Please, please welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin and his guest, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos.
Jeffrey Bezos, everybody! Jeff, thank you so much for being here. We always try to save the best for last, and we couldn't be more thrilled for you to be here. I said it at the beginning of the day and I'll say it again in front of you — Jeff is one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. We talk a lot about people, we've talked about it all day, about people of consequence on this stage, and there's no question that Jeff has changed the way we live. It's rare to be able to say that about anybody. In 1994 he founded Amazon, which started as an online book seller — you know the story — right out of his garage in Seattle. Today Amazon's one of the five most valuable companies in America. Now he's focused far beyond Earth, to outer space, through his company Blue Origin. He's racing to the moon and then to Mars. His New Glenn heavy-lift booster rocket expected to launch any day now. And meanwhile back here on Earth, his Bezos Earth Fund, granting $2 billion so far. And of course he also owns the storied Washington Post, which has put him in the headlines in recent weeks as well. It punches above its weight in that regard. And we're going to talk about all of that and more.
In fact, what I want to do, if you'd indulge me, is actually start there — with the Washington Post. The reason I want to do that, because I think as we all saw the election play out and we saw the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, prior to that it became, I think, a microcosm of so many different things in our society. That decision became a Rorschach test for people and their politics. It became a question about trust in the media, about influence, about business interests, and so many other things. So I was hoping, maybe just to help us with this story which we all read about, if you could just in your own words take us back to the two weeks before the election when that decision was made, and what happened, and what was going through your mind at that time.
Well, it was the time when, for some number of years, about that time, when the Washington Post would, you know, make an editorial decision and endorse a presidential candidate. For many decades the Post very studiously did not endorse presidential candidates. The kind of founder of the modern Post, a guy named Eugene Meyer, whose words are still inscribed on the wall in the lobby as you walk in, was against the idea because he thought an independent newspaper shouldn't be endorsing presidential candidates. And so they didn't do it. After Watergate the Post started endorsing presidential candidates. And so we're talking about this in that time frame. It hadn't come up before, and, you know, we just decided that, you know, it wasn't going to help. Well, first of all, it wasn't going to influence the election either way. You know, we didn't believe — there's no evidence that newspaper endorsements influence elections. There's no independent voter in Pennsylvania at that time who was going to say, 'Oh, is that what the Washington Post thinks? Well then I'll do that.' So that wasn't going to happen.
At the same time, you know, we're struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust. And the trust surveys have been done for many decades now, and the media has been going down in those surveys for four decades. They've always been able to hang on to the one small positive, that they're always above Congress. And this year they lost even that, falling below Congress — which is not easy to achieve. Congress was thrilled, by the way, not to be at the very bottom of the list.
So we just decided that the pluses of doing this were very small, and it added to the perception of bias. You know, the newspapers and media in general, if they are going to try and be objective and independent, they have to pass the same requirement that a voting machine does — they have to count the votes accurately, and people have to believe that they count the votes accurately. Both requirements are just as important for a voting machine, and media is similar. And there's a strong perception — not all of it is the media's fault, there's a lot of external factors involved too — but where we can do something, we should.
Okay, let me ask you — and you know that there was blowback. I just want to read you, this is Marty Baron, who was your former editor of that paper. He said, 'This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty.' David Remnick said, 'If Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements, all of them, you could argue the case one way or another.' But he was effectively suggesting that given this scenario, with the timing of it —
Look, if I had had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons. But in fact we made this decision — it was the right decision. I'm proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly, because we knew there would be blowback, and we did the right thing anyway.
Okay, so let me ask you about that though — there was blowback. I think 250,000 people canceled their subscription. So did you think, when you were doing this, that some people were going to say that actually creates less trust in media? I mean, part of it was aimed at creating more trust in media, and at the same time clearly there were other people saying maybe there's less trust.
No, I don't follow that logic.
You don't? And so what did you — were you surprised at the —
Not really. We knew there would — we knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way. As I said, you know, these things punch above their weight. And we worried about that at all? I mean, you can't worry — you can't do the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR or whatever it is you want to call it. So this was the right decision. We made the right decision. I'm very proud of the decision.
So let me just ask you one related question, which is this: you said in your opinion piece about all of this — I thought it was fascinating — you said, 'When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not the ideal owner. I'm a terrible owner of the Post from the point of view of appearance of conflict.' There is probably not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or some Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader isn't meeting with a government official somewhere. So there are always going to be appearances of conflict. A pure newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper and did nothing else would probably be, from that point of view, a much better owner. Now, the advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I'm available.
