Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on The David Rubenstein Show

You have become the wealthiest man in the world. It was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world; that actually worked fine. What propelled you to sell things more than books? I thought to myself, we can sell anything this way. Who came up with the idea of Prime? What happens when you offer a free all-you-can-eat buffet? Who shows up to the buffet first? The heavy eaters.

There are some people who criticize some things that The Washington Post says. I have no idea what you're talking about. Would you fix your tie, please? Well, people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed, but okay, just leave it this way. All right. [Music]

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 this year. Is there one thing that you think is responsible for that, or several things? Because 70 is pretty good.

Now, I have been lecturing. We have all-hands meetings at Amazon, and for 20 years, ever since we've been about 21 years now, in 1997, at almost every all-hands meeting, I said, look, when the stock is up 30 percent in a month, don't feel 30 percent smarter, because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month, it's not going to feel so good to feel 30 percent dumber. And that's what happens. Never spend 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. Is that a title that you really wanted, or not? Isn't it? I can't assure you I have never sought that title. It was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world; that actually worked fine. It's not... It isn't a... It... I would say it's something people naturally are curious about. You know, it's a kind of 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.

The, you know, it's an output measure that if you look at the financial success of Amazon, and the stock— I own 16% of Amazon, and Amazon's worth roughly a trillion dollars— that means that what we have built over 20 years, we have built 840 billion dollars of wealth for other people. And that's great! That's how it should be, you know? 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 near, in Seattle or outside of Seattle? Now, the man who was the richest man for about 20 years is named 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 any more houses for sale there?

That's right. After I saw Bill, not too long ago, I, you know, we were joking about the world's richest man thing, and I basically said, thank you. You know, I said, you're welcome. And he immediately turned to me and said, thank you. But no, Medina is a great little suburb of Seattle, and you know, I don't think there's anything special in the water there. And, 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.

If you go into a store when you want to buy something, do you have to put a credit card down? You to say I'm Jeff Bezos and they send you the stuff? How do you do that? And you have to care? You carry cash around? Or you carry... yeah, I think I do carry cash, and I have credit cards, yeah. If you're credit, I have to show my driver's license and you know... but have you ever had a credit card denied? Does that never happen? I have; I've had my credit card denied.

So what are you saying when that? You say don't you know who I am? I give him another credit card. I stay here; try this one. Okay, so you made an announcement that is the most significant philanthropic gift you've made in this type. It was about a year ago; you said you wanted to look for some good philanthropic ideas, and you got, I think, 47,000 of them. And you reviewed them. How did you decide where to put this two billion dollars? And would you describe exactly what you are to?

Well, that process was very helpful. So, I solicited ideas, kind of crowdsourced, and I got literally, as you said, something like 47,000. Maybe even a little more! Some of them 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 is 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 of all kinds. I'm very interested in early education, and I may... you know the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My mother has become, in running the Bezos Family Foundation, she has become an expert in early education. I'm a student of Montessori schools; I started at Montessori when I was two years old.

The teacher complained to my mother, the Montessori school teacher, complained to my mother that I was too task-focused and that 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. Did that teacher ever call you since and said she was responsible for your success? No, I'm in touch with several of my elementary school teachers, though, but I don't know any of my Montessori school teachers.

Okay, so the gift that you're giving essentially you're going to have some for preschool for children who need preschool— free, treat full tuition preschool, Montessori inspired. I'm very excited about that because I'm going to operate that. That's going to be an operating non-profit, and we're going to 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 they're two, three, or four years old, by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they're much less likely to fall behind. It 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 going to identify, with the help of a team, identify, fund, vet, and fund family homeless shelters. And that will be... you said you would give an initial two billion dollars, 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 budget at Blue Origin was very, very small. Now the budget of Blue Origin approaches a billion dollars a year, and next year, it'll be more than a billion dollars. In Amazon, it literally was 10 people. Today it's half a million people. But 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. 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 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 so anyway, the Day One Foundation is going to be like that. We'll wander a little bit too. So we have some very specific ideas about 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 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 too.

