Jeff Bezos

and the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Amazon's success has made Bezos the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of nearly one hundred sixty billion dollars, which he's using to fund his space company Blue Origin and contributing to charity, including his recent pledge to spend two billion dollars to help homeless families. Bezos recently sat down with Carlisle Group

co founder David Rubinstein. They spoke on David Rubenstein's Bloomberg television program Peer to Peer Conversations. Your stock is actually up seventy this year, Um, is there one thing that you think is responsible for that is several things, because is pretty good now, I am it's I have been lecturing. We have all hands meetings at Amazon and for twenty years,

ever since we've been twenty one years now. Um, every at almost every all hands meeting, I said, look, when the stock is up in a month, don't feel thirty percent smarter, because when the stock is down in a month, it's not gonna feel so good to feel dumber. And that's what happens. Never spend any time thinking about the daily stock price. I don't. Okay, So, as a result of going up seventy percent this year, you have become the wealthiest man in the world. It is that a

title that you really wanted or not? I is it? I can assure you I have never sought that title. And um, it was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world. That actually worked. Fine. Um, it's not. It isn't a it. I would say people, it's something people naturally are curious about, you know, it's a kind of an interesting curiosity. But it's not the thing I would much rather if they said, like, um, you know inventor Jeff Bezos or entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, or you know,

father and Jeff Bezo. Those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me. And the you know, the it's an output measure that if you look at the financial success of Amazon and the stock I own sixteen percent of Amazon. Um, Amazon is worth roughly a trillion dollars. That means that what we have built over twenty years, we have built eight hundred and forty billion dollars of wealth for other people. And that's great. That's how should be.

You know. There, I believe so powerfully in uh the ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to solve so many of the world's frothers. Not all of them, but so many of them. So, Um, you live in Washington State, near in Seattle. We're outside of Seattle. Now. The man who was the richest man for about twenty years is named Bill Gates, And um, what is the likelihood that the two richest men in the world live not only in the same country, not only the same state, not

only the same city, but in the same neighborhood. I mean, is there something in that neighborhood that we should know about? And are there any are there any more houses for sale? There After I saw Bill uh not not too long ago. Um, you know, we were joking about the World's Richest Man thing and I basically said thank you know, I said you're welcome, and he immediately turned to me and said

thank you. Um, but no me. Dina is a great little uh it's a suburb of Seattle, and you know, I'd don't think there's anything special in the water there. And you know, I did locate Amazon in Seattle because of Microsoft. I thought that that big pool of technical talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people from and that did turn out to be true. So it's not a complete coincidence. There's some correlation there. Do you go into a store when you want to buy something?

Do you have to put a credit card down you to say I'm Jeff Bezos and they send you the stuff? How do you do that? And you have to carry you carry cash around or you carry yeah? I think I do carry cash, and I have I have credit cards. Yeah, and if your credit have to show my driver's license and you know, but have you ever had a credit card denied? Never? Had I have? I've had my credit card denied. So what do you say when then you say don't you know, I give him another credit card.

I stay here, try this one. O. Thank you. So, UM, you made an announcement that is, uh, the most significant philanthropic gift you've made in this type. UM. It was a in about a about a year ago. You said you wanted to look for some good philanthropic ideas and you've got I think forty seven thousand of them and you yea reviewed them. And how did you decide where to put this two billion dollars? And would you describe exactly what you're gonna Well, that process was very helpful.

