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Jeff Bezos argued that the bottom 50% of Americans should pay no taxes because they contribute only 3% of total federal tax revenue, while government overspending and inefficiency remain the larger structural problem.
In a wide-ranging CNBC interview from May 2026, Bezos reframed the debate around inequality, taxation, public administration, economic growth, and entrepreneurship. His comments arrived during a period of heightened political hostility toward billionaires, persistent inflation concerns, federal deficits, and rapid technological disruption driven by artificial intelligence.
Rather than calling for sweeping new taxes on wealth or corporations, Bezos advocated eliminating income taxes for lower earners, reducing bureaucratic waste, and reforming government competence.
The interview also touched on housing affordability, education spending, AI productivity, philanthropy, media economics, and the future of space infrastructure. What made the discussion notable was not only Bezos’ economic philosophy, but the scale of his influence as founder of Amazon, Blue Origin, and Project Prometheus. His remarks are likely to influence debates around tax policy, public spending, and economic growth internationally.
Key Takeaways
- Jeff Bezos says the bottom half of earners should pay zero federal income tax.
- He argues the United States has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
- Bezos believes bureaucratic inefficiency drives housing, education, and affordability crises.
- He says AI will create productivity growth rather than mass unemployment.
- He argues entrepreneurship and investment expand wealth rather than redistribute a fixed pie.
Jeff Bezos enters the tax debate
The recent CNBC interview featuring Jeff Bezos immediately became one of the most discussed economic conversations of 2026 because it cut directly into a politically explosive issue: who should pay taxes in the United States and why.
Speaking with Andrew Ross Sorkin from the factory floor of Blue Origin in Florida, Bezos argued that the American tax debate has become distorted by political scapegoating and ideological theatre instead of practical economic problem-solving.
At the centre of Bezos’ argument was a simple but controversial statistic. He claimed that the bottom 50% of income earners in the United States contribute only 3% of total tax revenues to the federal government.
In his view, that amount is so small relative to overall government receipts that it could be eliminated entirely without materially damaging public finances. He specifically highlighted a nurse in Queens earning US$75,000 annually and paying more than US$12,000 in taxes each year. Bezos argued that such workers should not be taxed at all because the financial burden on ordinary households has become disproportionate relative to the economic assistance they receive.
His framing was politically strategic. Rather than arguing for tax cuts for billionaires or corporations, Bezos focused on lower-income and middle-income workers struggling with rent, groceries, and rising living costs. He repeatedly emphasised that he was not advocating tax reductions for himself.
Instead, he argued that the US government already operates the most progressive tax system in the world, with the top 1% of taxpayers allegedly contributing 40% of federal tax revenue. According to Bezos, the problem is not insufficient taxation of the wealthy. The real issue is excessive government spending combined with administrative inefficiency.
A spending problem or a taxation problem?
That argument places Bezos squarely within a long-standing tradition of supply-side and efficiency-based economic thinking that has influenced American fiscal debates for decades. Critics of large government bureaucracies have often argued that public institutions consume enormous resources while delivering mediocre outcomes.
Bezos attempted to illustrate this using New York City’s public school system, which he claimed spends roughly US$44,000 per student annually while producing weak educational results. He argued that excessive layers of administration absorb resources that should instead reach teachers and students directly.
The significance of Bezos’ comments extends beyond taxation because they reflect a broader ideological shift among elite business leaders. During the 2010s, many corporate executives avoided direct commentary on redistribution and fiscal policy because of rising populist anger toward billionaires and multinational corporations.
In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, however, escalating inflation, housing shortages, soaring government deficits, and dissatisfaction with public services have reopened debates around state efficiency and economic management.
Bezos attempted to reposition himself not as a defender of concentrated wealth, but as a critic of bureaucratic dysfunction. Throughout the interview he repeatedly used language associated with operational management and systems engineering.
He compared government inefficiency to failures that would be unacceptable at Amazon. In his analogy, if Amazon operated like certain public institutions, deliveries would take weeks, costs would skyrocket, and customers would receive incorrect products. His argument framed government problems as failures of execution rather than failures of compassion.
The political backlash against billionaires
This distinction is central to understanding Bezos’ worldview. He repeatedly argued that emotional anger toward wealthy individuals does not solve structural problems. In his assessment, politicians often create villains because doing so is politically easier than confronting complex policy failures. He described this as an “age old technique” used whenever leaders lack practical solutions.
His comments were clearly aimed at progressive critics such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have frequently criticised billionaire wealth accumulation and advocated higher taxes on the ultra-rich.
Bezos directly challenged the idea that billionaires cannot ethically earn their fortunes. Using the example of a successful burger chain expanding from one restaurant into a national enterprise, he argued that wealth creation results from delivering products and services that millions voluntarily choose to buy. His broader economic argument rejected the “fixed pie” theory of wealth distribution. According to Bezos, economies grow through investment, invention, and productivity rather than through zero-sum redistribution.
This reflects a classical capitalist interpretation of economic growth. Bezos compared investment to farming during a famine rather than hoarding resources during a crisis. In his view, ownership of productive assets such as company stock represents investment in future economic activity rather than the removal of wealth from circulation. This distinction matters because many critics of wealth concentration argue that billionaire fortunes represent disproportionate extraction from workers and consumers rather than productive economic expansion.
Why Bezos believes government inefficiency hurts ordinary workers
Another important aspect of the interview involved Bezos’ criticism of housing regulation. He argued that zoning restrictions, permitting delays, and government constraints on housing supply are major contributors to high rents.
This reflects mainstream economic arguments that restrictive urban planning policies artificially constrain housing development in major cities. Bezos claimed that governments simultaneously subsidise housing demand while limiting supply, inevitably driving prices higher.
His comments align with a growing bipartisan consensus among economists that regulatory bottlenecks contribute significantly to affordability crises across the United States. Even economists who strongly support progressive taxation increasingly acknowledge that housing shortages stem partly from local government restrictions. Bezos suggested that artificial intelligence could dramatically accelerate permitting processes by automating approvals and identifying compliance issues instantly.
The interview also highlighted Bezos’ broader philosophy regarding public administration. He repeatedly argued that large organisations succeed or fail primarily because of competence and execution. In his view, America’s fiscal challenges are not caused by insufficient wealth but by inefficient deployment of existing resources. Bezos claimed that any competent corporate finance department could identify 3% in federal spending cuts rapidly without materially harming public services.