I'm like the doting parent in that regard.
I think embedded underneath the fundamental question is this — and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it, the New York Times has been writing about it — it's whether, and this was I think the question that people had, whether you had any worry in your mind about your other businesses, about Trump, and whether he would ultimately target Amazon or target Blue Origin as retaliation against negative coverage, given that you had lived through that.
No, I don't think so. That was certainly not in my mind. And I'm also very aware that the Post covers all presidents very aggressively, is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively. And the endorsement or non-endorsement isn't going to —
You did not think that was going to change anything?
Miss — a drop in the bucket. It won't change anything. If he likes you, he likes you. And if he doesn't like you, he's not going to like you anyway.
Well, I don't know — I mean, that's a different question. But if we're talking about Trump, I think it's very interesting — you're actually very optimistic this time around that we're going to see —
I'm very hopeful about this. He has a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him. Because we do have too much regulation in this country. This country is so set up to grow. By the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems — like if you look at the deficit, and the national debt, and how gigantic it is as a portion of GDP — these are real problems, and they're real long-term problems. And the way you get out of them is by outgrowing them. You're going to solve the problem of the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP — not by shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP. You have to grow the denominator, and that means you have to grow GDP at, you know, 3, 4, 5% a year, and let the national debt grow slower than that. If you can do that, this is a very manageable problem.
So we need a growth orientation in this country. This is the most important thing — a growth mindset. And we are the luckiest country in the world. We have all these natural resources, including energy independence. We have the best risk capital system in the world, by far. So, you know, people get confused about why does the United States have so much venture success, so much entrepreneurial success? Why are the big tech companies here and not somewhere else? What's really going on with all this dynamism in this country compared to what we see elsewhere in the world? And there are a bunch of reasons for that, but the biggest one — eight of ten points there — is that we have better risk capital. It's not the banking system. You know, we have a good banking system, but so does Europe, right? What's different here is that you can raise, you know, $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That's crazy. But the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive in many cases, or they're at least gambling that that's true.
That risk capital system that we have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other countries to duplicate. So we have that. We speak English, and English is turning into the lingua franca of the whole world. There's so many advantages here. But we are burdened by excessive permitting and regulation. You can't build a bridge — and all these things, you know what they are, we see these examples all the time. We need to be able to build solar fields and everything.
You're optimistic about this?
I'm super optimistic about this president, and the reason because I'm very optimistic that President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda, and I think he's going to — I think he has a good chance of succeeding.
What about the idea that he thinks the press is the enemy?
I think he — I'm going to try to talk him out of that idea. I don't think the press is the enemy. And I don't think — he's also, you've probably grown in the last eight years, he has too. Like, this is not the case — the press is not the enemy.
Have you — let's go persuade him of this.
No, let's — but you and I should go.
Let's go talk to him if we could try. I really don't think —
I think that this is absolutely — he — I don't think he's going to see it the same way, but maybe I'll be wrong.
Was that always your thought? By the way, what I've seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time, and more confident, more settled.
Let me ask one related question, and then I want to actually get into space. But it actually is an interesting segue to space, because we were talking earlier this morning to Sam Altman about Elon Musk and Elon Musk's relationship with the president. Interestingly, there's been a lot of questions about whether there could be the possibility that Elon, given his proximity, would make things difficult for people who are his competitors. Elon, in the space context, is your biggest competitor. Does this concern you?
Well, they're certainly very able competitors. I mean, this is an arena where I have the —
Oh, I know he's a great competitor. No, I'm saying does it concern you, his proximity?
No, I was headed there. They're certainly very good competitors, no doubt about that. I take at face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I take that at face value. Again, I could be wrong about that, but I think it could be true. I think he probably is trying to — I think this Department of Government Efficiency that he and Vivek are helping Trump with and so on. Again, I'd like to take — I've had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I've very rarely been taken advantage of as a result. It's happened a couple of times, but not very often. And I think that cynicism — why be cynical about that? Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done above board, in the public interest. And if that turns out to be naive, well, then we'll see. But I actually think it's going to be great.
I'm glad you could address it. It's something I think we all want to know. One, by the way, before I even get to space, Washington Post question — just because there's a lot of media people here. The big plan to save or fix the Washington Post — you've been a great innovator as it comes to Amazon and everything else. Do you have a big idea about how the Post is going to change, newspapers are going to change?