So I I solicited ideas, kind of crowdsourced, and I got literally, as you said, something like forty seven thousand, maybe even a little more. Some of them came to my inbox, most of them came on social media, and I read through thousands and thousands of them. My office kind of correlated them all and put them into buckets, and UM, there were some themes that emerged. But the other thing that's fascinating about the kind of exercises you

see just how long tailed it is. People are interested in trying to help the world in so many different ways. A lot of people, UM, are very interested homelessness, including me. A lot of people are very interested in education of all kinds. I'm very interested an early education. And um, I made that. You know, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My mother has become in running the Bezos family Foundation, she has become an expert in in

early education. I'm a student of Monastory schools. I started at Monastory when I was two years old, and uh, the teacher complained to my mother. The Monetary school teacher complained to my mother the I was two task focused and that she she couldn't get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me. And by the way, I think that's you asked the people who work with me. That's still probably true. That teacher ever call you since, and she

was responsible for your succession. Now I'm in touch with several of my UM high schooled elementary school teachers though, but I don't know any of my Monastory school teachers. So the gift that you're giving, essentially you're gonna have some for preschool for children who need preschool. For each treaty full tuition preschool Monastory inspired. Um, I'm very excited about that because I'm going to operate that. That's going to be an operating nonprofit, and we're gonna put them

in low income neighborhoods. We know for a fact that if a kid falls behind UM, it's really really hard to catch up. And if you can give somebody a leg up when they're too three or four years old by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they're much less likely to fall behind. You can still happen, but you've really improved their odds. The money spent there

is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades. And the other part of your gift will be to give awards out to yes and that's gonna be more traditional grant making philanthropy. So there, I'm gonna identify, with the help of a team, identify and fund VET and fund um Family Homeless Shelters, and that will be You said you would give an initial two billion dollars, expect to add to that. Yeah, it's day one. Every thing I've ever

done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people, and UM Blue Origin started with five people, and the budgeted Blue organ was very very small. Now the budget of Blue Regions approaches a billion dollars a year. Next year it will be more than a billion dollars. And Amazon literally was teen people. Today it's half a million people.

But you it's hard to remember for you guys, But for me, it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping one day we could afford a forklift and so but so for me, I've seen small things get big, and it's part of this day one mentality. I like treating things as if if they're small, you know, Amazon, even though it is a large company, I wanted to have the heart and spirit of a small one. And uh. Then so anyway that the day one foundation is going to be like that,

will will will will wander a little bit too. So I we have some very specific ideas of what we want to do, but I believe in the power of wandering. All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, uh you know, not not uh analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart. Um, And that's what we'll

do with this Day one foundation too. It's and the customer is going to be the child. This is this is so important because the secret sauce of Amazon where there are several principles of Amazon, but the number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive, compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over

the competitor. And I talked so often to others oh and some other CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs, and I can tell that even though they're talking about customers, they're really focusing on competitors. And it is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitors. So then you have to identify who is your customer. Um. So at the Washington Post, for example, is the customer the people who

buy advertisements from us? No, the customer is the reader. And in the school, who are the customers? Is it the parents? Is that the teachers? No, it is the child. And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna be obsessively compulsively focused on the child. We're going to be scientific when we can be and We're gonna use heart and intuition when we when we when you use your intuition and make decisions. Where is the intuition leading you now?

On your second headquarters? All right? Can can we just take a moment to acknowledge that that may be the best segue in the history of interviewing? Seriously, David? So that is that? Is all right? That's amazing? Answer is uh? The answer is very simple. We we will announce the decision before the end of this year. So we've made tremendous progress. The team is working their butts off on it, and we will get there. No, no, hey be nice. Come on, Why did you buy the Washington Post? You

had no background in that area. What convinced you to do that? Okay? First of all, I was not looking for a newspaper. I had no intention of buying newspaper. I had never thought about the idea had never occurred to me. It was never something. Wasn't like a childhood dream. Nothing. And um, my friend Don Graham, who at that time I had known fifteen years. I know him twenty years now.