Critics would likely argue that government administration is fundamentally different from corporate logistics because public institutions serve broader social obligations rather than profit objectives. Yet Bezos’ remarks resonated because public frustration with bureaucratic inefficiency has intensified across many developed economies. Rising deficits, slow infrastructure development, expensive healthcare systems, and deteriorating affordability have contributed to growing distrust in institutional competence.
Artificial intelligence and the future of work
The timing of Bezos’ interview is especially important because it occurred during intense discussions about artificial intelligence, labour displacement, and economic inequality. Many economists and policymakers fear that AI will eliminate millions of white-collar jobs, deepen inequality, and concentrate even greater wealth among technology companies. Bezos rejected this narrative almost entirely.
Instead, he argued that AI will create enormous productivity gains that ultimately generate abundance, lower prices, and even labour shortages. His analogy comparing AI tools to replacing a shovel with a bulldozer illustrated his belief that technology enhances human productivity rather than eliminating human relevance. Bezos argued that software engineers, radiologists, and knowledge workers would evolve into higher-level problem solvers rather than becoming obsolete.
This optimism mirrors earlier industrial revolutions in which mechanisation increased output while eventually creating entirely new industries and occupations. Bezos believes AI will lower production costs, improve economic efficiency, and increase overall living standards if governments avoid excessive early regulation.
Critics, however, would likely argue that Bezos underestimates the transition costs associated with AI disruption. Even if long-term productivity gains emerge, millions of workers may still experience short-term unemployment, wage stagnation, or displacement.
Historical industrial transformations often generated decades of economic instability before benefits became widely distributed. The current speed of AI development may intensify those disruptions further.
Wealth creation, philanthropy, and capitalism
The interview also highlighted Bezos’ broader philosophy regarding philanthropy and capitalism. He reiterated plans to give away most of his wealth during his lifetime but argued that for-profit enterprises often create more social value than charitable organisations. Bezos maintained that companies like Amazon produce widespread benefits through innovation, convenience, logistics infrastructure, and employment creation.
In his framework, successful businesses become engines of societal advancement because consumers voluntarily engage with them. This view reflects a longstanding debate about the role of capitalism in social progress.
Defenders of entrepreneurial wealth argue that innovation-driven companies improve living standards, create employment, and expand access to products and services. Critics counter that many large corporations also generate labour exploitation, market concentration, political influence, and widening inequality.
Bezos also defended the importance of profitability in journalism while discussing The Washington Post, which he owns. He argued that media organisations must remain financially sustainable rather than operating permanently as subsidised charitable institutions. In his view, consumer willingness to pay for journalism signals relevance and quality. This reflects broader transformations within the global media industry, where digital disruption has destroyed many traditional advertising models.
The global significance of Bezos’ comments
Internationally, Bezos’ comments are likely to resonate beyond the United States because similar debates are unfolding across Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and parts of Asia. Governments worldwide face rising debt burdens, ageing populations, expanding welfare costs, and slowing productivity growth. Questions surrounding taxation, redistribution, and public-sector efficiency increasingly dominate political discourse.
Bezos’ proposal to eliminate taxes for lower-income earners while reducing bureaucratic waste offers one possible framework for addressing these pressures without dramatically increasing taxation on capital or investment.
Whether policymakers adopt such ideas remains uncertain. Critics would argue that Bezos oversimplifies government budgeting, understates the complexity of public administration, and overlooks the importance of social programmes funded through taxation.
Others would question whether billionaires possess sufficient understanding of public institutions to prescribe effective reforms. Yet even critics acknowledge that his comments struck a nerve because they addressed widespread frustration with living costs, government inefficiency, and economic anxiety.
The broader importance of the interview lies in how it reframed the national conversation. Instead of presenting inequality solely as a morality issue centred on billionaire wealth, Bezos framed it as a competence issue centred on governance, productivity, and opportunity creation. That distinction could become increasingly influential as governments struggle to balance rising social demands with mounting fiscal constraints.
Jeff Bezos and the future economic debate
For better or worse, Jeff Bezos remains one of the most influential economic voices in the modern world. His companies shape global commerce, cloud computing, media, logistics, artificial intelligence, and space infrastructure. When he speaks about taxes, government spending, or economic growth, markets, policymakers, and voters pay attention.
The CNBC interview demonstrated that Bezos is no longer limiting himself to technology or business strategy. He is now openly participating in one of the defining political and economic battles of the twenty-first century: determining how modern societies distribute prosperity while sustaining growth, innovation, and fiscal stability.
Whether his proposals become mainstream policy is uncertain. What is certain is that his intervention has intensified a debate that already dominates much of the modern political world. The coming years will likely determine whether governments continue pursuing higher taxation and expanded spending, or whether public pressure increasingly shifts toward efficiency, deregulation, and fiscal restraint.
For Jeff Bezos, the answer appears clear. America does not primarily suffer from a lack of money. In his view, it suffers from a lack of competent management.
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Note: The full unofficial transcript courtesy of CNBC is available below.
CNBC Exclusive: Transcript: Jeff Bezos Speaks with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box”
WHEN: Wednesday, May 20, 2026
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC exclusive interview with Amazon Executive Chairman & Founder, Blue Origin Founder and Project Prometheus Co-Founder & Co-CEO Jeff Bezos live from the Blue Origin Rocket Factory in Merritt Island, FL on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET), Wednesday, May 20. Following are links to video on CNBC.com:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-on-u-s-tax-code-this-is-crony-capitalism.html,
Transcript
PART I
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Good morning. We are here on the factory floor this morning of Blue Origin. And we are here with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin. Also, of course, the founder of Amazon. It is great to see you. This is remarkable, by the way, just the scale of it. We’ve been talking about it all morning. But of all the people that we could talk to about everything that’s going on in the country right now and the economy, A.I., jobs, space, we want to talk to you. And there is so much to talk about. We’re going to touch on that policy, politics and so much more. But one of the topics that I thought we should talk about and maybe even start with—
JEFF BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Is these days, it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, about the billionaire class, about wealth inequality and policy and everything else. And it’s taken a uniquely critical turn, I think. And I’m so curious, before we even get into everything else, what you think about that right now.
BEZOS: Well, first of all, Andrew, I’m glad you’re asking the question. I think it’s a really important topic, and I think it’s an important one to discuss because I see the same thing you do. You see it in a bunch of headlines. You see it in a bunch of places. And I’ve been thinking, I have been thinking about what is – what is driving this, because it does seem different from 10 years ago. And I think – I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies. So you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling – struggling to pay rent, groceries.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so what’s, you know, what’s happening here is politicians are using the kind of age old techniques. So there’s this tale of two economies, and they’re using this age old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers. But the problem is that doesn’t solve anything. And so like, if you want to help the group of people who are struggling, you have to figure out real root causes and solutions. And that takes skill. You know, it’s like the way we – if we have a problem at Amazon, you know, the way we would fix it is we would go in and we’d do the five whys and we’d try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix and then we fix it at the root, you’re fixing it forever. It’s a real solution.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And what we don’t do because it doesn’t work is just point fingers and blame people. It might feel good for 10 seconds, but it doesn’t accomplish anything. And so what could you really do? So like I, you know, I –
SORKIN: That’s what’s next – do you have a plan?