I have a bunch of ideas, and I'm working on that right now. And I have a couple of small inventions there. So we'll see. You know, we saved the Washington Post once. This will be the second time I would like to — it was saved, let's see, 2013, so 11 years ago. It took a couple of years. It made money for six or seven years after that. In the last few years it's lost money again, and it needs to be put back on a good footing again. The first time we did it by transitioning away from advertising to subscriptions, and also away from being a local paper to being a national paper. And there are many more details to it, but that was the basic formula that was used, and it was very successful. And we have a few other ideas, so stay tuned. We'll see.
Okay, here's my question to you about space. I think a lot of us watched you — this was just weeks after you stepped down as CEO of Amazon — you went aboard New Shepard as its first crewed flight. And I remember watching it on TV just like everybody else. This was 2021, and I know this is something you wanted to do literally since you were a kid. I mean, I went back and looked — there were articles and letters and people who said that when you were a child you were talking about this. So I was just curious if you could just take us back to that morning and what that felt like, because you have now put all of your eggs in the space basket, and what that was like, and how that might have even shifted your thinking about this.
You put all my eggs in the space basket? Well, it's not all my eggs. No, not all of them. I still have a huge investment in Amazon. I still spend a lot of time there too. I've actually never worked harder. This retirement thing — I've turned out to be extremely lame at. And so I'm waking up every morning and doing meetings from 9 to 7, and reading documents. Most of it is Blue Origin, but quite a bit of it is still Amazon too.
That morning, we're going to space. And I'll tell you about the overview effect, which everyone — we've now sent — New Shepard is our tourism vehicle. It takes people up in space. The whole journey takes 11 minutes. You're in space for 4 minutes. You go up above the Kármán line, 100 kilometers up. You see the curvature of the Earth, the thin limb of the Earth's atmosphere. It truly is a life-changing, transformative thing. Every astronaut, everybody who's ever been to space, has felt this. And it has a name — it's called the overview effect.
Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 astronaut and later moonwalker, has a beautiful quote. When he saw the Earth from space, he looked back and said, 'I realize you don't go to heaven when you die — you go to heaven when you're born.' And that's how beautiful this planet is. And you may have seen William Shatner when he flew on New Shepard, and he came back — he saw everything, the blackness and how there's the nothing, and he described it as death. And said, 'Look, this is the one little pool of life that we have in this entire solar system.' It's truly incredible, and you get — it is a profound experience that's hard to describe.
But that morning something else happened to me that was very personal. We're getting ready to go at 4:45 in the morning. My whole family is there — some close friends, extended family, 35, 40 people there. And by the way, I'm going on the first human flight of this vehicle, so it's never flown people before. And my poor mother — what's worse is I'm bringing my brother with me. So it's me and my brother. And we wake up, getting ready to go to the launch site, and kind of — we weren't really expected, but everybody of course is awake and there to say goodbye. But they thought they were saying goodbye forever. And that was surprising to me. I wasn't expecting this, but they were genuinely terrified for us.
But it was paradoxically for my brother and me, it felt really good to us because we got to see how loved we were. And it was very — my kids and my sister and my mom and my dad and these close friends — it's easy to know what's going on inside your own head. It's easy to know that you love people. To know how much you're loved by others is not always as obvious. And so to see that concern was very meaningful, very emotional. That was a kind of unexpected — the overview effect I talked to astronauts, I knew I was in store for something special, but it was very interesting to have that feeling from my family too.
Did that change the way you've thought about everything you're doing with Blue Origin, in terms of what this is all about? You've said that the reason we've got to go to space, in your view, is to save Earth. Does that come from being up there and looking at that?
That was for whatever reason, since I'm a teenager. In fact, there's a high school newspaper article — my Miami Palmetto Senior High — they wrote an article about my space plans, which I would tell everyone who would stand still long enough about. And those plans included what I still think, what I'm still working on, which is moving all polluting industry off Earth. So my view — but I know that sounds fantastical, so I beg the indulgence of this audience to bear with me for a moment — but it's not fantastical. This is going to happen. And we need to lower the cost of access to space low enough. And that's what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is all about. That's the big, super-heavy launch vehicle that's — so now it's literally on the pad now, waiting for regulatory approval. It needs its final regulatory approvals to launch, so we're very, very close.
And if we can lower the costs enough — and we will — I mean, it may take, who knows how many years it will take, but we can set up the preconditions where the next generation or the generation after that will be able to move polluting industry off Earth. And then this planet will be maintained as it should be, and you know, can kind of be zoned residential and light industry. And if you want to use large amounts of energy and large amounts of pollutants and so on, you go do that off Earth. And so we get the best of both — we get to have this energy-intensive civilization and use ever more energy per capita, and get all the benefits that we get from that, which are many, by the way.
