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00:00You have become the wealthiest man in the world. Is fine being the second wealthiest person in the world that actually worked fine. What's propelled you to sell things more than books. I thought to myself we can sell anything this way. You came up with the idea of primes. What happens when you offer a free . All you can eat buffet. Who shows up to the buffet for the heavy eater. There are some people who criticize some things that The Washington Post says I have no idea what you're talking about. Would you fix your time please. People wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed but it just seemed to sweet . All right . I don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else to consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though I have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership. What is it that makes somebody tick . Your stock is actually up 70 percent this year. Is there one thing that you think is responsible for that is several things because 70 percent is pretty good. No I it's I have been lecturing you have all hands meetings at Amazon for 20 years ever since we've been for 21 years now in nineteen ninety seven . Every at almost every all hands meeting I see look when the stock is up 30 percent in a month. Don't feel 30 percent smarter because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month it's not going to feel so good to feel 30 percent dumber. And that's what happens. Never spent any time thinking about the daily stock price. I don't. OK so as a result of going up 70 percent this year you have become the wealthiest man in the world. It does at a title that you really want it or not isn't I can assure you I have never sought that title and it was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world. That actually worked fine. It's not. It is the day. I would say 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 you know inventor Jeff Bezos or entrepreneur Jeff Bezos or you know Father Jeff Bezos. 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 in the stock I own 16 percent of Amazon and Amazon is worth roughly a trillion dollars. That means that what we have built over 20 years we have built eight hundred and forty billion dollars of wealth for other people . And that's great. That's how it should be. You know there I believe so powerfully in the ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to solve so many of the world's frauds not all of them but so many of them. So you live in Washington state there in Seattle where outside of Seattle now the man who was the richest man for about 20 years is named Bill Gates. Yes. And what is the likelihood that the two richest men in the world live not only in the same country not only the same state 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. I've tried after I saw Bill not not too long ago you know we were joking about the world's richest man thing and I basically said thank you. I said You're welcome. And he immediately turned to me and said thank you but no. Medina is a great little miss a suburb of Seattle and you know I 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 is some correlation there. You go into a store when you want to buy something do you have to put a credit card down you to say Sam Jeff Bezos and they send you stuff how do you have that and you have to carry you carry cash around you carry on. I think I do carry cash and I have I have credit cards. Yeah. And if your credit I have to show my driver's license and you know but have you ever had a credit card I'd never had. I have I've had my credit card denied. So what do you say when you say Don't you know I give him another credit card. I say here try this one so you made an announcement that is the most significant philanthropic gift you've made in this tape. It was a about about a year ago you said you wanted to look for some good philanthropic ideas. And you got I think forty seven thousand of them and you reviewed them and how did you decide where to put this 2 billion dollars and what you describe exactly what you're going to do. That process was very helpful so I I solicited ideas kind of crowd sourced and I got literally as you said something like forty seven thousand maybe even a little more. Someone 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 there were some themes that emerged. But the other thing that's fascinating about the kind of actualize is 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 are very interested in homelessness including me a lot of people are very interested in education of all kinds . I'm very interested in early education and I made that you know the apple doesn't fall far from the tree my mother has become in running the basis Family Foundation she has become an expert in an early education. I'm a student of Montessori schools. I started at Montessori when I was 2 years old and the the the teacher complained to my mother the Montessori school teacher complained my mother that I was too 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 if you ask the people who work with me still probably true. John Tucker today teacher ever call you sense and say that she was responsible for your success. Oh no I'm in touch with several of my high school elementary school teachers though. But I don't know any of my Montessori school teachers. So the gift that you're giving essentially that you're going to have some for preschool for children who need preschool free treat for full tuition preschool Montessori inspired I'm very excited about that because I'm gonna operate that that's going to be an operating nonprofit and we're going to put them in low income neighborhoods. We know for a fact that if a kid falls behind it's really really hard to catch up. And if you can give somebody a leg up when they're 2 3 or 4 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 page organic dividends for decades. The other part of your gift will be to give awards out too. Yes. And that's going to be more traditional grant making philanthropy. So there I'm going to identify with the help of a team identify and fund that and fund family homeless shelters and that will be used. You said you would give an initial 2 billion dollars you expect to add to that. Yeah it's day one. Everything I've ever done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people and Blue Origin