BEZOS: Well, I have some ideas. I have some places to start. So, you know, if, you know, I started thinking about this and doing some research. A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12 – more than $12,000 a year in taxes. Does that really make sense? So, people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? Why is somebody –
SORKIN: At all?
BEZOS: At all. Why is some – why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: That’s $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And so – and by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3 percent of the taxes. It’s only 3 percent. We can find 3 percent. So we don’t have – it’s a small amount of money for the government.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: You know that – and really, it’s – and the more I thought about it, to me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense.
SORKIN: Okay. But then on the other end, the question is, should you be paying higher taxes to pay for the 3 percent component part of this that you think is going to need to be paid for, if not more than that, given the debts we have.
BEZOS: The – it’s certainly a perfectly valid policy debate –
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: – to say, do we want an even more progressive tax system? So, you know, the kind of the line that gets quoted all the time is, you know, the wealthy should pay their fair share.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And we can argue about what the fair share is. That’s a policy debate. That’s okay. But the vilification is the thing that’s just the distraction.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And by the way, if you really are being honest about it, we don’t have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent. We have already, and I think it should be zero. I don’t think it should be 3 percent.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: I think it should be zero. So we would be making more progressive that way. We actually have a spending problem and that’s a skills issue. I mean, let me give you an example. The New York City school system –
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: They spend $44,000 per student, $44,000. That’s 30 percent more per student than other big cities like Chicago, L.A., and Boston. And it’s three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn’t get better outcomes. So what this, listen, let me, let me just say, if we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We’d have to charge you $100 delivery fee. And then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: We can’t, that’s a skills issue, Andrew.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: It’s, it’s not about, it’s just competence.
SORKIN: But there’s also a question about, you know, there’s teachers unions in New York, for example.
BEZOS: None of this money is getting to the teachers. I promise you, if you’re, if you’re charging $44,000 per student, how much is that money you think is trickling down to teachers? Not much.
SORKIN: And so, you don’t think it’s about creating a livable wage for the teachers? I mean, that’s part of the issue is sort of how do you create this livable wage—
BEZOS: By the way—
SORKIN: Affordability issue.
BEZOS: More of that, more of that, they could, that amount of spending should come down and more of it should go to the teachers. It’s just if you look at the level of—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Administration in the New York public school system, it’s off the charts.
SORKIN: Let me—
BEZOS: It’s like they have all these middle managers and senior leaders. The money does not get to the teachers.
SORKIN: Let me ask you a question, though, about great wealth, though. And the other issue around on the tax front is whether people of great means at the very, very top end. And Elizabeth Warren has made this point repeatedly. I think she’s made it in reference to you and others, are able to pay a lower tax rate even though you’re paying an enormous sum in taxes, a lower tax rate than maybe I am, for example.
BEZOS: These people sometimes say that, that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes. And it’s a per — again, if people want me to pay more billions—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Then let’s have that debate. But don’t pretend you know that this, that that’s going to solve the problem. You could, you could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you. This is the, so you can’t connect those two things, not logically. You know, there, there are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. In fact, it’s been almost, let me finish here one second. It’s already been outlawed—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: In New York City. And rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb isn’t causing high rents. What’s really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build? If you want rents to come down, econ 101—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Really simple. You need to, you can’t sub — you can’t sort of subsidize supply. I mean, sorry, subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue.
SORKIN: Well, let me ask you about government policy, though, because the other piece of the argument is that the wealthy have extraordinary influence over government policy and have too much influence over government policy, by the way, over tax policy, over housing, over all of it.
BEZOS: I, but what I would say is that we have way too much corporate welfare, way too much corporate subsidies. We have, there’s way too much influence in politics from business, in some cases, wealthy people who really focus on that, unions. There’s a bunch of people interfering in the political process.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And if we can make that better, we should do that, too. That would be another root cause. You go back and figure out what is, what is happening there.
SORKIN: Yeah.
BEZOS: But yeah, it doesn’t make any sense for the government to subsidize, you know, certain agricultural crops, certain, you know, real estate transactions, Hollywood films. This, the tax code is 10, 10,000-plus pages long—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Because it has built in corporate loopholes for various things. This is crony capitalism. And of course, it should be fixed.
SORKIN: Well, that’s my question. And therefore, the question is, should people like you and your position advocate ways to fix it? I mean, one of the things people talk about is this policy of what they call “buy, borrow, die”. This idea that you can take your, take assets that you have, stock, and get loans against them.
BEZOS: Andrew, as far as I know, there is, there’s no truth to this “buy, borrow, die” thing. I don’t even know where this comes from. And, you know, you can look at, I’m selling Amazon stock routinely. And that’s how I fund Blue Origin—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And Prometheus and a bunch of other things, investments in small companies that I’m doing. So I, every time I sell—
SORKIN: By the way, it may not be you.
BEZOS: I pay taxes on that.
SORKIN: But there are other people. By the way, Elon Musk, who takes extraordinary loans against his stock and as a result, isn’t paying taxes in that moment. Now, when he sells stock, he pays.
BEZOS: And this is, you know, again, can we fix that, if that’s a true loophole? I’m a little skeptical that that’s a true loophole. But if it is—
SORKIN: OK.
BEZOS: Can we fix it? Then we should. That’s, I don’t—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: I don’t think such a loophole should exist, but I want to get back to my primary point. When you fix that loophole, it’s not going to help that—
SORKIN: It’s not going to solve the full problem.
BEZOS: That nurse in Queens is, it’s not going to help her at all.
SORKIN: Let me ask you this. Look, I’m going to—
BEZOS: And so, that’s what, you’ve got to bring it to, you know—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: If you really want to have a progressive tax system, you also want that money to actually be helping and not just dissolving in, you know, in like administrative bureaucracy and not even getting to the teachers.
SORKIN: But part of it is—
BEZOS: And with bad outcomes. 70% of the New York public city school kids in eighth grade are at their reading level—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: 70%. Only, it’s like it’s actually 72 percent, 28 percent are there.