You don't want to go back in time. And it's really important to think about — when people talk about the good old days, that is such an illusion. Almost everything is better today than it was. Infant mortality is better. Global illiteracy is better. Global poverty is far better. Everything really is better today. There's one exception to that, which is the natural world. The natural world — if you go back in time 500 years, we had pristine oceans, pristine rivers, pristine forests. And that's part of the trade we've made, is we're kind of using up the natural world here. But space has, for all practical purposes, infinite energy, infinite raw materials. So that's —
It's a very interesting philosophical choice, because one of the things you're talking about is trying to save the Earth. And I was going to say that a number of other people, including I think Musk and others, say that we need an escape hatch from Earth. We need to all move to Mars, because Earth is not going to be saved. Do you see that?
No. We have to save — so first of all, there is no Plan B. We have to save Earth. We've sent robotic probes to all of the planets in this solar system. This is the good one. And we must save it. We cannot — look, we can live — we can choose how we want to live. It is not impossible — if you think about climate change and so on, some of the issues that we face here because of the way we're doing things currently — you could imagine a world with enough technological sophistication where we can turn Earth into sort of a giant spaceship. You know, like, air-conditioned —
No, I know. But I'm saying air-conditioned planet, and you know, kind of pave the whole thing and turn it — that's a bad future. We don't need to do that. Turning Earth into — take the whole thing and turning it into a human construct and destroying this natural ecosystem, when it's so unique and such a gem — that's not the right way to do it. So we should move all that off Earth. And we will, because we won't do it the wrong way. And you know why we won't? Because humans value beauty and art.
I have a ranch in West Texas. It's actually also where the launch site for the suborbital vehicle is. And on that ranch, you can, in many different places, go and find arrowheads and ancient pottery. And some of the pottery is 7,000 years old. And that was a hard-scrabble, subsistence-level life. And that pottery is decorated. So here are these people who are in a desert environment, scraping for water and food, and yet they're taking the time to paint their pottery. What does that tell you about our values? Humans value beauty and art. We're not going to destroy this planet.
Let me ask you two other related space questions. I had the opportunity to tour Blue Origin in the fall, and one of the things that everybody down there talks about is this idea of going to the moon and then using the moon. In fact, the phrase that one of your colleagues used was, 'We're going to use the moon — the moon is going to be like JFK, the airport, because we're going to send stuff to the moon, and then from the moon we're going to go to Mars. It's like a pit stop along the way.' And I thought that was sort of a very interesting process.
Yeah, there's a very strong argument to be made that the moon is a good stepping stone to the rest of the solar system. And the reason for that — because the moon has a much, much lower gravity level than the Earth, and because it has a lot of very important minerals and also water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles of the moon. And ice can be — water can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, which happen to be the very best, highest-performing rocket propellants. And so it takes — if you want to raise a kilogram of mass from the Earth, it takes 28 times as much energy as raising that same kilogram from the moon. So to the degree that you can get raw materials from the moon — which is again, we're talking about a couple of generations in the future — but to the degree that you can get raw materials from the moon instead of from Earth, those materials will allow you to build spaceships and to fuel those spaceships, and to build solar arrays and all these other things that you want to do, but using lunar resources instead of Earth resources. And then it would provide a very convenient stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.
Dave Limp, who retired to run Blue Origin for you as CEO, said apparently when he was interviewing with you, he said, 'Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?' What did you tell him?
It's a business. It's not a very good business yet. We're investing — no, it'll be — look, I think it's going to be, from a business point of view, from a financial returns point of view, I think it's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in. But it's going to take a while.
So let me ask you a different question, which is — I remember just being down there, the scale of everything. I wish you could all just go and see it, it is so remarkable. You sort of look at the scale and you can't even understand what is happening around you. It's sort of so hard to fathom, just the size of it all. And it made me think about confidence. We were actually talking to Serena Williams earlier today about confidence, and I was thinking to myself, it's easy for her, she just has to be the best in the world. Well, but this is going to go to you too, which is — when you started Amazon, that was a business that had to scale, and you had to see the scale to work. I remember for years, I was covering it, I would be writing about when you were losing money left, right, and center, everyone thought this whole thing was crazy.
We lost money for 11 years.
The scale of it — people thought it was insane. And if you go down to Florida, to Cape Canaveral, and you see the scale of this thing, you say, 'My God, this is insane.' Tom Brokaw interviewed me one time about Amazon's losses, and he looked at me and he said, 'Mr. Bezos, can you even spell profit?'
