Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on The David Rubenstein Show

you have become the wealthiest man in the world it was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world that actually worked fine what propelled you to sell things more than books i thought to myself we can sell anything this way who came up with the idea of prime what happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet who shows up to the buffet first the heavy eaters 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 well people wouldn't

recognize me if my tie was fixed but okay just leave it this way all right [Music] i don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else would 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 this year um is there one thing that you think is responsible for that or several things because 70 is pretty good now i um it's a i

have been lecturing we have all hands meetings at amazon and for 20 years ever since we've been about 21 years now in 1997 every at almost every all hands meeting i said 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 uh never spend any time thinking about the daily stock price i don't okay so as a result of going up 70 percent this

year you have become the wealthiest man in the world is that a title that you really wanted or not i isn't it i can't 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 um it i 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 um you know inventor jeff bezos or entrepreneur jeff

bezos or uh you know father jeff bezos those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me and uh the you know the it's an output measure that if you look at the financial success of amazon and the stock i own 16 of amazon and amazon's worth roughly a trillion dollars that means that what we have built over 20 years we have built 840 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 uh the ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to

solve so many of the world's problems not all of them but so many of them so um you live in washington state near in seattle or outside of seattle now the man who was the richest man for about 20 years is named bill gates yeah 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 are

there any more houses for sale there that's right after i saw bill uh not not too long ago um i you know we were joking about the world's richest man thing and i i basically said thank you know i said you're welcome and he immediately turned to me and said thank you um but no medina is a great little uh it's 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's some correlation there if 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 care you carry cash around or you carry yeah i think i do carry cash and i have uh i have credit cards yeah and if you're credit

i have to show my driver's license and you know but have you ever had a credit card denied does that never happen i i have i've i've had my credit card denied so what are you saying when that you say don't you know who i give him another credit card i stay here try this one okay so um you made an announcement that is uh the most significant philanthropic gift you've made in this type it was a about about a year ago you said you wanted to look for some good philanthropic ideas and you got

i think 47 000 of them and you reviewed them and how did you decide uh where to put this two billion dollars and would you describe exactly what you're to well that process was very helpful so i i solicited ideas uh kind of crowd sourced and i got literally as you said something like 47 000 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 uh 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 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 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 may 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 montessori schools i started at montessori when i was two years old and uh 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 that's still probably true did that teacher ever call you since and said she was responsible for your success no i'm in touch with

several of my um high school elementary school teachers though but i don't know any of my montessori school teachers okay so the gift that you're giving essentially you're going to have some for preschool for children who need preschool free treat full tuition preschool montessori inspired um i'm very excited about that because um i'm going to operate that that's going to be an operating non-profit 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 two three or four years old by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade they're much less likely to fall behind it can still happen but you've really improved their odds the money spent there is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades the other part of your gift will be to give awards out to 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 vet and fund family homeless shelters and that will be you

you said you would give an initial two billion dollars 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 um uh blue origin started with five people and the budget at blue origin was very very small now the budget of blue origins approaches a billion dollars a year and next year it'll be more than a billion dollars in amazon it literally was 10 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 and so anyway that the day one foundation is going to be like that we'll we'll we'll um will wander a little bit too so i

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 uh 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 too 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 at 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 cos 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 competitor 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 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 going to 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 segue in the history of interviewing seriously david that is that is all right that's amazing the answer is uh the answer is very simple we uh we will announce the decision before the end of this year so we've made tremendous progress uh 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 the

media lowlifes 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 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 my friend don graham who at that time i had known 15

years i know him 20 years now he approached me through an intermediary and wanted to know if i would 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 um i 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 what 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 like this would definitely be intuition and not analysis the 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 had all of them and i said um 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 a financially upside down salty snack food company the answer would be no as soon as i started thinking about it 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 dawn yes and that was i wanted to look myself you know be really open with myself and look in the 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 and it needed

to be transitioned 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 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 last night 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 80 or let's say i always project myself forward to age 80 but as i get older i'm starting to do 90. so i know that when i'm 90 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 agreed to buy it um

i think the the asking price was 250 million dollars you'd negotiate no hit done i asked him how much he wanted he said 250 i said fine i didn't negotiate with him and i did no due diligence and he i wouldn't need to with don he have something i'd like to sell [Laughter] 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 uh 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 uh out their opinion to attack media and journalists i believe that it is an essential component of our democracy there has never been i was going to say never been elected official who liked their headlines i think there's probably 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 you don't take that job thinking you're not gonna get scrutinized you're gonna get scrutinized and it's it's it's healthy and um somebody very you know what what what um 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 lowlifes 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 the social norms that protect us those 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 um 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 um 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 they're a lot of kinds of stupid too but but there are uh 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 right so you ultimately moved to high school in miami and then you were validatory in 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 it was 1982 i graduated from high school in 1982. big public high school miami palmetto senior high go panthers and there were 750 kids in my graduating class and i loved high school i had so much fun we had i lost my library privileges because i laughed too loudly in the library and what 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 and my uh but i don't know why i have this laugh it's just it's just and i laugh easily and often the people who know me you know ask my mom or anybody who knows me well and they'll say if jeff's unhappy wait five minutes i was

packing boxes on my hands and knees and um with somebody else and standing next to me kneeling next to me we're packing 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 you graduated as validatory and you decided to go to princeton how come you decide to go to princeton because i wanted to be a theoretical physicist i changed my uh major very quickly to electrical engineering and computers

you graduated summa laude i graduated summa 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 quantitative hedge fund run by a brilliant man named david shaw d.e shawn 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 going to do it from seattle where'd that idea come from i came across the fact um so this is 1994. nobody has heard of the internet very very few people and i came across the fact that the web world wide web was growing at something like 2 300 a year this is in 1994 and 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 got to be i should come up with a business idea and to 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 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 the other category there are three million different books active