SORKIN: Well, let me ask you about the anger, because there seems to be anger, at least from certain political sides of this. And AOC recently said in a podcast, I’m just curious how you think about this, says there’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, she says. You can’t earn $1 billion, just can’t earn that, she says. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: By the way, you’ve earned an extraordinary amount of money. You employ, largest employer, if not one of them in the whole country. When you read that, what do you think?
BEZOS: Well, it’s, it’s not correct on its face. Let’s give you, let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you have ten employees and you make a little bit of money.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Until you have this is, this one outlet. And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then you open a second outlet. And now you’re making a little bit more money and you have 20 employees and you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened 1,000 outlets, you are a billionaire.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And by the way, this is a real life story. It happens all the time. It’s In-N-Out burger. It’s, you know, Raising Cane’s Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical or it didn’t? There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. What you’re doing, the way, the way you make $1 billion or $100 million or $10 million or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with $1 billion.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you can, you know, just try it with a chicken franchise.
SORKIN: Do you think though—
BEZOS: But your chicken has to be good.
SORKIN: But there’s the question of whether the people who are working at the burger joint ultimately should be paid more, that that’s what creates the affordability gap.
BEZOS: Well, by the way, that’s also if you want to change the minimum wage, change the minimum wage. Amazon, we have our entry level wage for, in Queens is $23 an hour. And that’s, that works out to be like $52,000 a year. And this is an entry level job that doesn’t require any educational attainment. It doesn’t require any preexisting skills. We will train you. It’s actually a great first job. On day one, you get full healthcare.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: The same healthcare program that our senior executives get, the same one I’m on. And so this is, this is actually a fantastic entry level job, $23 an hour. But guess what? They’re still charging that person more than $10,000 in taxes.
SORKIN: And you think that person—
BEZOS: Now that’s absurd.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Why would you charge somebody making $52,000 a year, $10,000 a year in taxes? It doesn’t make any sense. Let them be, you know what? That person has a chance to uplift themselves and to uplift them—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Uplift their, or their family, and to learn more skills. This is, but like, why are you taxing them so much? I really am puzzled by this. You know, the more I think about it. Why? Well, you don’t need that revenue.
SORKIN: The pieces that we have a big budget gap. And so whether you’re the federal government or whether you’re a city, I mean, I was going to ask you about what you thought of the pied-a-terre tax in New York and what you thought of what happened with this, with this Ken Griffin video that the mayor made?
BEZOS: Well, there are two—
SORKIN: You have a place in the city.
BEZOS: Yeah, there’s two different, I think there are two different things about that video. On the one hand, it’s perfectly fine to have a policy debate about whether you want to have a pied-a-terre tax.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Right. The second piece, which is not so good, is to go stand in front of Ken Griffin’s house and act like he’s some kind of villain. Ken Griffin isn’t a villain. He hasn’t hurt anybody. He’s not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite. And so that piece of it isn’t right. And there was no reason to do that. A pied-a-terre tax is a, you know, a, there’s a very, taxes on out of towners are very popular taxes. That’s why there are hotel taxes. And hotels always have very high tax rates because why not tax the tourists? And there are limits. If you raise the hotel taxes too much, tourists stop coming.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Right? So you have to be judicious. But I think that the pied-a-terre tax is a fine thing for New York to do. And, you know, they have to figure out. But it’s a policy debate. Policy debates don’t have to be finger-pointing. This is the piece.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And—
SORKIN: So you’re not going to sell your place in New York?
BEZOS: Unfortunately. It’s a, it’s, it is an effective political technique. It’s as old as the Hills. So when you don’t know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them, but it won’t solve the problem. The only thing that will solve the problem is skill.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so really it’s a skills issue. You want to say any corporate CEO, CFO worth their salt, an Amazon CFO could find 3 percent in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. This is, there is, there is so much waste in government spending.
SORKIN: Right. What do you think personally? I mean, you read these headlines. You see your name in them, whether it’s the Met Gala protests.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: On a personal level, what do you, what do you personally think of all this? I know we’re talking about policy.
BEZOS: Well, on a personal level, you know, I think, I think of my parents and I think of how they uplifted me. I think of where they started. I think, you know, my dad is a Cuban immigrant. He came to this country right after Castro took over, and he was a 16-year-old boy who didn’t speak a word of English. He came all by himself. His parents weren’t allowed to leave. He was in a refugee camp in the Everglades, and he built himself up. My mom had me in, she was in high school. She was a 17-year-old mom. You know, it wasn’t cool to be a pregnant mother in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. And she brought herself up. And so I look at that and I think, you know, I want to make sure that the people who are struggling today have a chance to do that, too, to bring themselves up, and maybe, you know, maybe they’re going to be the next Steve Jobs, maybe they’re going to be, you know, maybe one of their kids will be the next Steve Jobs, I don’t know. But they, we can give them a better chance by eliminating their tax bill. I don’t want to reduce it. I want to eliminate it. I think there’s something very powerful about zero. You know, like we, zero is a better number than like $1. You know we don’t charge, we have free shipping at Amazon. Not like 25 cents, shipping. Zero is a good number. When people are starting out and they’re struggling, stop taxing them. We don’t need it. We live in the wealthiest country in the world. America is the greatest country in the world. We have more entrepreneurial dynamism here than anywhere else in the world. This is the best time to be alive in America because we have access to capital is so easy right now. It’s so good. And I’m talking about entrepreneurs—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And aspiring entrepreneurs. And that’s, we should have so much optimism about the future.
SORKIN: Okay. Well, I want to talk about some of that optimism because there are some people who are very fearful, by the way, about A.I.
BEZOS: I know. I’m very aware of this. And I think those people are dead wrong.
SORKIN: We’ll get into that in a second. But do you have a relationship with the president, President Trump.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Now that you have this, I don’t know if this is a policy position, the Bezos policy position for zero taxes on, I don’t know what the wealth number is going to be. Do you plan to go to Washington to talk about this with them? I mean, is this something you want to be the advocate for?
BEZOS: I’m certainly going to advocate for this. You know, I’ve worked with every president since Bill Clinton, and I hope to work with, you know, the next couple of presidents, too, if they’ll have me. But yeah, we have, it’s part of our job as, as citizens and as business leaders to, to share our ideas. And this one would actually help people. This one would actually help people.