He approached me through an intermediary and I wanted to know if I would be interested in buying the Washington Post, and I sent back word that I would not um because I didn't really know anything about newspapers, and Don over a series of conversations convinced me that, UM, that was unimportant because we had inside the Washington Post, we have so much talent that understands newspapers. That wasn't what the problem was. But they needed was somebody who had

an understanding of the Internet. And so so that was the first thing. That's kind of how it got started. And then I so I did some soul searching and again my decision making process something this would definitely be intuition and on analysis the financial situation of the Washington Post at that time, this was very upside down. The problem was a secular one. The Internet was just eroding all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers had, all of them. And I said, UM, you know, is this

something I want to get involved in. If I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna put some heart into it and some work into it. And I decided I would only do that if I really believed it was an important institution. UM. And I said to myself, if this were a financially upside down salty snack food company, the answer would be no. As soon as I started thinking about that way, I was like, this is an important institution. It is the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country

in the world. The Washington Post has an incredibly important role to play in this democracy. There's just no doubt

in my mind about that. So and and so, as soon as I had passed through that gate, I only had one more gate that I had to go through before telling Don yes, and that was I wanted to look myself, you know, be really open with myself and look in a mirror and sort of think about the company and be sure that I was optimistic that it could work, because, um, you know, if it were hopeless, that would also be not something I would get involved in.

And I looked at that and I was super optimistic. Um, and it needed to be transitioned to a national and global publication. There's one gift that the Internet brings newspapers, and that is free global distribution. So we had to take advantage of that gift. And that's the That was the basic strategy. We had to switch from a business model where we made a lot of money per reader with a relatively small number of readers to a little bit, tiny bit of money per reader on a very large

number of readers. And that's the transition that we did. I'm pleased to report to you that the Post is profitable today. Um. The newsroom is growing. It's been growing every year since I've been there. It's working, and I'm so proud of that team. And I know for a fact, when I'm eight year let's say, I always project myself forward to age eight, but as I get older, I was starting to do ninety. So I know that when

I'm ninety it's gonna be. One of the things I'm most proud of is that I took on the Washington Post and helped them through a very rough transition. So, UM, when you when you agree to buy it, um, I think they asking price was two million dollars. You didn't negotiate, you know, h done. I asked him how much he wanted He said to fifty. I said, fine. I didn't negotiate with him, and I did no due diligence, and um,

I wouldn't need to have done. He told, you have something I'd like to sell now that you own the Washington Post. Sometimes there are some people who criticize some things that the Washington Post says. And you've been remarkably quiet. I have no idea what you're talking about. Well, you've been remarkably quiet and not defending yourself. Well, I do defend the Post. It is a mistake for any elected official, in my opinion. I don't think this is a very

out their opinion to attack media and journalists. Um. I believe that it is an essential component of our democracy. There has never been I was gonna say, never been elected official who like their headlines. I think there's probably a no, no public figure who has ever liked their headlines. It's okay, it's part of the process, you know. It's

it's um. If you're the president of the United States or a governor of a state or whatever, you don't take that job thinking you're not going to get scrutinized. You're gonna get scrutinized. And it's it's it's healthy and um, somebody very you know what what what what the president should say is this is right, this is good. I'm glad I'm being scrutinized, and that would be so secure and confident. But it's really dangerous to demonize the media.

It's dangerous to call the media low life. It's dangerous to say that they're the enemy of the people. We live in a society where it's not just the laws of the land that protect us. We do have freedom of press. It's in the constitution we but what what we But it's also the social norms that protect us those we we It works because we believe those words on that piece of paper, and every time you attack that, you're eroding it a little bit around the edges. Now, look,

I don't want to be dramatic here. We are so robust in this country. The media is going to be fine. Let's talk about how you came to the situation where you are today. So you grew up in Texas initially, yes, and from early age where you are pretty smart student and your teachers tell you this. You know you were good or I have always been academically smart and um that you know. By the way the older I get, I realized how many kinds of smart there are. There

are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid too, um, but but there are you know, I c p blaw all the time. Who I know, they wouldn't have gotten a plus is on you know, their calculus exams. But they're incredibly smart. But yes, I was a very good student. So you ultimately moved into high school in Miami and then you were valuatorian ever your class. And then you gave a speech as the valigatorian saying you thought we should colonize