And the customer is going to be the child. This is so important because the secret sauce of Amazon— where there are 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 talk so often to other CEOs and some other COs 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 competitor.

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? No, the customer is the reader. And in school, who are the customers? Is it the parents? Is it the teachers? No, it is the child. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to be obsessively compulsively focused on the child. We're going to be scientific when we can be, and we're going to use heart and intuition when we want to.

When you use your intuition, make decisions: where is the intuition leading you now on your second headquarters? All right, can we just take a moment to acknowledge that that may be the best segue in the history of interviewing? Seriously, David, that is... that is all right. That's amazing! The answer is very simple: 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 a little bit around the edges.

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 a newspaper. I had never thought about the idea; it had never occurred to me. It was never something— it wasn't like a childhood dream, 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 Don, over a series of conversations, convinced me that that was unimportant because we had inside The Washington Post 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.

So that was the first thing; that's kind of how it got started. And then I did some soul searching. And again, my decision-making process on something like this would definitely be intuition and not analysis. 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 eroding 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 going to do it, I'm going to 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 it 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! So as soon as I had passed through that gate, I only had one more gate that I had to go through before telling Don yes. And that was I wanted to look at myself, you know, be really open with myself and look in the 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 not something I would get involved in. And I looked at that, and I was super optimistic. It needed to be transitioned 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 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 of money per reader on a very large number of readers, and that's the transition that we did.

Last night, 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 agreed to buy it, I think the asking price was 250 million dollars. You didn't negotiate? No, I asked him how much he wanted; he said 250. I said, fine! I didn't negotiate with him, and I did no due diligence. And I wouldn't need to with Don; he had something I'd like to sell! [Laughter]

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. Well, 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 going to say, never been an elected official who liked their headlines. I think there's probably no public figure who has ever liked their headlines.

It's okay; it's part of the process. You know, if you're the President of the United States or a governor of a state or whatever, you don't take that job thinking you're not gonna get scrutinized. You're going to get scrutinized, and it's healthy. And somebody very... you know 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 the press. It's in the Constitution. We... but what we... but it's also the social norms that protect us. It works because we believe those words on that piece of paper, and every time you attack that, you're eroding a little bit around the edges. Now look, I don't want to be dramatic here; we are so robust in this country. The media is going to 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 an early age, were you a pretty smart student, and your teachers tell you this? You know, you were good? 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 are a lot of kinds of stupid too, 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 ultimately moved to high school in Miami, and then you were valedictorian in every 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 lost my library privileges because I laughed too loudly in the library. And what about that laugh? Where did you get that laugh from? You know, it 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... I laugh easily and often. The people who know me, you know, ask my mom or anybody who knows me well, and they'll say, if Jeff's unhappy, wait five minutes.

I was packing boxes on my hands and knees with somebody else, and standing next to me, kneeling next to me. We're packing, and I said, you know what? We need knee pads; this is 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!

You graduated as valedictorian, 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 computers. You graduated summa cum laude. I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa—Phi Beta Kappa!

And then you went into the highest calling of mankind: finance. Yes, I went to New York City, and I ended up working at a quantitative hedge fund run by a brilliant man named David Shaw—D.E. Shaw & 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 going to start a company selling books over the internet? I'm going to 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. I came across the fact that the web, the World Wide Web, was growing at something like 200 to 300 percent a year. This is in 1994! 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 and to 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 sell online. 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.

There are three million different books active and in print around the world at any given time, so my 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, we built... we built the software, I moved to Seattle.

You told your parents you were going to quit D.E. Shaw, where you're successful, making presumably a fair amount of money. And you told your wife, Mackenzie, that you're going to 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?

Right, and so no, but this is right. You know, with your loved ones, you bet on them. You're not betting on the idea; you're betting on the person. And that was— that and it's one of those decisions I made with my heart and not my head. I basically said I don't want to regret, I don't—when I'm 80, now 90—I want to minimize 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, to the post office yourself? I still... I don't still deliver, but I was doing that for years. And I was packing boxes on my hands and knees on the first month; I was packing boxes on my hands and knees on the hard cement floors. And with somebody else, and standing next to me, kneeling next to me, we're packing, and I said, you know what? We need knee pads, this is 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, and 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 started selling music, and then we started selling videos, and then I got smart! And I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them, besides the things we sell today, what would you like to see us sell? And that answer came back incredibly long-tailed.