started with five people and the budget of Bloomberg was very very small. Now the budget and bludgeons approaches a billion dollars a year the next year it'll be more than a billion dollars. Amazon who literally was typical 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 so anyway the day one foundation is going to be like that will will will will wander a little bit too. So we have some very specific ideas 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 you know not not an 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 and that's what we'll do with this day one foundation to it. And the customer is going to be the child. This is this is so important because the secret sauce of Amazon with their civil principles and 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 talk so often to other CEOs and some other CEOs and also founders and odd for years 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. So at the Washington Post for example is the customer the people who buy advertising from us . No the customer is the reader in the school who are the customers is it the parents. Is it the teachers. No it is the child. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to be obsessively compulsively focused on the child. We're gonna be scientific when we can be and we're going to use heart and intuition when we when we want to. When you use your intuition 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 Segway in the history of interviewing Seriously David. So that is that is all right. That's an amazing answer is the answer is very simple. We will announce a 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. It's really dangerous to demonize the media. It's dangerous to call them media low lifes. It's dangerous to say that they're the enemy of the people. And every time you attack that you're eroding a little bit around the edges . Why did you buy the Washington Post you had no background in that area. What what convinced you to do that. OK. First of all I was not looking for a newspaper. I had no intention of buying this paper. I'd never thought about the idea. It never occurred to me it was never something wasn't like a childhood dream. No nothing. And my friend Don Graham who at that time I had known 15 years I know in 20 years now he approached me through an intermediary and wanted to know if I'd be interested in buying The Washington Post and I sent back word that I would not because I didn't really know anything about newspapers. And Don over a series of conversations convinced me that I 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 saw I did some soul searching and again my decision making process something this would definitely be intuition not analysis. The financial situation of the Washington Post at that time. This is 2013 was very upside down. The problem was a secular one . The Internet was just eroding all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers that all of them. And I said you know is this something I want to get involved in if I'm going to do it I'm going to 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. And I said to myself If this were an financially upside down salty snack food company the answer would be no. As soon as I started thinking about that way it's 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 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 Dawn 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 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 and it needed to be transition to a national and a 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 that. 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 do. Let's say that I'm pleased to report to you that the post is profitable today. 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 80 or let's say it was projecting myself saw Ford to age 80. But as I get older I've started to do 90. So I know that when I'm 90 it's going to 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 when you and you agreed to buy it I think the asking price was two hundred fifty million dollars you'd negotiate. You know Don I asked him how much he wanted he said 250. I said fine I didn't negotiate with him I did no due diligence and I wouldn't need to Don. He took I 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 in not defending yourself. I do defend the post. It is a mistake for any elected official in my opinion. I don't think this is very out there opinion to attack media and journalists. 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 no no public figure who has ever liked their headlines. It's OK. It's part of the process. You know it's if you're the president 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 healthy and somebody very you know 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 lifes. 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 we. But it's also that social norms that protect us those that we. It works because we believe those words on that piece of paper. And every time you attack that you're eroding 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 were you a pretty smart student and your teachers tell you this you know you were good . I have always been academically smart and that you know by the way the older I get I realize how many kinds of smart there are . There are a lot of kinds of smart there a lot of kinds of stupid too. But but there are you know I see people all the time who I know they wouldn't have gotten a pluses 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 valedictorian every class and then you gave a speech as the valedictorian saying you thought we should colonize space or something like that. I did. It was 1982 I graduated from high school in 1982. Big public high school Miami Palmetto Senior High Go Panthers. And there were seven hundred and fifty kids in my graduating class. And 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 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 shirt there not that shirt. 