Do you want to own it? And the reason I ask is you've talked about how you are by default, to some degree, a conflicted owner given you own all of these other businesses.
I think an ideal owner. Yes, my vision is still to make sure the Post is, you know, when I bought the Post, it was very unprofitable when I bought it. The newsroom was even smaller than it is today. And we turned it around in two years, was profitable for six years. I put all that money back into the Post, grew the newsroom. So we've shrunk it back somehow, but we haven't shrunk it back to what it was when I bought it.
And so what do you think went wrong then? I mean, you had this super successful period.
Yeah, what went wrong is we did not adapt. So this is the news business. If you go back to the 90s, right, the local monopoly newspaper was the greatest business in the world. It was the printing press. The Washington Post had 70% of households in the Washington metro area, and it made money hand over fist. We live in a completely different environment now. It's nothing like it now. You have to work hard to make a living in the news business.
Let me ask you one related question to all of this. And this goes to the Washington Post piece of it, and just the influence and money piece of it. Yeah. And it relates to the President of the United States. Yeah. And there is a view among critics that say that part of what you have done or are doing is trying to placate the President with either the sort of shift in the tone of what's happening at the paper or even some of the things that Amazon, the decision to make the documentary around Melania, for example.
Yes, the Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die. Okay, so, you know, I see reported all the time that somehow I was involved in this. And, you know, we did this at this Mar-a-Lago dinner.
Everybody thinks that you went to Mar-a-Lago. True?
Not true. We have denied it. Melania's office has denied it. It's not true. I had nothing to do with that, by the way. It appears that it was a good business decision. You know, that did very well in theaters. It's done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision. I also had nothing to do with Project Hail Mary, which I regret because it's an incredible success. I wish I had greenlit that, but I didn't. And so, you know, Amazon's a big company. It makes a lot of decisions. But no, this idea that somehow that is a way of buying influence is just not correct. I can see why people say this. And by the way, the same thing at the Post. I want the Post's opinion section to stand for free markets. Kind of what I've been talking to you about today, free markets and individual personal liberties. I think those are founding pillars of America. It's one of the reasons that America has been so successful. I mean, we have an incredible history. In 1917, we had the same GDP per capita and the same population size as Argentina. Those two countries diverged completely. And it's because of our system. It's the way that we have organized ourselves to be productive. But businesses can do that, and they can be interfered with a bit. But there's a limit. If you interfere too much with too much regulation or too much, there's just the right amount. Too much, and the golden goose that is the goose that lays the golden eggs can stop laying golden eggs. You don't want that to happen. This is the engine. You want to make sure everybody is sharing in that engine, but don't hurt the engine. Does that make sense?
Completely. When I last interviewed you, yeah, it was about two years ago. President Trump had just won. He was not the president yet. And I had asked you what you thought of him at the time, and you said that you thought that he had mellowed, that he was calmer. Yeah. And I'm curious now. Here we are.
That two years later. Yeah. We've had lots of wars and tariffs and all sorts of things that have happened since then. What do you think?
I think he has, I mean, I'm comparing him to his first term. And I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. And, you know, the so he's again, I've worked with all the presidents. I will work with all the presidents, you know, and I hope to do that going forward if they'll have me. But we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is.
I'm not on the side. You know what this is? I'm on the side of America. And that is so important. And that's where business leaders should be.
I think they're not. No, I think we are, but we get perceived as being like, you know, partisan or whatever.
Like I was helping Obama every chance I could. I was helping Biden every chance I could. I still call Obama for advice. He's a very smart guy. And, you know, and by the way, people that are Trump has lots of good ideas and he's done a lot of, he's been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.
Let me pivot this whole conversation to space because we haven't really gotten there. And here we are in this. It's a mecca of sorts. It's really a remarkable.
It's amazing. Thing to behold this. You know, this is what you're looking at here is billions of dollars of investment. And it's also, you know, employing 14,000 people. And it has an unbelievable future. It's very exciting.
So you've talked about this.