space or something like that. I did it. It was too I graduated from high school, big Publicist Miami palmetto Senior High, Go Panthers. Uh and uh. There were seven hundred and fifty kids in my graduating class. And um, I loved high school. I had so much fun we had I got I lost my library privileges because I laughed too loudly in the library. And about that laugh, where did you get that laugh from? You know, it is distinctive. I've had that laugh all my life. There

was a short, not that short. There was a multi year period where my brother and sister would not see a movie with me because they thought it was too embarrassing. Um, and my I don't know why I have this laugh. It's just it's just and I laugh easily and often. Um, the people who know me you know, you asked my mom or anybody who knows me well, and they'll say, if Jeff's unhappy, wait five minutes. You graduated as Valgatory

and you decided to go to Princeton. How come you decided to go to Princeton because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I changed my major very quickly to electricaltioning your company. You graduated Summa comality. I graduated Summa Kappa. And then you went into the highest calling of mankind finance. Yes, I went. I went to New York City and I ended up working at a quanty of hedge fund run by a brilliant man named David Saw d Saw and Co.

I learned so much from him. I used a lot of his ideas and principles on things like HR and recruiting and what kind of people to hire. When I started, very very good, well known hedge fund, and you were a star there. As I understand what propelled you to say, I'm quitting this. I'm going to start a company selling books over the internet. I'm gonna do it from Seattle. Where did the idea come from? I came across the fact um. So this is nobody has heard of the Internet,

very very few people. And I came across the fact that the web, worldwide Web was growing at something like percent a year. This is anything growing that fast is even if it's baseline usage today is tiny, it's growing so fast it's gonna be big. And so I looked at that and I was like, there's gotta be I should come up with a business idea and that get you know, on the internet, and then let the Internet go around this and we can keep working on it.

And so I made a list of products that I might saw online and I started force ranking them, and I picked books because books is super unusual in one respect, which is that they're more book items in the book category than there are items in another category. There three million different books active and in print around the world and be given time. So my, my, the founding idea of Amazon was to build universal selection of books. The biggest bookstores only had a hundred and fifty thousand titles.

And so that's what I did, and I, you know, I hired a small team, We built, we built software. I moved to Seattle. I mean, you told your parents you're gonna quit d Shaw where you're successful making presuming a fair amount of money. And you told your wife Mackenzie, that you're going to move across the country. What did they all say? They were immediately and reflectively supportive. Right

after they asked the question, what's the internet? And UM, so you know that, but this is right, you know, um, you know you on with your loved ones. You you you bet on them. You're not betting on the idea, You're you're you are betting on the person. And that was, uh. That And it's one of those decisions I made with my heart and not my head. And I basically said, I don't want to regret. I don't when I'm a d now ninety I have. I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life.

And most of our regrets our acts of omission. There are things we didn't try. It's the path untraveled. Um, those are the things that haunt. And you were telling me that you had to go deliver the books, Yeah, for the post office yourself. I still I don't still deliver too. But I was doing that for years and

I was packing boxes on my hands and knees. In the first month I was packing boxes on my hands and knees on the hard cement floors, and um, with somebody else sitting standing next to kneeling next to me, we're packing and and I said, you know what, we need knee pads. This is killing my knees. And this guy packing alongside me said we need packing tables. And I was like, that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard. And the next day I went and bought packing tables

and it like doubled our productivity. Think about it as a senior executive, what do you really get um paid to do you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions? What propelled you to sell things more than books? After books, we started saying music, and then we started selling videos. And then I got smart and I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them, besides the things we saw today, what would you like to see us sell? And that answer came back incredibly

long tailed. The way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment. So like I remember, one of the answers was I wish you sold Winshield wiper blades because I really need Winshield wiper blades, and I thought to myself, we can sell anything this way and um, and then so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time, and the vision became because you read the original business plan, it's

just books. Your stock at one point, I think went to a hundred dollars, but then I went down to six or something like that. At the peak of the Internet bubble, our stock peaked somewhere around a hundred and thirteen dollars. And then after the Internet bubble, uh, you know, busted open, our stock went down to six. It went from a hundred and thirteen to six in less than a year. So my annual shareholder that year starts with a one word sentence, and that one word sentences the