SORKIN: Right. Let me ask you, a social compact question—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Between wealth. I mean, part of this is a social compact issue between the wealthy and the less wealthy. And, you know, I don’t know if you saw about a year or two ago, Warren Buffett wrote a fabulous letter where he said they always thought he was getting rich, but he never imagined that people were going to get as rich as Carnegie or Rockefeller. And he thought they would never imagine they’d get as rich either. Those people gave away extraordinary amounts of money. They built libraries. They built schools, all of it. You’ve talked about giving your wealth away—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Some $280 billion of it mostly during your lifetime.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: You’re 62 years old now. Warren Buffett has said how hard it is to give money away.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: He’s not even sure that his kids in their generation are going to give away. He’s already starting to prepare to find another, the next generation to give it away.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: How are you going to do it?
BEZOS: Well, I, I give a, I give away billions of dollars to charitable causes. And I’m going to continue to do that. I’m going to give away most of my wealth in my lifetime.
SORKIN: But that’s going to be hard. But you have to give a lot of ways quickly—
BEZOS: It’s hard and it’s also hard to do well. It’s easy to do poorly.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And what you, in my view, you don’t want to create dependence with your wealth. One of the things I fund that I really, really like is family homeless shelters. I give about 100 and, 100 million or so every year to 30 or 40 different family homeless shelters. These are usually women with children. The motto that I have is, no child sleeps outside. And this, these are, I really like these because they build independence. So they, the average stay in these shelters is usually less than 180 days. They teach people skills. They teach people how to interview. They teach a bunch of things because mothers with kids, usually mothers with kids, sometimes fathers, but usually mothers with kids. They really do want to stand on their own two feet. So like when you start talking about charity, one question I would encourage anyone to ask is thinking about doing charitable giving is does, does this giving create dependence or independence?
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you want to do things that create independence?
SORKIN: How are you going to do that at scale? I mean, $280 billion and maybe more.
BEZOS: I want to say one more thing about this. I don’t know yet the answer to your question. This is a, this is a very difficult thing to do, and it’s going to take a lot of focus and work. But I want to make one more point here, which I think is really important, even though I’m going to give away the majority of my wealth if I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Than the, than the good that I do with my charitable giving. And I think this is an important point to make because people, people forget or they sometimes don’t see that when, you know, when you create something like Amazon and you’re saying, I get letters from new mothers all the time that say like, I have no idea what I would be doing right now if I didn’t have Amazon, thank you. Or what we did in the pandemic, when people could really see what an essential service we provided to them. And so, you know, this is where, Amazon creates tremendous value. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. That’s why people are voluntarily giving them money.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: You know, nobody is forcing somebody to use a particular product. You’re choosing to do it because that product is giving you value. And so if you create a company, Blue Origin will create tremendous value for the world. Prometheus will create tremendous value for the world. And Amazon has already created tremendous value for the world, and I hope it will continue to create even more. It’s not just the consumer side, it’s with AWS, too. But this, this is such an important point. You know, I really want people listening to this to think about that, that for-profit companies properly run a tremendous value for the world. And they’re, and they’re self-sustaining and they draw competition. If you can do something with the for-profit model, you should. And then if you can’t figure out, there are market failures where it’s just not going to work. If you want to do room temperature vaccines, you know, there’s not a big market for that because wealthy countries have refrigeration. And so, there are market failures where you really can’t, you know, there’s no real market for family homeless shelters. Do you see what I’m saying?
SORKIN: But let me—
BEZOS: But for most things, there is a market and you should do that. And you are creating tremendous value that way. And so everybody out there who’s a potential entrepreneur make sure you focus on that. You will be creating value for society if you’re successful at pleasing your customers.
SORKIN: Okay. Talking about markets—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: I was asking you about the news market.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Because you own “The Washington Post”.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: And one of the critiques, by the way, and this is, this is maybe the wealth critique and everything else is, you know, we just you, the company laid off about 30 percent of its staff.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: And there’s a lot of people out there who said, Jeff’s super wealthy. He’s talked about this being a public trust. That’s something that he bought early on. How much do you care about that piece of it? Why, why lay people off? Why fire people? Why don’t you subsidize the business if in fact—
BEZOS: Because “The Post” needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. It needs to be.
SORKIN: But does it?
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: I mean, that’s the question. Some people say it should be a trust.
BEZOS: And let me tell you why.
SORKIN: OK.
BEZOS: Because it’s a measure of its relevance. If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product. It’s like, you know, doing, it would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy. So we want, it’s got to be something that people will pay for because that’s a signal.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: It’s a signal that we’re providing a relevant service. Your paper, “The New York Times”, you guys make a ton of money. You guys are doing very well financially, and you’re providing a service that people are willing to pay for. We can do that, too. And guess what I told them, you know, when we were planning those layoffs. I didn’t pick who was going to get laid off or which departments. I said, follow the data, follow the data. And I said, there’s one exception to this.
SORKIN: What’s that?
BEZOS: Don’t follow the data on investigative reporting. The heart of “The Post” is investigative reporting. And guess what? Our newsroom today, even after the layoffs—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Is still larger than when we did Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. And so, and we just won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the most prestigious prize, but most prestigious Pulitzer for our investigation into DOGE. So, “The Post” is going to continue to be an important institution. And in fact, it’s going to be a more important institution because of this financial discipline. It needs to be relevant to readers. It needs to stand on its own two feet. I don’t want it to be a charity. It doesn’t need to be and it shouldn’t be.
SORKIN: Do you want to own it? And the reason I ask is you’ve talked about how you are, by default, to some degree a conflicted owner, given you own all of these other businesses.
BEZOS: I think an ideal owner, yes. My vision is still to make sure “The Post” is a, you know. When I bought “The Post,” it was very unprofitable when I bought it. The newsroom was even smaller than it is today. And we turned it around in two years, it was profitable for six years. I put all that money back into “The Post,” grew the newsroom, so we’ve shrunk it back some now, but we haven’t shrunk it back to what it was when I bought it.
SORKIN: So what do you think went wrong then? I mean, you had this super successful period.
BEZOS: Yes, what went wrong is we did not adapt. So this is what, the news business, if you go back to the, I don’t know how much time you want to spend on this, but if you go back to the 90s, the local monopoly newspaper was the greatest business in the world. It was the printing press. “The Washington Post” had 70 percent of households in the Washington metro area, and it made money hand over fist. We live in a completely different environment now. It’s not even, it’s nothing like, now you have to work hard to make a living in the news business.
SORKIN: Let me ask you one related question to all of this, and this goes to “The Washington Post” piece of it, and just the influence and money piece of it. And it relates to the president of the United States.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: And there is a view among critics that say that part of what you have done or are doing is trying to placate the president, with either the sort of shift in the tone of what’s happening at the paper, or even some of the things that Amazon, the decision to make the documentary around Melania, for example.
BEZOS: Yes, the Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die.
