'd probably still fail. To be understood is too difficult. As a public figure, it's hard enough, by the way, to be well understood by your loved ones,

by your kids and your close family members and your closest friends. Even that is difficult. It takes a lot of energy. And I think to be well understood by the world, 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 saw her so often and in so many different circumstances

that maybe you got a real sense of her. I know her and she does seem like the woman on her show. So 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 they tend to, they just dominate the entire conversation.

You know, like, in my case it would be wealth or something like this. People would say, you know, it's very hard if you're, I had a very funny moment on stage with Bill Gates once. 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 promised you I had never sought.

And we were being interviewed, the two of us by, I can't remember who the moderator was, but he said, Bill, how do you feel about this guy stealing your number one wealthiest person title? And before Bill could answer, I looked at Bill and said, you're welcome. Because of course, it's not,

it's actually just a, that particular thing tends to be dominant in our culture. People over-focus on it, and then they think you're focused on it, which isn't really true. In my case, I think of myself as an inventor. That's what I am. I wake up every day, and I follow 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 if I could somehow have a Ford's 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 Friedman and I've done a couple of things. And so you don't wanna be so mysterious that nobody ever sees you. And you want to be the 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 not happy to do this I am and and I have enjoyed it and you're very good at it. Thank you Jeffrey Bezos. Thank you so much. by Evan Roberts and edited by Sarah Kessler, mixing by Kelly Piclo, original music by Daniel Powell. The rest of the Dealbook Events team includes Julie Zahn, Hilary Kuhn, Angela Austin, Haley Hess, Dana Prakowski, Matt Kaiser, and Yanwe Liu.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Nita Lassam, Ravi Matu, Beth Weinstein, Kate Carrington, and Melissa Tripoli. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.