word ouch. So most of those internet companies of the dot com era are out of business. Yeah, you survived, what was that that made you to survive? And virtually the rest of them are gone. Um, it's very That whole period is very interesting because the stock is not

the company and the company is not the stock. And so as I watched the stock fall from a hundred and thirteen to six, I was also watching all of our internal business metrics, number of customers, profit per unit, um uh, you know, everything you can imagine, defects, et cetera. Every single thing about the business was getting better and fast, and so as the stock price was going the wrong way, everything inside the company was going the right way. And um uh, I you know, so I wasn't We didn't

need to go back to the capital markets. We didn't need more money. The only reason, you know, a financial uh bust like the Internet bubble bursting, is it makes it really hard to raise money. But you know, we already had the money we needed, so we just needed to continue to progress. Wall Street kept saying, well, Amazon's not making any money, They're just getting customers. Where are the profits? Where the profits? And Wall Street kept beating you up on that, and your response was, I don't

really care what you think Amazon was. Uh. You know, people always accused us of selling dollar bills for ninety cents and said, look, anybody can do that and grow revenues. That's not what we're doing. We always had positive gross margins. It's a fixed cost business. And so what I could see is that from the internal metrics is that what at a certain volume level um, we would cover our

fixed costs and the company would be profitable. So who came up with the idea of prime Prime seems to be a great way to get money in advance of people actually getting the services. Who's actually it's very interesting. So, like many inventions, inside of a team, and I love team. Inventing is my favorite. So I tap dance into the office. I love Amazon. I have so much fun there. I love Blue Origin, I love the Washington Post. But Amazon is my full time job and I get to invent.

I get to live two to three years in the future. And um, most of the invention we do there is you know, if somebody has an idea, and then other people improve the idea, and other people come up with objections why I can never work, and then we solve those objections, and it's a very it's a very fun process.

We're always wondering what could a loyalty program be? And then actually kind of a junior software engineer came up with this idea, not as a loyalty program, but this idea that we could um uh offer people, um kind of an all you can eat buffet of fast free shipping.

And when we modeled that so then you know the finance team went and modeled that idea and that the results were horrifying, that we would offer unlimited shipping shipping is expensive, um, and that we would customers love free shipping. But we could see I mean again back to that, you have to use heart and intuition. There has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct all the good decisions have you made. That way, you do it with a group. You do it with great humility, because,

by the way, getting it wrong isn't that bad. That's the other thing. When when when we make mistakes, and we've made doozies like the fire phone and many other things that just didn't work out, I could I could look, we don't have enough time for me to list all of our failed experiments. But the big winners pay for thousands of field experiments. So you try something like prime and it was very expensive at the beginning. It costs us a lot of money. Because what happens when you

offer a free all you can eat buffet? Who shows up to the buffet first? The heavy eaters. It's scary. It's like, oh my god, did I really say as many prawns as you can eat? And um, and so that is what happened. But but surely we could see the trend lines. We could you that you know, all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service. You shit around with your team and so forth. But you don't like meetings before ten am. No, you'd like to get eight hours of sleep and don't like UM

power points, explain all that. Why is that? Okay? Many? So I like to putter in the worry. I get up early, I go to bed early, I get up early. I like to putter in the morning. So I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. So I have my kind of puttering. Time is very important to me. And so that's why I set my first meeting for ten o'clock. I like to

do my high i Q meetings before lunch. Like anything that's gonna be really mentally challenging, that's a ten o'clock meeting. And because by five pm, like I can't think about that today, Let's try this again tomorrow at ten am and UM. And so then on sleep I get eight hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible. But I am very focused on it. And and and for me, I needed a dog to sleep. I think better, I have more energy,

my mood is better. All these things. And think about it. As a senior executive, what do you really get UM paid to do? As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions. Your your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it if the quality of the decisions might be lower because you're tired, or grouchy or any number of things. Now, it's different if it's a