and in print around the world at any given time so my my the founding idea of amazon was to build universal selection of books the biggest bookstores only had 150 000 titles and so that's what i did and and i you know i hired a small team we built we built the software i moved to seattle i mean you told your parents you're going to quit the esha 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 ask the question what's the internet right and so no that but this is right you know um you know you on you 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 80 now 90 i have i want to have minimized

the number of regrets that i have in my life and most of our regrets are acts of omission they're things we didn't try it's the path untraveled um those are the things that haunt us and you were telling me that you had to go deliver the books yeah to the post office yourself i still i don't still delivered but i was doing that for years and i 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 and standing next to me kneeling next to me we're packing and and i said you know what we need knee pads this is killing my niece 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 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 selling music and then we started selling videos and then i got smart and i um 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 windshield wiper blades because i really need windshield wiper blades and i thought to

myself we can sell anything this way and 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 100 but then it went down to six or something like that at the peak of the internet bubble our stock peaked somewhere around 113 dollars and then after the internet bubble you know busted open our stock went down to six it went from 113 to six in less than a year so

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 survived what was that that made you to survive and virtually the rest of them are gone um i 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 watch the stock fall from 113 to 6 i was also watching all of our internal business metrics

number of customers profit per unit you know everything you can imagine defects et 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 capital markets we didn't need more money the only reason you know a financial uh bus 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's the profits where are 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 uh you know people always accused us of selling dollar bills for 90 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 that 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 yeah whose idea 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 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 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 it 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 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 um and that we would and 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 to be 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 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 um and so that is what happened but but surely we could see the trend lines we could see that you know the diff all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service you uh sit around with your team and so forth but you don't like meetings before 10 a.m no you like to get eight hours of sleep and you

don't like powerpoints explain all that why is that okay many so i i like to putter in the morning 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 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 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 o'clock meeting and because by 5 p.m i'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 it unless i'm traveling in different time zones sometimes it's impossible but i am very um focused on it and and and for me i need adults 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 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 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 100 people that's a different story but but amazon's 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 sometimes i get you know we'll have a good um quarterly conference call or something and and wall street will like our quarterly 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 i right now i'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself

in 2021 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 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 now 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 luck 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 order is anything ever wrong what do you do do you call up and complain or you don't have any problems no i i i i'm a customer of amazon hopefully like all of you in this is there one person full-time service is your account in this room who's not an amazon customer see me right afterwards and i'll um i'll walk you through it it's um i i yeah i

get i have problems sometimes um 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 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 is because we've screwed up their order somehow and i am uh so i look at this and for some reason something seems a little odd about that one and so i'll ask the team 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 um 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're 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 i've been asked for years we ever opened physical stores literally 20 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 storage is so well served if we offer a metoo product offering it's not gonna work we're and it's also just we're not very good at that most of the 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 know-how and and expand the whole foods 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 now 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 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 it at aws we completely reinvented the way that companies buy 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 uh when i launched amazon.com in 1995 barnes and noble launched barnesandnoble.com in 1997. two years that's very cla that's very typical if you invent something new we launched kendall barnes 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 um 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 the european government some regulatory thing could come and impair your business well not here's here's what i think about that i have i have a couple

i get asked this question frequently i thought it was an original question no sorry you do do that sometimes but that's not one of them um 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 government institutions big educational institutions big non-profits 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 and i remind people internally when you know the

if they that 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 to really you know i mean under all uh kind of regulatory frameworks that i can imagine um 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 that big companies bring and not demonize or vilify business in general or especially not business well they shouldn't vilify big companies and they certainly vilify business in general for sure and the reason is simple there are certain things only big companies can do i love you know garage entrepreneurs i invest in a lot of 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 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 we can fix it in exactly one way by having by moving out into the solar [Music] system 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 uh you're putting a billion dollars or more of your own personal capital into it every year next year it'll be more for the first time all right and um what are you going to get out of it are we going to have people going to space what is the purpose 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 a simple argument 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 my friends who say they want to move to mars i say look do me a favor move 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 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 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 einsteins and a thousand mozarts 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 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 uh 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 uh and and because i got to ride on the back of the credit card system i got to ride on the back of the pre-existing transportation network that could deliver packages 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 trillion dollar market cap company in a in 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 build space infrastructure so that the next generations of people can use that infrastructure the same way i used ups and fedex and so on to build amazon and that 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 my but the the real thing is i you know it'll be whatever it's going to be i'm going to be proud of

the things i want 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 what will my legacy be i have no idea and i i don't even want to spend a lot of time thinking you intend to give away the bulk of your fortune at some point your life i tend to give away uh 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 non-profit model but i'm also going to 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 non-profit some at some distant point in the future but that would be i would be i wouldn't want that i want i want it to be a thriving ecosystem more like ups and fedex so let's just close

with your wife we haven't mentioned her yet we met in new york city at d.e shanko where we worked we got engaged uh 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 uh i also i i would like to take a moment to talk about my parents if that's okay you didn't ask me but i well i would like to they're they're here in the audience and um my parents are

i thank you guys [Applause] you know you get different gifts in life and one of the great gifts i got is my mom and dad it's amazing my highest admiration is withheld for those people 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 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 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 um uh 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 uh 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 finish 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 and then she married my my dad my dad

is my real dad not my biological dad his name is mike he's a cuban immigrant got a scholarship to to college in albuquerque which is where i met my mom so i have a 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 four to sixteen i basically spent every summer working alongside him on the ranch he was the most resourceful man he would

um he did all his own veterinary work he would even make his own needles he would pound the wire with the 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 um he was a remarkable man in a huge uh part of all of our lives um but it is you don't realize you know you just look back and you know if you if you don't have these parents um

you know 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 you