Jeff Bezos on Innovation, Thinking and Building for the Future | America Business Forum 2025

Thank you, mayor.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Well, this little kid who went here in high school 40 plus years ago was dreaming at that time of building a space company that would one day take heavy polluting industry off Earth. And this guy sitting here on stage with you is still dreaming the same dream 40 years later. That kid was also working at the McDonald's on Dixie and 130th Street. I recently took Lauren there. We drove through the drive-thru, got Big Macs and chicken nuggets. It looks exactly the same as it did 40 years ago. That was a great job, by the way. I learned a lot. Be on time. You have to start at the bottom. I cleaned the bathrooms. You learn a lot. The ketchup dispenser got stuck open one day. Five gallons of ketchup all over the floor. Then who do you think they asked to clean it up? This guy.

Tech has completely transformed over the last 40 years. It's an incredible city today. It has the energy and the dynamism. I love the Latin part of the culture here. There's so much energy. It's so alive. And I have personal reasons, too. My dad is Cuban. He's here in Miami. This city has such good energy. You can just feel it. As soon as I land, I feel that energy. As soon as the plane gets on the ground, I feel that energy.

Well, all big things start small.

So you've got to accept that that's the way it is. And you've got to plant an acorn and work hard and water it and nurture it and maybe it grows into a big tree. For me, I made that decision and I knew that if I didn't try, I would always be haunted by that. I would always have regret. I would always wonder what might have been. And I think that's the best way when you're making a deeply personal decision about your own life. You can make pros and cons lists. You can be as analytical as you want, but at the end of the day, you have to project yourself forward. You know, age 80, we're all living longer now, maybe age 90, and say, do I want to be haunted by that regret? I want to minimize the number of regrets I have in my life. And when you start thinking that way, looking back on your life from age 90, most regrets are acts of omission. They're things we didn't do.

So we live in a very dynamic world and everything changes. Technologies change, your competitive set changes. So many things are changing every day. You can't build a strategy on those. You have to build a strategy around stability. So you have to find the things that are not going to change and say, 10 years from now, what's going to be the same? And most of those things are going to be customer needs. So as you were saying, examples for Amazon would be low prices, fast delivery. Nobody 10 years from now is going to say, 'I love Amazon. I just wish they delivered a little more slowly.' That's impossible. And you can use this for anything. At Blue Origin, we have a rocket launch coming up this Sunday. I'm very anxious about it.

Excited and anxious. It's the second time we've launched the vehicle. It's a giant vehicle called New Glenn. But I can use this method. What do we focus on for something like that vehicle? It's the same kinds of things that we know our customers will want. Nobody's going to say 10 years from now, 'I love New Glenn. I just wish it was a little more expensive,' or 'I love New Glenn. I just wish it was a little less reliable.' In the context of being a mayor of a city, the same thing works. You can say, 'Look, 10 years from now, is anybody going to say, I love Miami. I just wish the crime was a little worse,' or 'I love Miami. I wish the ambulances came more slowly or that the taxes were higher.' These things are so fundamental. And when you pin them down, you can put energy into them, making them better and better. If the ambulances take 11 minutes to come, then maybe you work on getting it to be 10 and a half minutes, then 10 minutes, then 9 minutes. That's how you can make a city great. And that's one of the things that people, often in business, make this mistake. They focus too much on what's changing instead of what's not changing.

Well, it's a very interesting question. First of all, if you're running any organization of any scale whatsoever, it is essential to have data and to rely on data. If you're not, that's so basic and fundamental. But the data doesn't tell you everything. It often doesn't tell you about changes or things that you're missing or things that you're not measuring properly. That's where anecdotes come into play, and that's where intuition and gut instinct and heart come into play. A lot of those things are new. The biggest things that we've done at Amazon, and it's going to be true in space for Blue Origin as well, it's true in AI, a lot of them come from instinct and hunches. If you take Echo and Alexa, which has been a fantastically successful product for us, installed in hundreds of millions of endpoints, nobody was asking for a black cylinder that's always on that you can talk to for music and to turn your lights on and off and set timers. We didn't know if people would want that. You just have to use your intuition. AWS, again, nobody was asking for that. We had to use our intuition. Third-party marketplace. We've been working on doing cloud computing in space at Blue Origin because you get eight times as much solar power per unit of area in space as you do on Earth. So in principle, you could make data centers in space that would be very efficient. That's something Blue Origin is working on, and a lot of other companies are working on that, but that's not something you can be sure is going to work. You don't know what launch costs are going to be. So technically it works, but there are a lot of mysteries about it too. And this is, I think, when you're talking about invention, you have to be a wanderer. You have to wander because if you're not wandering, you're going in a straight line. That means you know where you're going, and a lot of the most important discoveries and inventions don't come from knowing where you're going.

Well, for me, there are a bunch of reasons. Literally since I was a kid here in Miami, I have been thinking that ultimately, if we want to keep growing our civilization and using more energy per person, we're eventually going to have to move all of our heavy industry off Earth. And that will happen. I know it sounds a little fantastical, maybe like science fiction to some degree, but it will happen. I don't know how soon. It's a job that I won't finish. Probably my children's children won't finish. This is something that multiple generations will work on, but it will happen. I just mentioned one of the first steps: we already put a lot of communications in space. We can start to build factories in space. We can start to build data centers in space. We will ultimately get the materials not from Earth but from the moon and near-Earth objects and asteroids. We have unlimited energy in space and unlimited material resources in space. And this planet is so beautiful and so unusual. This is the one we're going to want to protect. There's no plan B. We've sent robotic probes to every planet. This is the good one.

Well, I'm fundamentally an inventor. It's the thing I do the best. It's the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm a good brainstormer. I love problem solving. And to me, the creation of new ideas is what drives the world forward. Somebody 10,000 years ago invented the plow, and when they invented the plow, they made the whole world wealthier. That's what happens. Every discovery, every invention, somebody invented penicillin and they made the whole world better. They discovered it, perfected it, and expanded it to other antibiotics. We sort of go one invention at a time. The world gets more prosperous. That's my mindset. That's how I think about the world. I don't think there's any problem that, if we apply human ingenuity to it, we can't solve. And it's fun to do that too.

And rightly so, by the way.

Heavily involved in AI. I spent a lot of time at it at Amazon and at Blue Origin and with some startup companies that I'm investing in. It is everything it's cracked up to be. Investors right now are investing in everything, the good ideas, the bad ideas, but the fundamentals of what are happening are very powerful, and it will impact every industry and make every industry more productive. You'll see medicine, diagnosis will get better, drug discovery will get better, but literally you can go through every single industry, and it's going to make everything better. In Miami, you should have an AI application that reads your building permit for a new house or a new building and gives you a yes or a no in 10 seconds. And if the answer is no, it should tell you the six things you have to change to get a yes. Why does it take months and months to get a building permit? It doesn't make any sense.

Exactly. This is a business opportunity. This is a hundred billion dollar business, by the way. Huge business. Most things like permitting processes in government, at the state, municipal, or federal level, they almost always say yes, they just make you wait a long time.

So if they're going to say yes, can we do that quickly?

And maybe with AI, it can just read all the plans and know all the codes and spit it out.

Yep. And let me tell you what people don't realize. A big building in Miami is a multi-billion dollar enterprise. So you're talking about half a billion, a billion dollars in lending cost. The daily carrying cost, one day of interest, is $200,000 to $400,000 per day. So every day it takes costs the developer, the ultimate user, $400,000 a day.