Please please welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin and his guest, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos. Jeffrey Bezos.
Entrepreneurs, we talk a lot about people of consequence on this stage. There's no question Jeff has changed the way we live. In 1994 he founded Amazon as an online bookseller out of his garage in Seattle. Today Amazon is one of the most valuable companies. Now he's focused far beyond Earth to outer space through Blue Origin, racing to the moon and Mars. His New Glenn heavy lift booster is expected to launch any day. Meanwhile, his Bezos Earth Fund has granted $2 billion so far. And of course he also owns the Washington Post. The reason I want to start with that — because I think as we all saw the election play out and the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate, it became a microcosm of so many things: a Rorschach test for people and their politics, a question about trust in media, about influence, about business interests. I was hoping you could help us with this story. In your own words, take us back to the two weeks before the election when that decision was made and what happened.
The Washington Post did not endorse a presidential candidate for many decades. The founder of the modern Post, Eugene Meyer, whose words are still inscribed in the lobby, was against it because he thought an independent newspaper shouldn't endorse presidential candidates. After Watergate, the Post started endorsing. So we were talking about this in that timeframe. It hadn't come up before. We decided it wasn't going to help. First of all, it wasn't going to influence the election either way. We're struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with: a very difficult and significant loss of trust. Trust surveys have been going down for four decades. The media has always been able to hang on to a small positive—they're always above Congress—but this year they lost even that. These endorsements were very small and added to the perception of bias. If newspapers are going to try to be objective and independent, they have to pass the same requirement as a voting machine: they have to count the votes accurately, and people have to believe they count the votes accurately. Both requirements are just as important. Not all of it is the media's fault; there are external factors. But where we can do something, we should.
Okay, let me ask you—you know there was blowback. I want to read you this... Marty Baron was effectively suggesting that given the timing, it would have been better for perception reasons to have thought about this topic two years before. But in fact we made this decision. It was the right decision. I'm proud of it, and it was far from cowardly because we knew there would be blowback and we did the right thing anyway. Okay, so there was blowback: 250,000 people canceled their subscriptions. Did you think that some people would say this actually creates less trust in media? I mean, part of it was aimed at creating more trust in media, and at the same time these things punch above their weight. Did you worry about that? You can't do the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR. So this was the right decision. I'm very proud of it.
So let me just ask you one related question. You said in your opinion piece that when it comes to the appearance of conflict, 'I am not the ideal owner... no, I'm a terrible owner of the Post for the Post.' From the Earth Fund leader meeting with a government official, there are always going to be appearances of conflict. A pure newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper would be a much better owner from that point of view. The advantage I bring to the Post is that when they need financial resources, I'm available. I'm like the doting parent in that regard. I think the fundamental question is whether... the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have been writing about it. It's whether, given that you had lived through that—no, I don't think so. That was certainly not in my mind. The Post covers all presidents very aggressively and will continue to do so. The endorsement or non-endorsement isn't going to change anything. It's a drop in the bucket. Won't change anything. If he likes you, he likes you; if he doesn't, he's not going to like you anyway. Well, that's a different question. But if we're talking about Trump, I think it's very interesting. I'm actually very optimistic this time around. I'm very hopeful that we're going to see... We need to grow our way out of problems. All our economic problems, like the deficit and national debt as a percentage of GDP, are real long-term problems. The way out is by outgrowing them. Solve the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP, not by shrinking the debt but by growing the denominator. We need to grow GDP at 3, 4, 5% a year. We have the best risk capital system in the world by far. People get confused about why the US has so much venture success. The biggest reason is we have better risk capital. It's not the banking system; Europe has that. What's different is you can raise capital. The expected value is still positive in many cases. That risk capital system is hard for other countries to duplicate. We also speak English, which is becoming the lingua franca. But we are burdened by excessive permitting and regulation. We need to be able to build bridges, solar fields, everything. I'm super optimistic about this President because I believe President Trump is serious about this regulatory agenda. I think he's also grown in the last eight years. The press is not the enemy. I hope you're right. Let's go persuade him of this. But I really don't think he's going to see it the same way. Maybe I'll be wrong. Was that always your thought? What I've seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time, more confident.
Interestingly, there's been a lot of questions about whether Elon, given his proximity, would make things difficult for his competitors. Elon in the space context is your biggest competitor. Does this concern you?
Well, they're certainly very able competitors. This is an arena where... 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 it again, I could be wrong, 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—again, I've had a lot of success in life by not being cynical. I've very rarely been taken advantage of. It's happened a couple of times but not often. Why be cynical? 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.