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 and my but I don't know why I have this laugh. It's just it's just that I laugh easily and often the people who know me Yes my mom or anybody who knows me well and they'll say if Jeff's unhappy wait five minutes I was packing boxes my night on my hands and knees. And with somebody else and standing next to me kneeling next to me were packing and I said you know we need many pads. This is for killing my knees and this guy packing alongside he said we did packing tables and I was like that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard you graduated as an obligatory and you decide to go to Princeton . How come you decide to go to Princeton. Because I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I changed my major very quickly to electrical engineering. But you graduated summa cum body. I graduated summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa Phi Beta 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 kind of hedge fund run by a brilliant man named David Shaw de Shaw and Co. I learned so much from him I used a lot of his ideas and principles on things like H.R. and recruiting and what kind of people to hire when I started very very good well-known hedge fund and 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 going to do it from Seattle . Where'd that idea come from. I came across the fact this is 1994. 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 20 300 percent a year. This is in 1984. 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 for the business idea you know on the Internet and then let the internet go around this and keep working on it. And so I made a list of products that I might sell online and I sort of forced ranking them and I picked books because books were super unusual in one respect which is that they're more book items in the book category than there are items in the other case where the three million different books active and in print around the world and given time. So my my the founding idea of Amazon was to build universal selection of books. The biggest bookstores only had one hundred and fifty thousand titles and so that's what I did . And I you know I hired a small team and we built we built the software. I moved to Seattle. I mean you told your parents you were going to quit the show where you're successful making presumably a fair amount of money. Yeah and you told your wife MacKenzie that you're going to move across the country. What did they all say they were immediately and reflexively supportive right after they asked the question what's the Internet. And so no but this is right you know. You know you get 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 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 80 now 90 I had I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life and most of my regrets are acts of omission the things we didn't try. It's the path untrammelled those are the things that haunt us. And you were telling me that you had to go deliver the books. Yeah. So the post office yourself. I still I don't still delivered to wasn't I was doing that for years and ISE and I was packing boxes my night on my hands and knees in the first month I was packing boxes on my hands and knees on the hard Smith floors and with somebody else and standing next to me kneeling next to me were packing and and I said you know what we need kneepads. This is killing my knees and this guy packing alongside he said we did 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 paid to do you get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions . What propelled you to sell things more than books books. We started selling music and then we started selling videos and then I got smart and I I e-mailed it a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them. Besides the things we sell today what would you like to see yourself in. That answer came back incredibly long tailed. The way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment slick I'm sure one of the answers was I wish you sold windshield wiper blades because I really need windshield wiper blades and I thought to myself we can sell anything this way. And then so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time. And the division became because you read the original business plan it's just books your stock at one point I think went to one hundred dollars but then I went down to six or something like that at the peak of the Internet bubble. Our stock peaked some around one hundred and thirteen dollars and then after the Internet bubble busted open our stock went down to six and went from one hundred and thirteen to six in less than a year. My annual shareholder that year starts with a one word sentence and that one word sentence is the word ouch. So most of those Internet companies of the dot.com era are out of business. Yeah you survive. What was it that made you to survive and virtually the rest of them are gone. It's free. 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 one hundred and thirteen to six I was also watching all of our internal business metrics number of customers profit per unit. You know everything you can imagine defects etc. 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 I know why was it we didn't need to go back to capital markets we didn't need more money. The only reason you know the financial 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 on Wall Street kept beating you up on that. And your response was I don't really care what you think. Amazon was you know people always accuse us of selling dollar bills for 90 cents and saying 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 at a certain volume level we would cover our fixed costs and the company would be profitable. So who came up with the idea of prime crime seems to be a great way to get money in advance of people actually getting the services. Whose side. Actually it's very interesting. So like many inventions inside of a team and I love team inventing is my favorite thing. So I tap dance into the office. I love Amazon. I have so much fun there I love Blue Origin of 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 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 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 offer people 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 the results were horrifying that we would offer unlimited shipping shipping is expensive and that we would the customers love free shipping but we could see I mean again back to that . You have to use heart and intuition and there has to be risk taking. You have to have instinct all the good decisions have to be the 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 disease like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn't work out I can I could. We don't have