The way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment. Like, I remember one of the answers was, I wish you sold windshield wiper blades because I really need windshield wiper blades. And I thought to myself, we can sell anything this way! And then, so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time.

The division 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 6 or something like that. At the peak of the internet bubble, our stock peaked somewhere around 113 dollars, and then after the internet bubble, you know, busted open, our stock went down to 6. It went from 113 to 6 in less than a year.

So 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 survived. What was that that made you to survive and virtually the rest of them are gone?

It's very— that whole period is very interesting because the stock is not the company, and the company is not the stock. And so as I watch the stock fall from 113 to 6, 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, 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, a financial bust like the internet bubble bursting is it makes it really hard to raise money. 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's the profits? Where are 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 accused us of selling dollar bills for 90 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, 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! Whose idea actually? It's very interesting. So like many inventions inside of a team, and I love team inventing—it's 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 it can never work, and then we solve those objections, and it's a very fun process!

We're always wondering, what could a loyalty program be? And then actually, 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 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 be 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 we make mistakes—and we've made doozies, like the Fire Phone and many other things that just didn't work out—I could 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 as many prawns as you can eat?

And so that is what happened, but surely we could see the trend lines; we could see that, you know, the diff all kinds of customers were coming and they appreciated that service.

You sit around with your team and so forth, but you don't like meetings before 10 a.m. No, you like to get eight hours of sleep and you don't like PowerPoints. Explain all that; why is that?

Okay, many... so I like to putter in the morning. I get up early; I go to bed early. I get up early, I like to putter in the mornings, 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 is 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 p.m. I'm like, I can't think about that today; let's try this again tomorrow at 10 a.m. And so then on sleep, I get eight 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 for me, I need to sleep; I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better, all these things.

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 job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. Is that really worth it, if the quality of the decisions might be lower because you're tired or grouchy or any number of things? Now it's different if it's a startup company. I mean, you know, when Amazon was 100 people, that's a different story. 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 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'm 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, then why do I need to make 100 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.

Now, one of the other companies you started within your company is 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!

When you buy over the internet Amazon, do you ever get the wrong order? Is anything ever wrong? What do you do? Do you call up and complain, or you don't have any problems?

No, I am a customer of Amazon, hopefully like all of you. Is there one person full-time service is your account in this room who's not an Amazon customer? See me right afterwards, and I'll walk you through it. It's um, I... yeah, I have problems sometimes, and I treat them the same way I treat a problem that I would get from a customer.

My email address is famous, and I keep it, and I read it; it's jeff@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. I'll get one from a customer, and there's a defect; you know, we've done something wrong.

That's usually people are writing us, not always, but usually they're writing because we've screwed up their order somehow, and I look at this, and for some reason, something seems a little odd about that one, and so I'll ask the team to do a case study 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.

So you've revolutionized retail, as I say, but now you're in the bricks-and-mortar business: you bought Whole Foods. That was the theory behind buying something that doesn't sell things over the internet. We're very interested in physical stores, and we haven't... I’ve been asked for years: will we ever open physical stores? Literally, for 20 years, I’ve been asked the question, and I always say, yes, but only when we have a differentiated offering, something that's not me too because that space—physical stores—is so well served. If we offer a me too product offering, it's not gonna work.

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. Our culture is much better at pioneering and inventing, and so we have to have something that's different, and that's what Amazon Go is; it's completely different! The Amazon bookstore is 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 going to be able to do is take some of our resources, some of our technological know-how, and expand the Whole Foods mission they have—a great mission—which is to bring nourishing food to everybody, organic nourishing food to everybody. 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 within your company, which is technologically a superior company, is Amazon Web Services. Where did the idea come from? AWS? We started it, I don't know, a long time ago now. Fifteen years ago, and worked on it behind the scenes for a long time, and then finally launched it.