startup company. I mean, you know, you're really you know, when Amazon was a hundred people, it's a different story. But but Amazon is not a startup company. And all of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter. UM. I always tell people sometimes they get, you know, we'll have a good UM quarterly conference call or something, and and Wall Street

will like our early results. And I'll get people will stop me and say congratulations on your quarter, and I say thank you, But what I'm really thinking is that quarter was baked three years ago. Right now, I'm working on a quarter that's gonna reveal itself in one sometime. And that's what you need to be doing. You need to be out sort of you know, two or three years in advance. And um, if you are, and then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today?

If I make like three good decisions a day, that's enough and they should just be as high quality as I can make them. When you buy over the internet Amazon, do you ever get the wrong order? Is anything ever wrong? What do you do? Do you calm up and complain? Or you don't have any problems? No? I I am. I'm a customer of Amazon, hopefully like all of you in this one person if there wasn't even the stream who's not an Amazon customer, see me right afterwards and

I'll walk you through it. It's um, I yeah, I get I have problems sometimes, um and I and I treat them like the same way treat a problem that I would get from customer. My email address is famous and I keep it and I read it. It's Jeff ad Amazon to calm. I don't see every email that I get anymore because I get too many, but I see a lot of them, and I use my curiosity to pick out certain emails. I'll get one from a customer and there's a defect. You know, we've done something wrong.

That's the usually people are writing us. Not always, but usually the writing us because we've screwed up their order somehow. And I am so I'm looking at this and for some reason, it's something seems a little odd about that one, and so I'll ask the to you to do a case study and and find real root cause or causes. It's usually causes, real root causes, and then real root fixes, so that when you fix it, you're not fixing it for that one customer. You're fixing it for every customer.

And that process is a gigantic part of what we do. So I would treat my if I have a failed order or some bad customer experience, I would treat it just like that. So, um, you've revolutionized retail, as I say, but now you are in the bricks and mortar business. You bought whole food. That was the theory behind buying something that doesn't sell things over the internet. We're very

interested in physical stores, and we haven't. I've been asked for years, Um we have opened physical stories literally twenty years. Have been asked the question, and I always say yes, but only when we have a differentiated, differentiated offering, something that's not me too, because that space physical stores is so well served. If we offer a meat product offering, it's not gonna work. We're and it's also just we're

not very good at that, most of them. Whenever we've tried dabbling in something that's a me to service, we tend to get beaten. It doesn't work. We're our culture is much better at pioneering and inventing, and so we have to have something that's different. And that's what Amazon Go is. It's completely different, the Amazon Bookstore, completely different.

And we have ideas about how to merge Prime and Whole Foods to make that those are still rolling out you haven't seen them yet, but to make to use Amazon Prime to make Whole Foods a very differentiated experience. And so what we're gonna be able to do is take some of our resources, some of our technical, technological know how, and and expand the Whole Food's mission they have a great mission, which is to bring nourishing food

to everybody, organic nourishing food to everybody. And um, but you know, we have a lot to bring to that table in terms of resources, but also in terms of operational excellence and in terms of technology. Know how. One of the other companies you started within your company, which is technologically a superior company, is Amazon Web Services. Where did the idea come from? AWS? We started it, I don't know, a long time ago, now fifteen years ago. Um, and worked on it behind the scenes for a long

time and then finally launched it. Um it has become a very large company. Um uh. And at AWS, we completely reinvented the way that companies by computation. Then a business miracle happened. This never happens. This is like the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business so far as I know. We faced no like minded competition for seven years. It's unbelievable. And uh we like. I'll give you like when I launched Amazon dot com.

Barnes and Noble launched Barnes and Noble dot com two years that's very class, that's very typical if you invince something new. We launched Kendall, Barnes and Noble launched Nook. Two years later, we launched Echo. Google launched Google Home two years later. When you pioneer, if you're lucky, you get a two year head start. Nobody gets a seven year head start. And so that was incredible because, um, and I think it was a whole confluence of things.

