The David Rubenstein Show: Jeff Bezos

you have become the wealthiest man in the world it was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world fine what propelled you to sell things more than books I thought we can sell anything this way came up with the idea of primes what happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet who shows up to the buffets first the heavy eaters there are some people who criticize some things that The Washington Post says would you fix your time please well people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed okay just leave it this way all right 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 percent this year is there one thing that you think is responsible for that of several things because 70 percent is pretty good now I am it's a I have been lecturing they 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% in a month don't feel 30% smarter because when the stock is down 30% in a month it's not going to feel so good to be feel 30% dumber and that's what happens and never spent 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 it is that a title that you really want it or not I is it 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 isn't a 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 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 and the 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 they're I believe so powerfully in 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 you live in Washington State they're in Seattle we're outside of Seattle now the man who was the richest man for about twenty years his name Bill Gates yeah 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 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 after I after I saw Bill not not too long ago I you know we were joking about the world's richest man thing and I basically said thank you no I said you're welcome and he immediately turned to me and said thank you but no Medina is a great little it's a suburb of Seattle and you know I don't think there's anything special in the water there and they 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 you go into a store when you want to buy something do you have to put a credit card down you just say I'm Jeff Bezos and they send you so how do you about that if you have to carry it carry cash around you you can't yeah 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 ID no gonna write I I have I've had my credit card denied so what do you say when they you say don't you know if I give them another credit card I'd say here try this one so you made an announcement that is the most significant philanthropic gift you've made in their type it was a about about a year ago you said you were 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 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 a kind of crowd-sourced and I got literally as you said something like 47,000 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 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 and of all kinds I'm very interested in early education and I made them 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 in 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 complain to 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 today hhor-- ever call your since and said she was responsible for your success 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 gonna have some for preschool for children who need preschool for each week for full tuition preschool Montessori inspired I'm very excited about that because I'm gonna operate that that's gonna 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 it's really really hard to catch up and if you can give somebody a leg up when there are two 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 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 gonna identify with the help of a team identify and fund that and fund family homeless shelters and that will be you said you would give an initial two billion dollars I 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 budgetable origin was very very small now the budget of Blue Origin his approaches a billion dollars a year a next year would be more than a billion dollars in Amazon who literally was Tim people today it's half a million people but you 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 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 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 where there 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 talked so often to other CEOs 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 so at the Washington Post for example is the customer the people who buy advertisements from us know the customer is the reader and in the school who are the customers is it the parents is it the teachers know it is the child and that's what we're going to do we're gonna be obsessively compulsively focused on the child we're going to be scientifically we can be and we're gonna 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 [Laughter] all right can we just take a moment to acknowledge that that may be the best Segway into history of interviewing seriously David so that is that is alright that's amazing answer is 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 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 it a little bit around the edges [Music] 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 no 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 Dawn over a series of conversations convinced me that I thought 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 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 a roading all of the traditional advantages that local newspapers had all of them and I said 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 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 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 and 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 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 last night the 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 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 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 think the asking price was 250 million dollars you didn't ago she a you know hip done I asked him how much she 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 it done heat 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 a 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 an elected official who liked 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 if you're the president the United States or a governor of a state or whatever you 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 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 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 that 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 it a little bit around the edges now look I don't want to be dramatic here we are so robust this country the media is gonna 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 or 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 right so you openly moved into High School in Miami and then you were valedictorian of your 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 750 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 laughs where did you get that laughter um you know what 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 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 yes my mom or anybody who knows me well and they'll say if Jeff's unhappy wait five minutes I was packing boxes am I not on my hands and knees and with somebody else in standing next to me kneeling next to me we're packing and I said you know we need knee pads this is for killing my knees and this guy packing alongside I said we need packing tables and I was like that's the most brilliant idea I've ever heard [Music] you graduated as Valerie 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 major very quickly to electrical engineering and computer 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 de Shah & 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 gonna start a company selling books over the internet and I'm gonna do it from Seattle where'd that idea come from I came across the fact 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 23 hundred percent a year this is the 1984 and anything growing that fast is even if its 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 then they 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 mine I started force ranking them and I picked books because books is super unusual in one respect which is that there are more book items in the book category than there are items in the other category they're three million different books active and imprint around the world in 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 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're gonna quit de sha where you're successful making presumably a fair amount of money yeah and you told your wife McKenzie that you're gonna 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 know that but this is right you know you know you on your with your loved ones you-you-you bet on them you're not betting on the idea you're you're you 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 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 those are the things that haunt us 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 delivered some of it but I was doing that for years and I said I was packing boxes I might not know in my hands and knees them in the first month I was packing boxes on my hands and knees on the hard cement floors and with somebody else didn't