It has become a very large company, and at AWS, we completely reinvented the way that companies buy 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 I'll give you like… when I launched Amazon.com in 1995, Barnes & Noble launched barnesandnoble.com in 1997. Two years! That's very typical! If you invent something new, we launched Kindle; Barnes & Noble launched Nook two years later. We launched Echo; Google launched Google Home two years later. When you pioneer, if you're lucky, you get a two-year head start. Nobody gets a seven-year head start, and so that was incredible.

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 runway to build this incredible 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, here's what I think about that. I have a couple—I get asked this question frequently. I thought it was an original question—no, sorry you 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 non-profits, big companies— they're going to get scrutiny. It's not personal; it's kind of what we, as a society, want to have happen. So that's one thing, and I remind people internally when that, 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 going to want low prices, they're still going to want fast delivery, they're still going to want big selection.

It's really important that politicians and others understand the value that big companies bring and not demonize or vilify business in general, or especially not business—well, they shouldn't vilify big companies, and they certainly shouldn’t vilify business in general, for sure. And the reason is simple: there are certain things only big companies can do.

I love, you know, garage entrepreneurs; I 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 it's 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 moving out into the solar system.

One of your passions is not just Amazon, but it's outer space and space travel and Blue 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 into it every year; next year it'll be more.

For the first time... all right, and what are you going to get out of it? Are we going to have people going to space? What is the purpose? This is the most important work I'm doing, and I have great conviction about that. It is 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!

This gem of a planet, we're finally, as a species, big enough to really impact it. And so, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, Earth was really big, and humanity was really small. That's not true anymore! And so we face a choice. As we move forward, we're going to have to decide whether we want a civilization of stasis, which we could do; 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 takes a lot of energy, and, uh, 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 and a thousand Mozarts! 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 so, 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 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! It 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, two kids in a dorm room made this half trillion dollar market cap company in an incredibly less than two decades.

That's unbelievable! And so, but that can't happen in space. There's no way two 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 used UPS and FedEx and so on to build Amazon!

And that, 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! Um, that's a famous line I like, but my... but the real thing is I, you know, it'll be whatever it's going to be. I'm going to be proud of the things I want.

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 as few regrets as possible. And I don't— you know, what will my legacy be? I have no idea, and I don't even want to spend a lot of time thinking... you intend to give away the bulk of your fortune at some point in your life?

I tend to give away, I don't know how much of it I'm going to give away. I'm going to 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 a non-profit at some distant point in the future.

But that would be... I would be, I wouldn't want that! I want... I want it to be a thriving ecosystem more like UPS and FedEx. So let's just close with your wife; we haven't mentioned her yet. We met in New York City at D.E. Shaw & Co. where we worked. We got engaged; we got... we dated for three months, were engaged for three months, and then got married, so our whole kind of dating engagement period was only six months long.

It's uh... 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 here in the audience, and um, my parents are... I thank you guys. [Applause] You know, you get different gifts in life, and one of the great gifts I got is my mom and dad! It's amazing! My highest admiration is withheld for those people; we all know some of them, I know several of them who had terrible parents.

Maybe they were abusive, whatever it is, and some of those people who, who so admirably break that cycle and pull out and make that all work—I did not have that situation; I was always loved. My parents loved me unconditionally, 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 life, went to bat for her because the high school wanted to kick her out. You weren't allowed to be pregnant in high school there, 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, 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 dad—my dad is my real dad, not my biological dad; his name is Mike. He's a Cuban immigrant; got a scholarship to college in Albuquerque, which is where I met my mom.

So I have 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 four, he would take me every summer on his ranch, and it was the most spectacular! From age four to sixteen, I basically spent every summer working alongside him on the ranch. He was the most resourceful man! He did all his own veterinary work—he would even make his own needles.

He would pound the wire with the oxy-acetylene torch 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! 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, um, it's just a really big deal, and my grandfather too—he was like a second set of parents for me.