I think that the big established enterprise software companies did not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company, and so we had this long runway to build this incredible feature rich and it's just so far ahead of all the other products and services available to do this work today. But do you worry that the US government might come along or or the European government some regulatory thing could come and impair your business? Well not. Here's here's what

I think of it that I have. I have a couple I could ask this question frequently, and I thought it was an original question. Now, sorry, you do do that sometimes, but that's not one of them. Um and uh, my view on this is very simple. Um, all big institutions of any kind are going to be and should be examined, scrutinized, inspected. Governments should be inspected. Government institutions, big educational institutions, big nonprofits, big companies, They're gonna get scrutiny.

It's not personal, it's kind of what we as a society want to have happened. So that's that's one thing. And I remind people internally when you know, they if they don't take this personally, that will lead you in a lot of wasted energy. This is just normal, it's actually healthy, it's good. And then, UM, the second thing I think is we are so inventive that whatever regulations are promulgated or however it works, that will not stop

us from serving customers. So to to really you know, I mean, under all uh kind of regulatory frameworks that I can imagine, UM, customers are still gonna want low prices, They're still gonna want fast delivery, They're still gonna want big selection. It's really important that UM that UM politicians and others not they need to understand the value that bring big companies bringing and not demonize or vilify business

in general or especially not business. Well, they shouldn't vilify big companies and they shouldn't vilify business in general for sure. And the reason is simple, UM, there are certain things only big companies can do. I love you know, garage entrepreneurs. I invest in a lot of other companies. I know many of them. Um, but nobody in their garage is going to build and all carbon fiber, fuel efficient bowing. It's not gonna happen. You need Bowing to do that.

This world would be really bad without Bowing, and without Apple, and without Samsung and so on. One of your passions is not just Amazon, but it's outer space and space travel and Blue Origin. So you've started Blue Origin a little bit in secret, then you've made it public. You're putting a billion dollars or more of your own personal capital into it every year. Next year it will be more for the first time. All right, And um, what you are you going to get out of it? Are

we going to have people going into space? What is the use? This is? Um? This this is the most important work I'm doing. And I have great conviction about that. It is um, It's simple argument. Um, this is the best planet. We have now sent robotic probes to every planet in this Solar system. Believe me, this is the good one. UM. My friends who say they want to move to Mars, I say, look, do me a favorite moved to the top of Mount Everest for a year first,

because that's a garden paradise compared to Mars. And so this gem of a planet, Um, we're finally as a species big enough to really impact it. And so you know, for for thousands and thousands of years, Earth was really big and humanity was really small. That's not true anymore. And so we face a choice as we move forward. We're going to have to decide whether we want a civilization of stasis, which we could do. That's a real that's a legitimate choice. What does it mean. It means

we will have to cap population. We will have to cap energy usage per capita. So people don't think about how much energy they use. It's it's um. It takes a lot of energy. And uh so do you want that to continue for your grandchildren and your grandchildren's grandchildren. In other words, I want my grandchildren's grandchildren to be using way more energy per capita than I am. And I would like to see not have a population cap I wish there were a trillion humans in the Solar System.

Then there would be a thousand nine Steins and a thousand Mozarts. But we don't have that long. So there's all sorts of problems, um, that we are about to face because for the first time in our civilizational history, going back thousands of years, we're now big compared to the size of the planet. We can fix that problem, but we can fix it in exactly one way by having by moving out into the Solar system. And uh, you know, and so my part, my role in that

is I want to build reusable space vehicles. That's the heavy lifting. Amazon was able to get started with only a million dollars in capital um and uh and and because I got to write on the back of the credit card system, I got to write on the back of the pre existing transportation network that could deliver packages, um, the pre existing telecommunications network that could allow people to connect to our servers. All of that, all that would