SORKIN: OK. Tell me.
BEZOS: So it, you know, I see reported all the time that somehow, I was involved in this, and I know we did this at this Mar-a-Lago dinner.
SORKIN: Everybody thinks that you went to Mar-a-Lago.
BEZOS: It’s not true.
SORKIN: Not true.
BEZOS: We have denied it. Melania’s office has denied it. It’s not true. I had nothing to do with that. By the way, it appears it was a good business decision. You know, it did very well in theaters. It’s done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision. I also had nothing to do with “Project Hail Mary,” which I regret because it’s an incredible success. I wish I had greenlit that.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: But I didn’t. And so, you know, Amazon’s a big company and makes a lot of decisions. But no, this idea that, you know, that somehow that is a way of buying influence, it’s just not. It’s just not correct. I can see why people say this. And by the way, you know, the same thing at “The Post.” You know, I want The Post’s opinion section to stand for free markets, kind of what I’ve been talking to you about today, free markets and individual personal liberties. I think that’s those are founding pillars of America. It’s one of the reasons that America has been so successful. This I mean, we have an incredible history. In 1917, we had the same GDP per capita and the same population size as Argentina. Those two countries diverged completely. And it’s because of our system. It’s the way that we have organized ourselves to be productive. And business can do that, you know, and they can be interfered with a bit. But there’s a limit. If you interfere too much with too much regulation or too much, there’s just the right amount, too much, and the golden goose, the goose that lays the golden eggs can stop laying golden eggs. You don’t want that to happen. This is the engine. You want to make sure everybody is sharing in that engine. But don’t hurt the engine. Does that make sense?
SORKIN: Completely, when I last interviewed you, about two years ago, President Trump had just won. He was not the president yet. And I’d asked you what you thought of him at the time. And you said that you thought that he had mellowed, that he was calmer.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: And I’m curious now. Here we are.
BEZOS: Yes. I still think that. Yeah.
SORKIN: Two years later, we’ve had lots of wars and tariffs and all sorts of things that have happened since then. What do you think?
BEZOS: I think he has, I mean, I’m comparing him to his first term. And I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. And, you know, so he is again, I’ve worked with all the presidents. I will work with all the presidents, you know, and I hope to do that going forward if they’ll have me. But we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is.
SORKIN: I want to—
BEZOS: I’m not on the side. You know what? This is, I’m on the side of America. And I and that is so important. Like and that’s where business leaders should be.
SORKIN: And do you think they’re not?
BEZOS: No, I think, no, I think we are. But we get perceived as being like, you know, partisan or whatever. Like I was helping Obama every chance I could. I was helping Biden every chance I could. I still call Obama for advice. He’s a very smart guy. And you know, and by the way, people that are Trump has lots of good ideas and he has done a lot of, he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.
SORKIN: So let me pivot the whole conversation we could to space, because we haven’t really gotten there. And here we are in this, it’s a mecca of sorts, and it’s really remarkable to behold.
BEZOS: Thank you. It’s amazing. You know, this is what you’re looking at here is billions of dollars of investment. And it’s also, you know, employing 14,000 people. And it has an unbelievable future. It’s very exciting.
SORKIN: So you’ve talked about this—
BEZOS: By the way, I want to make one more point before we move to Blue that I just thought of, which is one of these things that I think you asked me at the very beginning, like, where does this, you know, kind of this anger come from? And I said, it’s kind of, you know, a tale of two economies. And I think that really is what’s going on. But there are also some deep misconceptions that are worth people thinking about. And there are a lot of people who don’t understand that this kind of zero-sum fallacy. So, you know, they think that if there’s some a bunch of wealth over here, that there’s a fixed pie. You know, we’ve got one pizza and there are seven people and there are eight slices. Who’s going to get two slices? That is not how economies work. So it isn’t a fixed pie. It grows. And people get, their mental model is that wealth is like water in a drought or food in a famine. It’s you know, you could, you could hoard food in a famine. You could hoard gasoline in an energy crisis. You could hoard water in a drought. You can hoard toilet paper in a pandemic, as people did. But you can’t hoard investment, right? So if you’re like if you have stock in a company that’s not hoarding, that’s investing and investing is more like farming. And you would definitely want to farm in a famine. Do you see what I’m saying? And so this, by the way, this the billions of dollars of investment that have come here have come from that Amazon stock.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: By the way, when I sold that Amazon stock, I paid capital gains on it.
SORKIN: You were early when you talked, I remember talking to you maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and you were talking about putting infrastructure in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: And I think you were even talking a couple of years ago about putting data centers potentially in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Even before Elon was talking about data centers in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: How realistic is that really?
BEZOS: It’s very realistic.
SORKIN: And what is the timeline of that? Because right now there’s a lot of excitement, by the way, around the SpaceX IPO in particular, because of this view that we’re all going to be moving stuff to space.
BEZOS: Yes. The question, are data centers in space realistic? The answer is yes. The timeline is harder to answer. So you know, some of the timelines you hear are very short. They’re probably not right. You know, people would talk about two or three years. That’s probably a little—
SORKIN: Elon’s talking about two or three years.
BEZOS: It’s probably a little ambitious.
SORKIN: Right, OK.
BEZOS: You know, but I think what Elon would tell you is if you don’t set an ambitious timetable, you know, if you want it to be six years, say it’s three. So exactly how long it will take, I don’t think anyone knows, but it is real. It will happen. And a couple of things need to happen for that to happen. Energy needs to become a bigger percentage of the cost of terrestrial data centers. So today, terrestrial data centers typically spend less than 15 percent of their kind of total cost of ownership on energy. And the biggest advantage to being in space is that the energy is free, right? You’re getting solar energy 24/7, no clouds, no weather. And so that’s a big energy, but 15 percent is not a huge number. So I predict over time, the energy budget of a data center will go up. So the chips will get a little cheaper. Right now, the chips are so expensive that the energy is not a big chunk. So that will probably change. And so, and then the second thing is that launch cost has to come down very significantly by a factor of 10. That’s what we’re working on right here. That’s what Blue Origin is doing. And this team’s on fire doing that. You know, so we have a CEO named Dave Limp, and he’s doing a great job. This whole leadership team is doing a great job. I’m very proud of them.
SORKIN: If you’re right about the data center piece, though, getting to space. Does that change the equation for all the investment that’s going on in data centers terrestrially on the ground right now?
BEZOS: No, I don’t think so. Because again, the timeline is very different. And you’re going to need as much terrestrial data center capacity, I think, as you can arrange in the near term. This is, this technology is real. And I mentioned my optimism a minute ago, and we should definitely talk about that. Because I think there’s so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job. I think that there’s going to be a labor shortage as a result.