enough time for me to list all of our failed experiments. But the big winners pay for thousands of failed experiments. So you try something like prime and it was very expensive at the beginning it cost 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 so that is what happened but sure. But surely we could see the trend lines we could see that you know all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service. You sit around with your team and so forth but you don't like meetings before 10:00 a.m.. No. You'd like to get eight hours of sleep. I don't like PowerPoint. Explain all that. Why is that OK. Many so I I like to putter and when I get up early I go to bed early . I get up early. I like to putter in the mornings. I like to read the newspaper I like top 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 10 o'clock. I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch. Like anything that's going to be really mentally challenging that's a 10:00 o'clock meeting and because by 5:00 p.m. like I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10 a.m. and and so then on sleep I get eight hours of sleep. I prioritize that unless I'm traveling in different time zones sometimes it's impossible but I am very focused on it. And for me I need a dose of 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 paid to do as a senior executive. You get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it. If the quality of those 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 has one 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. I always tell people as soon as I get you know we'll have a good quarterly conference call or something. And Wall Street will like our quarterly results and I'll go. 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 big three years ago . Right now I'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself in 2021 some time 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 if you are and then why do I need to make 100 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. One of the other companies you started within your company is Amazon Web Services a business miracle happened . This never happens. This is like the greatest piece of business lock in the history of business so far as I know we faced no like minded competition for seven years . When you buy over the Internet Amazon do you ever get the wrong orders anything I'm wrong. What do you do. You call up and complain or you don't have any problem. No I am. I'm a customer of Amazon. Hopefully like all of you and it's just a one person full time services that even this room is not an Amazon customer see me right afterwards and I'll I'll walk you through it. I yeah I get I have problems sometimes and I and I treat them like the same way I 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 at Amazon.com 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 e-mails 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 is because we've screwed up their order somehow and I am so I look at this and for some reason something seems a little odd about that one. And so I ask the team to do a case study 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 Meyer if I have a failed order or some bad customer experience I would treated just like that oh you've revolutionized retail as I say but now you are in the bricks and mortar business you bought whole foods. 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 been asked for years. We ever open physical stores literally 20 years of an ask a question and I always say yes but only when we have a differentiated differentiated offering something it's not me to because that space physical store is so well served if we offer a me too product offering it's not gonna work where. And it's also just we're not very good at that . Most of that whenever we've tried dabbling in something that's a me too 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 going to be able to do is take some of our resources some of our technical technological knowhow and and expand the whole foods mission. Now have a great mission which is to bring nourishing food to everybody organic nourishing food everybody and 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 knowhow . Now one of the other companies you started within your company which is technologically superior is Amazon Web Services where the idea come from NWS. We started it. I don't know a long time ago now 15 years ago and worked on it behind the scenes for a long time and then finally launched it. It has become a very large company and each of us 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 we'd like. I'll give you it like when I launched Amazon.com in 1995. Barnes and Noble last Barnes Noble dot com in 1997. Two years. That's very Clark. That's very typical. If you invent something new. We launched Kindle Barnes and Noble launched nook two years later. We launched echo Google last school home two years later. When you pioneer if you're lucky you get a two year headstart. Nobody gets a seven year head start. And so that was incredible because 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 will 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 U.S. government might come along 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 get asked 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. And my view on this is very simple. All big institutions of any kind are going to be and should be examined scrutinized inspected . Governments should be inspected. Governments intuitions big educational institutions big nonprofits big companies they're going to get scrutiny. It's not personal. It's kind of what we as a society want to have happen. So that's that's one thing . And I remind people internally when you know 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 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 really you know I mean under all kind of regulatory frameworks that I can imagine customers are still going to want low prices they're still going to want fast delivery. They're still going to want big selection. It's really important that that politicians and others not. They need to understand the value the big companies bring and not demonize or vilify business in general or especially not poison. Well they shouldn't feel if I become is and they shouldn't vilify business in general for sure. And the reason is simple. And there are certain things only big companies can do. I love you know garage entrepreneurs. I invest in law their companies. I know many of them but nobody in their garage is going to build an all carbon fiber fuel efficient Boeing 787. It's not going to happen. You need Boeing to do that. This world would be really bad without Boeing 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. So there's all sorts of problems that we are about to face because for the first time in our civilizational history going back thousands of years we're not big compared to the size of the planet. We can fix that problem. We can fix it in exactly one way by having by moving out into the source system one of your passions is not just Amazon but it's outer space and space travel. 