have been hundreds of billions of dollars in CAPEX. But the heavy lifting was already in place. And that's what allowed Facebook. If you think about it, two kids in a dorm room made this half trilli into our market cap company. And you know, in an incredibly less than two decades. That's unbelievable. And so, but that can't happen in space. There's no way two kids in a dorm room can start a space company of any significance because

the price of admission is so high. And so I want to um build space infrastructure so that the next generations of people can use that infrastructure the same way I used UPS and fed X and so on to build Amazon UM and that and and and so that's what Blue Origin is all about. So do you ultimately want that to be your legacy? Or Amazon? And what would you like to be have as your legacy, world's oldest man um. That's a that's a famous line I like. But but the real thing is, you know, it'll be

whatever it's gonna be. I'm gonna be proud of the things I want to I I live my life in such a way that when I in a quiet moment of reflection and I'm thinking back on my life, that I have as few regrets as possible. And I don't you know what would my legacy? But I have no idea, And I don't even want to spend a lot of time thinking. You you intend to give away the bulk of your fortune at some point in your life. I tend to give away I don't know how much of it.

I'm going to give away. I'm going to give away a lot of money um in a nonprofit model, but I'm also gonna invest a lot of money and something that any rational investor would say is a really bad investment um, which is Blue Origin. But I think it's super important. And if I can't make Blue Origin a for profit thing, maybe I'll convert it to nonprofits at some distant point in the future. But that would be I would be. I wouldn't want that. I want I wanted to be a thriving eCos and more like ups

and FedEx. Now let's just close with your wife. We haven't mentioned her yet. We met in New York City at d Shanco where we worked. We got engaged at we got we got we dated for three months, were engaged for three months, and then got married. So we our whole kind of dating engagement period was only six months long. Um it's uh. I also, I would like to take a moment to talk about my parents, if that's okay. You didn't ask me, but I I would like to. They're they're here in the audience, and UM,

my parents are I thank you guys? Um Uh, you know you get different gifts in life, and one of the great gifts I got as my mom and dad. UM, and it's amazing. My highest admiration is withheld for those people. And we all know some of them. I know several of them who had terrible parents, maybe they were abusive, um, whatever it is. And some of those people who who so admirably break that cycle and pull out and and and make that all work. I did not have that situation.

I was always loved. UM. My parents loved me unconditionally and uh and and by the way, it was pretty tough for them. You know, she doesn't talk about it that much, but my mom had me when she was seventeen years old. She was a high school student in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You could ask her, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't cool in nineteen sixty four to be a

pregnant mom in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And in fact, my grandfather, who is another incredibly important figure in my in my life, UM, I went to bat for her. And because the high school wanted to kick her out. You weren't allowed to be pregnant in high school there, and and my grandfather said, you can't kick her out. It's a public school. She gets to go

to school. And they negotiated for a while, and the principal finally said, okay, she can stay and finished high school, but she can't do any extracurricular activities and she can't have a locker, and um, I know. And then and my grandfather, being a very wise man, he was like, done, we'll take that deal. And so she finished high school, she had me um, and then she married my my dad and my dad is my real dad, not my

biological dad. His name is Mike. He's a Cuban immigrant, got a scholarship to to UH College in Albuquerque, which is where he met my mom. So I have a kind of a fairytale story. And my grandfather um, possibly because I mean, I'm pretty sure, because my parents were so young. Starting at age four, he would take me every summer on his ranch and it was the most spectacular. From age four to sixteen, I basically spent every summer we're working alongside him on the ranch. He was the

most resourceful man. He would um did all his own veterinary work. He would even make his own needles. He would pound the wire with an oxyus satelene torch and drill a little hole in it and sharpen it and make a suiture, like make a needle that he could suit. Youre up the cattle with. Some of the cattle even survived, and um he was a remarkable man and a huge

part of all of our lives. Um. But it is you don't realize, you know, if you just look back and you know if you if you don't have these parents, Um, you know how it's so important. So um it's just a really big deal. And my grandfather too, he was like a second set of parents for me. Would