SORKIN: Let’s go there, then. I wanted to stay in space, but let’s go to that.
BEZOS: We can come back, we can be in space, too, or whatever you want, Andrew.
SORKIN: No, but that’s fascinating, because I don’t know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend. And the students were booing because every time he mentioned AI, they were booing because I think they’re deeply fearful and worried about whether they’re going to have a job.
BEZOS: Yes, well, and the reason they’re afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that. So there are so many smart people, and they are smart. And they are saying, oh my God, there’s going to be no more radiologists, because AI can read X-rays better than a radiologist can. And there are going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So what’s really going to happen is that it’s going to elevate all of these people. And it’s like you’ve been digging, let’s say you’re a software engineer, the analogy I can give you is you’ve been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy. If you’re digging the basement to your house, and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here that’s going to, what’s really going to happen is we’re going to have so much productivity in our economy that, for example, this is just one effect. A lot of people who have two earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce. That’s why we’re going to have a labor shortage. Because of the productivity gains, you’re going to be able to afford things. I predict we’ll actually have deflation of certain core, assuming we let this technology play out and don’t hamstring it with regulation too early, we will actually have, you know, everything will be, you know, food will get cheaper, and housing construction will get cheaper, and so on and so on.
SORKIN: But is there a transition cost? I mean—
BEZOS: We could even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing. It should take, when you are, if you are a builder, why does it take you six months, nine months, two years, five years, depending on what municipality you live in, to get a building permit?
SORKIN: Right. AI should be able to do it.
BEZOS: AI should do that in 10 seconds, and it should give you a yes or no in 10 seconds, and then you should have your authority to build, and by the way, if it says no, it should give you the six reasons why and then you go change those things and resubmit, and you start building tomorrow instead of two years from now.
SORKIN: But how do you answer, I mean, Amazon’s laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard Mark Zuckerberg.
BEZOS: Not because of AI.
SORKIN: But Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off.
BEZOS: Is that because of AI?
SORKIN: Jack Dorsey has.
BEZOS: I very much—
SORKIN: Jack Dorsey ascribes it directly to AI.
BEZOS: Well, you’d have to talk to Jack about that. We’ve had a lot of people. We’re not seeing those same kinds of things at Amazon.
SORKIN: But the reason that people are talking about this is in the context of coding right now, and also in the context that for these companies to have the extraordinary valuation I think that we’re talking about, they have to create extraordinary productivity gains.
BEZOS: Look, can I give you a different lens to view this? So if I’m a software engineer, I need to up-level and think to myself, what am I really doing? What does a software, a good computer scientist software do? What we really do is we identify problems and we help solve them. And the code is almost just a, it’s a piece of execution that helps with that. But the real job is going to be identifying problems and helping to solve them. Does that make sense?
SORKIN: Totally.
BEZOS: And that’s not going to go away. Because that’s going to, that’s the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at is figuring out, oh, okay, we want this.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And they’re going to work with that tool to build the system. But we humans are never going to run out of problems, and we’re never going to run out of the need for solutions, and it’s just that the work is going to be done at a higher level. It’s going to be done with a bulldozer instead of a shovel, and that’s going to be a good thing.
SORKIN: There’s an argument, or there’s a concern about, there’s the white-collar workers on one end, and then I was going to mention, you have a new company called Prometheus?
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: That is really about A.I. robotics?
BEZOS: No, this is, just so you know, it’s not surprising, but, you know, because we haven’t said much about it, and I can’t say much about it today either. It’s a little premature for me to talk about it, but we have nothing to do with robotics. What we are doing is we’re building an artificial general engineer. So, when you go to design something, we want, we’re building tools that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects. So, you’ve heard of CAD—
SORKIN: Yup.
BEZOS: And so computer-aided design, and so on. This is kind of like a very, very modern version of that. I’m really oversimplifying here, and it’s premature for me to give much detail about Prometheus. Prometheus is something I got so excited about that I became the co-CEO of the company, putting a lot of time into it, a lot of energy into it, and it’s, it’s going to be amazing. And this is, this is that, you know, as I say, 10,000 years ago, somebody invented the plow, and the whole world got wealthier. So this, the root of civilizational wealth is invention. So, somebody invented the plow, we all got wealthier. Much later, somebody invented the steam engine, we all got wealthier. That’s how this works.
SORKIN: And you don’t think this is, at this time, is different?
BEZOS: No, it is not different, it’s even better. And so, and by the way, not only is this, people should not be depressed, they should be energized, because this is a moment when the possibilities are so large. Just keep your eyes open to those possibilities.
SORKIN: You’ve heard Sam Altman talk about the need for universal, potentially universal basic income. There’s a question, by the way, this gets maybe to the wealth, about the concentration of wealth.
BEZOS: Instead of universal basic income, how about we stop taxing nurses who make $75,000 a year? We don’t need to give her universal income yet—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Let’s just stop taking money away from her.
SORKIN: Right. Let me go back to space for a second, because I’m so curious. Well, let me ask you one question about Prometheus. I know you can’t go too far in it. I’m curious how you decide, I mean, you’re now the CEO of that company, co-CEO of that company, you oversee this.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Dave Limp is running it day to day, you’re the executive chair at Amazon. How do you decide, for example, with Prometheus, I’m going to go, I don’t know how much time you spend on that, versus all these other things, like, how do you do it? And also, did you ever say to yourself, well, I’ll put Prometheus inside of an Amazon, or I’ll put Prometheus inside of a Blue Origin?
BEZOS: What I do, my through line for the last few years has been A.I. And so, you know, I’ve been on the machine learning track for, you know, 15 years, and Amazon has made incredible use of machine learning. But a few years ago, we had a real breakthrough in machine learning, and we called that A.I. And it has so much potential, so my time at Amazon is spent on A.I, my time at Prometheus is spent on A.I., Prometheus is really an A.I. company.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And my time at Blue is largely spent on A.I. And so, and so, and Prometheus, by the way, the tools that we’re building are going to help companies like Blue immensely.
SORKIN: And you, but rather than do it inside Blue, or rather than do it inside one of the others?
BEZOS: It deserves its own special focus, it’s its own big idea, and Prometheus, you get a lot of focus by having a separate company.
SORKIN: SpaceX is going public, potentially at a $1.75 or $2 trillion valuation, by the way, there’s a lot of people here who I think have stock in Blue, they’re very excited about that.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: I heard a little bit about that as I was walking through. What do you think about that valuation, does that make sense to you?