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 one every year next year it will be more for the first time . All right. And what are you going to get out of it. Are we going to have people going into space. What is the. Yes this is this. This is the most important work I'm doing and I have great conviction about that. It is a simple argument. This is the best planet we have now sent robotic probes to every planet in this source system. Believe me this is the good one. My friends who say they want to move to Mars I say Look do me a favor. Move to the top of Mt. Everest for a year first because that's a garden paradise compared to Mars. And so this gem of a planet 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 status 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 it takes a lot of energy. And so do you want that to continue for your grandchildren or 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 slaw system. Then there would be a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozart's but we don't have that long. So there's all sorts of problems that we are about to face because for the first time in our civilizational history going back thousands of years we're not 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 source system. And 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 and in it 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. The preexisting 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 trillion dollar 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 to 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 build space infrastructure so that the next generations of people can use that infrastructure the same way I used U.P.S. and FedEx and so on to build Amazon and that. 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 is your legacy. World's Oldest Man. That's a that's a famous line I like but. But the real thing is you know it'll be whatever it's going to be I'm going to 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 know what what will my legacy be I have no idea. And I don't even want to spend a lot of time thinking about how you intend to give away the bulk of your fortune at some point 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 in a nonprofit model. But I'm also going to invest a lot of money in something that any rational investor would say is a really bad investment which is Blue Origin. But I think it's super important. And if I can't make Bloomberg and a for profit thing maybe I'll convert it to non-profit some at some distant point the future. But that would be I big I wouldn't want that. I want I want it to be a thriving eco some more like U.P.S. and FedEx. Well let's just close with your wife. We haven't mentioned her yet. We met in New York City at RTS co where we worked. We got engaged. We met. We dated for three months. We're engaged for three months and then got married. So we our whole dating engage in fiercely six months long. It's I also I would like to take a moment to talk about my parents if that's OK. You didn't ask me but I . Well I would like to they're they're here in the audience and my parents are. Thank you guys . You know you get different gifts in life. And one of the great gifts I got is my mom and dad. He 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 whatever it is and some of those people who who so admirably break that cycle and pull out and and make that all work. I did not have that situation. I was always loved my parents loved me unconditionally. 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 17 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 1964 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 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 of public school. She gets to go to school and then negotiate for a while . And the principal finally said OK she can stay and finish high school but she can't do any extracurricular activities and she can't have a locker. And 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 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 two college in Albuquerque which is where he met my mom. So I have kind of a fairy tale story and my grandfather 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 4 to 16 I basically spent every summer working alongside him on the ranch. He was the most resourceful man. He would do all his own veterinary work. He would even make his own needles he would pound the wire with oxy acetylene torch and and drill a little hole in it and sharpen it and make a suture like make a needle that he could suture up the cattle with some of the cattle even survived. And he was a remarkable man and a huge part of all of our lives . But it is you don't realize you know you look back and you know if you if you don't have these parents you know how it's so important. So it's just a really big deal. And my grandfather to you like a second set of parents for me .

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The David Rubenstein Show: Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, entrepreneur and owner of the Washington Post, talks to David Rubenstein about his background, how he came up with the idea for Amazon, building the company, some of the key businesses including Prime and Whole Foods, the space race and philanthropy. The world's richest man says his most important decisions are made not with quantitative analysis but "with instinct, intuition, taste, heart." Bezos speaks in the latest episode of "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations." The interview was taped on September 13 in Washington. (Source: Bloomberg)

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