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 with 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. I have a couple of small inventions. We'll see. We saved the Washington Post once; this will be the second time. In 2013, 11 years ago, it took a couple of years, it made money for six or seven years after that. The basic formula was moving from print to subscriptions and from being a local paper to a national paper. We have a few other ideas, so stay tuned.
Okay, here's my question about space. I think a lot of us watched you weeks after you stepped down as CEO of Amazon, you went aboard New Shepard as its first crew flight. I remember watching it on TV. I know this is something you wanted to do since you were a kid. I went back and looked: there were articles and letters that said when you were a child you were talking about... Might have even shifted your thinking about this. You put all your eggs in the space basket.
Well, you mean you have a huge investment in space. Yes, but it's not all my eggs. Not all of them. I still have a huge investment in Amazon. I spend a lot of time there. I've never worked harder. This retirement thing I'm extremely lame at. I wake up every morning and do meetings from 9 to 7, reading documents. Most of it is Blue Origin but quite a bit is still Amazon. That morning, we're going to space. I'll tell you about the overview effect. We've now sent 6%? New Shepard is our tourism vehicle. It's a life-changing, transformative thing. Every astronaut has felt this—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, 'You don't go to heaven when you die; you go to heaven when you're born.' That's how beautiful this planet is. You may have seen William Shatner when he flew on New Shepard; he came back and saw... an experience hard to describe. But that morning something happened to me that was very personal. We were getting ready to go at 4:45 in the morning. My whole family was there, close friends, extended family, 35-40 people. I'm going on the first human flight of this vehicle; it's never flown people before. My poor mother—what's worse, I'm bringing my brother with me. We wake up getting ready to go to the launch site. I wasn't expecting this, but they were genuinely terrified for us. Paradoxically, for my brother and me, it felt really good because we got to see how loved we were. My kids, my sister, my mom, my dad, these close friends. It's easy to know what's going on inside your own head, it's easy to know you love people. It's not as obvious how much you're loved by others. To see that... did that change the way you've thought about everything you're doing with Blue Origin? What this is all about? You've said the reason we've got to go to space is to save Earth. Did that come from being up there? For whatever reason, since I'm a teenager, there's a high school newspaper article from Miami Palmetto Senior High about my space plans. Those plans... bear with me, it's not fantastical. This is going to happen. We need to lower the cost of access to space low enough. That's what New Glenn, our orbital vehicle, is about. It's literally on the pad now, waiting for regulatory approval. We're very close. If we can lower the costs enough, we can set up the preconditions where the next generation or the generation after that will be able to move heavy industry off Earth. We use large amounts of energy and produce pollutants; you go do that off Earth. We get the best of both: energy-intensive civilization and ever more energy per capita. You don't want to go back in time. The good old days are an illusion. Almost everything is better today: infant mortality, global illiteracy, global poverty. There's one exception: the natural world. The natural world here is finite, but space has infinite energy and raw materials. It's a philosophical choice. Some people, like Musk, say we need an escape hatch from Earth, move to Mars because Earth can't be saved. No, we have to save Earth. There is no plan B. We've sent robotic probes to all the planets; this is the good one. We must save it. We can imagine a world with enough technological sophistication to turn Earth into a giant spaceship, air-conditioned planet, paving the whole thing—that's a bad future. We don't need to destroy this natural ecosystem when it's so unique and such a gem. So we should move all that off Earth. We will, because we won't do it the wrong way. You see arrowheads and ancient pottery 7,000 years old. Hard-scrabble subsistence life, yet they decorated their pottery. That tells you about human values. We value beauty and art. We're not going to destroy this planet.
Let me ask you two other space questions. I had the opportunity to tour Blue Origin in the fall. Everybody down there says we're going to send stuff to the moon, then from the moon to Mars—it's like a pit stop. I thought that was a very interesting process.
There's a very strong argument that the Moon is a good stepping stone to the rest of the solar system because of its much lower gravity and because it has important minerals and water ice. Water can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, which are rocket fuel. If you can get raw materials from the Moon instead of Earth, you can build spaceships, fuel them, build solar arrays using lunar resources. It would provide a convenient stepping stone. Dave Limp, who came to run Blue Origin as CEO, said when he interviewed with you he asked, 'Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?' What did you tell him? I told him from a business point of view, I think it's going to be the best business I've ever been involved in, but it's going to take a while. Bigger than Amazon? Yes.