standing next to me kneeling next to me were packing and and I said you know what we need knee pads this is for 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 in 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 surged slime music and then we started selling videos and then I got smart and I I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them besides the things we felt today what would you like to see a self 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've 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 vision 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 some around a hundred and thirteen dollars and then after the internet bubble you know busted open our stock went down to six it went from a 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 oh it's the 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 113 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 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 financial bust like the internet bubble bursting is you know makes it really hard to raise 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 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 you know people always secure suss 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 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 who's I can actually it's very 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 I can never work and then we solved those objections and it's a very it's a very fun process we're always wondering what could a loyalty program me and then actually a 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 if the results were horrifying that we would offer unlimited shipping shipping is expensive 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 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 we make mistakes and we've made Dizzy's like the fire phone and many other things that just didn't work out I can 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 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 it's many prawns as you can eat and and so that is what happened but but surely we could see the trend lines we can see that you know the different all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service you sit around with your team and so forth but you didn't like meetings before 10 a.m. no you'd like to get eight hours of sleep I don't like powerpoints explain all that why is that ok many so I I like to putter in the room 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 it's 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 5:00 p.m. I'm like I can't think about that today let's try this again tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. and and so then on sleep I get 8 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 in the for me I need $1 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 your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day is that really worth it if the quality of this decisions might be lower because you're tired or growt she 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 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 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 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 one of the other companies you started with in your company because 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 you when you buy over the Internet Amazon do you ever get the wrong orders anything ever wrong what do you do if you call up and complain or you're not having any problems oh I I I'm customer of Amazon hopefully like all of you in this just one person full time their service isn't even this room who's not an Amazon customer see me right afterwards and I'll walk you through it it's 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 then 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 so 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 riding us not always but usually the writing us because we've screwed up their order somehow and I am so I look at this and for summary isn't it something seems a little odd about that one and so I asked 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 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 oh you've revolutionize retail as I say but now you were in the bricks and mortar business you bought Whole Foods yeah it was the theory behind buying something that doesn't sell things over the internet we're very interested in physical stores and we have it I've been asked for years we ever open physical stores literally 20 years of an asset 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 me-too 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 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 Foods mission they have a great mission which is to bring nourishing food to everybody organic nourishing food to 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 know-how now one of the other companies you started with in your company which is technologically superior company is Amazon Web Services where the idea come from AWS we started it I don't know a long time ago now 15 years ago and 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 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 like I'll give you it like when I launched amazon.com in 1995 Barnes & Noble launched Barnes and noble.com in 1997 two years that's very class that's very typical if you invent something new we launched Kindle Barnes and Noble launched Nook two years later we launched Ecco Google launched Google home two years later when you pioneer if you're lucky you get a two-year head start nobody gets a 7 year head start and so that was incredible because 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 run way to build this incredible little 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 where I think about 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 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 happen so that's that's one thing and I remind people internally when you know that 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 gonna 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 of the big companies bring and not demonize or vilify business in general or especially I'm visiting well they shouldn't vilify big companies and they certainly 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 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 its 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 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 system [Music] one of your passions is not just Amazon but its outer space and space travel yeah Lu 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 in every year next year it'll be more for the first time alright and what you're 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 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 faced a choice as we move forward we're gonna 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 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 in 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 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 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 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 to 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 use UPS and FedEx and so on to build Amazon 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 that's a that's a famous line I like but but but the the real thing is I 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 a few regrets as possible and I don't you know what what will my legacy be I have no idea and I don't even want to spend a lot of time I think 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 gonna give away a lot of money in a non-profit 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 Blue Origin a for-profit thing maybe I'll convert it to non profit some at some distant point the future but that would be I would be I wouldn't want that I want I want it to be a thriving ecosystem and her yeah we met in New York City at de Xiang Co where we worked we got engaged after we got we dated for three months we were engaged for three months and then got married so we our whole kind of dating engagement period was only six months long its 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 well I would like to they're there here in the audience and my parents are I thank you guys you know you get different gifts in life and one of the great gifts I got is my lawn dad he it's amazing my highest admiration is withheld for those people we all know some of them I know several them who had terrible parents maybe they were abusive whatever it is in 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 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 walk 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 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 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 and Albuquerque which is where he 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 4 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 he intended all his own veterinary work he would even make his own needles he would pound the wire with a 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 just look back and you know if you don't have these parents you know it's so important so it's just a really big deal and my grandfather to use like a second set of parents for me [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Markets and Finance

Views: 943,941

Rating: 4.8579798 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: f3NBQcAqyu4

Length: 48min 11sec (2891 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

I am on an Amazon product 15hours per day