By the way, I did. I want to make one more point before we if we're about to move to Blue, I just thought of which is one of these things that, that I think you asked me at the very beginning, like, where does this, you know, kind of this anger come from? And, and, and I said, it's kind of, you know, a tale of two economies. And I think that really is what's going on. But there are also some deep misconceptions that are worth people thinking about. And there are a lot of people who don't understand the kind of zero sum fallacy, right? So, you know, they think that if there's a bunch of wealth over here, that there's a fixed pie, right? You know, we've got one pizza and there are seven people and there are eight slices. Who's going to get two slices? That is not how economies work. So it isn't a fixed pie. It grows. So and people get their mental model is that wealth is like water in a drought or food in a famine. It's, you know, you can hoard food in a famine. You could hoard gasoline in an energy crisis, you could hoard water in a drought, you could hoard toilet paper in a pandemic, right, as people did. But you can't hoard investment, right? So if you're like, if you have stock in a company, that's not hoarding, that's investing. And investing is more like farming. And you would definitely want to farm in a famine. Do you see what I'm saying? And so this, by the way, this the billions of dollars of investment that have come here have come from that Amazon stock. And by the way, when I sold that Amazon stock, I paid capital gains on it.
You were early when you talked, I remember talking to you maybe ten years ago, 15 years ago, and you were talking about putting infrastructure in space. Yes. And I think you were even talking a couple of years ago about putting data centers potentially in space before Elon was talking about data centers in space.
How realistic is that really? What's the timeline of that? Because right now there's a lot of excitement, by the way, around the space IPO in particular, because of this view that we're all going to be moving stuff to space. Yeah.
The question, are data centers in space realistic? The answer is yes. The timeline is harder to answer. So, you know, some of the timelines you hear are very short. They're probably not. Right. You know, people who talk about two or three years, that's probably a little ambitious. Okay. You know, but I think what Elon would tell you is if you don't set an ambitious timetable, you know, if you want it to be six years, say it's three. That's the kind of, so exactly how long it will take, I don't think anyone knows. But it is real. It will happen. And a couple of things need to happen for that to happen. Energy needs to become a bigger percentage of the cost of terrestrial data centers. So today, terrestrial data centers typically spend less than 15% of their total cost of ownership on energy. And the biggest advantage to being in space is that the energy is free, right? You're getting solar energy 24 over seven, no clouds, no weather. And so that's a big energy. 15% is not a huge number. So I predict over time the energy budget of a data center will go up. So the chips will get a little cheaper. Right now, the chips are so expensive that the energy is not a big chunk. So that will probably change. And so and then the second thing is that launch cost has to come down very significantly by a factor of ten. That's what we're working on right here. That's what Blue Origin is doing. And this team is on fire doing that. You know, so we have a new CEO named Dave Limp and he's doing a great job. This whole leadership team is doing a great job. I'm very proud of them.
If you're right about the data center piece though, getting to space. Yeah. Does that change the equation for all the investment that's going on in data centers? Terrestrially on the ground right now? No.
I don't think so. Because again, the timeline is very different. And you're going to need as much terrestrial data center capacity, I think, as you can arrange in the near term. This technology is real. And you know, we I mentioned my optimism a minute ago and we should definitely talk about that because I think there's so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job. I think that there's going to be a labor shortage as a result.
So let's go there then. I wanted to stay in space, but let's go to that.
Because we can come back. We can be in space too. Whatever you want, Andrew.
But that's no, but that's fascinating because I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend. Yeah. And the students were booing because every time he mentioned AI, they were booing because I think they're deeply fearful and worried about whether they're going to have a job.
Yeah. Well, and the reason they're afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that. So there are so many smart people and they are smart and they are saying, oh my god, you know, there's going to be no more radiologists because, you know, AI can read X-rays better than a radiologist can, and they're going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So what's really going to happen is that it's going to elevate all of these people. And there's going to be, it's like you've been digging, let's say you're a software engineer, right? What is the analogy I can give you is you've been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy if you're digging the basement to your house and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here that's going to. And what's really going to happen is we're going to have so much productivity in our economy that, for example, this is just one effect. A lot of people who have two-earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce. That's why we're going to have a labor shortage, people, because of the productivity gains. You're going to be able to afford things. We're going to have, I predict, will actually have deflation of certain core, assuming we let this technology play out and don't hamstring it with regulation too early. We will actually have everything, food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper, and so on.
And so on. Is there a transition cost? I mean.
We could even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing. Like it should take when you if you are a builder, why does it take you six months, nine months, two years, five years, depending on what municipality you live in to get a building permit. Right. Hey, I should be able to do it in seconds. And it should give you a yes or no in seconds. And then you should have your authority to build it. By the way, if it says no, it should give you the six reasons why. And then you go change those things and resubmit, and you start building tomorrow instead of two years from now.
But how do you answer? I mean, Amazon's laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off.