BEZOS: I, you know, I don’t know enough about their financials to have, I think maybe their, maybe their S1 is going to come out tomorrow or something, and maybe we’ll have a better view of the company at that point, so it’s hard to know how much of it is, you know, based on the financials and how much of it is a bet on the future.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: One thing I can tell you for sure is that space is going to be a gigantic industry. So, in terms of particulars, should it be $1.75 or $2 or $1.5 or $2.25, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know that space is going to be a gigantic industry. There is no doubt about this.
SORKIN: Jeff, we’re almost, we’re running out of time, we’re going to take a quick break,
BEZOS: OK.
SORKIN: If we could, and then we’re going to come back on the other side, we’ll be back in just a moment. Jeff Bezos, in a moment.
PART II
SORKIN: We are back on the factory floor here of Blue with our exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos, and Jeff, what are you holding? What is it that was, you had on the side there before?
BEZOS: This is a solar cell that we at Blue Origin made out of lunar regolith. Lunar regolith is the dust on the surface of the moon. This is, this is lunar, this is a lunar regolith simulant.
SORKIN: Okay.
BEZOS: It has exactly the same composition as as lunar regolith does, and we’re working on building, making solar cells out of lunar regolith, and so the lunar regolith, fortunately, has a lot of silicon in it.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so this is, this is actually, this is an actual solar cell that we produced with lunar regolith simulant.
SORKIN: And will this be on things that are ultimately on the moon or just in space?
BEZOS: It could be both, so ultimately you may build data centers on the moon and power them with solar cells that you make on the moon. Alternatively, you can make the solar cells on the moon and then fling them into space in various ways and build data centers in space, but with materials from the moon. And if you use materials from the moon, you’re accomplishing a couple of things. One, it’s much more efficient to lift things off of the moon because the moon’s gravity is very low. It takes 28 times less energy to lift a kilogram off the moon than it does to lift it off the earth, and secondarily, it’s the beginning of the process of moving heavy industry off earth, you know, because this is the garden planet, and we want to keep nature here the way it is.
SORKIN: What’s the timeline for you? You talk about lunar permanence, this idea of, yeah, it’s creating permanent, you know, working environments on the moon.
BEZOS: Well, you know, with NASA, we will be building lunar base on the moon. Blue Origin has a big contract with NASA to build a lunar lander, and NASA is in the process of letting additional contracts now. NASA is really focused on the moon now. This has been, I’ve been, I’ve been focused on the moon for a really long time, and have been saying, let’s do the moon, and then we’ll do Mars. It’s kind of step by step, but do the moon first. The moon is a gift. It has all these resources, it has water, has eternal peaks of light. We can build a whole bunch of things on the moon.
SORKIN: The economics, though, for this business, at least in the short term, are about satellites, right?
BEZOS: I mean, it can be about satellites and data centers. We have, you know, Amazon has Leo.
SORKIN: Right and Kuiper.
BEZOS: That’s right and we have two constellations in work. One is called TeraWave. It’s a communications constellation with very high bandwidth, it serves a limited number of customers with very high bandwidth, so it’s focused on like government customers and big enterprises, hyperscalers. And then we have another constellation called Sunrise, and Sunrise is our data centers and space constellation. So these, it’s, for now, I would say yes, most of these things are focused on low earth orbit constellations, and then there’s a third thing, which is national defense, so you know the US has always enjoyed strong superiority in space. That’s something that you really do want to continue for the purposes of US national security, and so we also focus a lot on that too.
SORKIN: There are all sorts of wild things we hear about things that could happen in spaces. The idea that you can put mirrors in space that would project the sun down 24 hours a day to power solar, for example. I mean, I don’t know if it’s 10 years, 20, what do you think the timeline is where all of a sudden our kids are going to either be in space or be impacted in a meaningful way by all of this?
BEZOS: Well, I would argue you’re already impacted meaningfully by space, and you have been ever since we had weather satellites. So, you know, the hurricanes don’t sneak up on you anymore. You know, we have, ever since we have had weather satellites, we’ve been in a way better position. Same thing with communications satellites, which we’ve also had for many decades now. So space has been a factor. It’s also been a factor in national security for many decades, but that’s accelerating. And you see it with Starlink, the constellation that SpaceX has launched. You’re going to see it with Leo, and you, but it’s your timeline question. Look, it’s going to be a gradual thing, but it 100 years from now you won’t believe what has happened. And remember, the best way to think about 100 years is to think about Kitty Hawk and what happened, you know, for that little right flyer that you know, only few flew a few 100 feet. It wasn’t very many decades before you had a 747 and so I would caution people who think it’s all science fiction to be a little cautious with their judgment, because it is real, it is happening, it’s probably going to happen faster than most people think.
SORKIN: Dave Limp, who runs Blue for you—
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: There was a memo that leaked to the Financial Times. You think you’re taking outside money for the first time?
BEZOS: Yes. Yeah.
SORKIN: So when’s that going to happen? What does that look like?
BEZOS: Well, we’re, we finally have enough visibility into our future and our financial success that you know I’ve funded Blue out of my own by selling Amazon stock to fund to fund Blue, but it’s a good time actually to start thinking about the future and bring on some other outside investors, so we’re considering that—
SORKIN: So it’s not, it’s not happened yet.
BEZOS: It has not happened yet.
SORKIN: And finally, because we’re going to run out of time, you’ve lived through a whole bunch of economic cycles, including 1999.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: When people called, you know, there were a lot of questions about whether Amazon was going to continue—
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Even, and so I’m curious, where you think we are now in this economy because there is a lot of excitement around AI, around space, but there’s almost an exuberance about it too, and I’m curious, if you think we’re—
BEZOS: We’re in a phase where every experiment is getting funded, so what that means is the good ideas are getting funded and the bad ideas are getting funded. It’s because investors in this, at this moment, haven’t learned yet how to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas, and that’s okay, because the good ideas will pay for all of the losers. So, from a point of view of civilization of society, these kind of industrial, you know, cycles, you know, are can actually be very healthy because they drive the technology forward.
SORKIN: And so we shouldn’t worry about being in a bubble.
BEZOS: No, even if it does turn out to be a bubble, you shouldn’t worry about it because the bubble is driving investment, and a lot of the investment is going to turn out to be very healthy. It’s like the biotech bubble, when it burst in the 1990s, a lot of investors lost money on certain things, but we’ve still got to keep all the life-saving drugs that they had invented.
SORKIN: Jeff Bezos, thank you for a great conversation.
BEZOS: My pleasure, Andrew. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
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