Squawk Pod: Jeff Bezos & Andrew Ross Sorkin at Blue Origin | Edited Transcript

A timestamped transcript and chapter map of Bezos on wealth, tax policy, AI, space, Blue Origin, the Washington Post, and the future of work.

Chapter Timestamps

[00:00:00]: CNBC frames the episode around Bezos on wealth, tax policy, AI, space, the Washington Post, and Blue Origin. The hosts treat the interview as unusually broad because Bezos is funding space infrastructure, running Amazon-adjacent AI work, owning a major newspaper, and weighing in on politics from the position of extreme wealth.

[00:03:00]: The pre-interview setup explains why Blue Origin matters now: outside funding rumors, SpaceX IPO expectations, orbital data centers, and the factory floor as the backdrop. The hosts also detour through Trump, IRS audits, settlements, and norms before handing off to Sorkin.

[00:18:33]: Sorkin opens the Bezos interview with wealth inequality and the public anger at billionaires. Bezos says politicians misdiagnose the problem when they pick villains; his core claim is that the bottom half of earners should pay zero federal income tax because they contribute only about 3 percent of revenue.

[00:22:00]: Bezos argues the United States has a spending and competence problem more than a revenue problem. He uses New York City schools as the example: high per-student spending, weak outcomes, too much administration, and too little money reaching teachers.

[00:25:00]: The tax debate moves from billionaire rates to loopholes, housing, and political influence. Bezos says he pays billions in capital gains when he sells Amazon stock, rejects “buy, borrow, die” as overstated, and says real affordability problems come from policies like subsidizing housing demand while constraining supply with zoning and permitting.

[00:30:00]: Sorkin presses AOC’s claim that billionaires cannot earn their wealth. Bezos answers with the burger-chain example: a company can grow from one outlet to a thousand by serving customers well, and the ethical question is not the final wealth number but whether the business creates value voluntarily.

[00:33:00]: Bezos keeps returning to the same policy distinction: debate taxes without turning people into villains. He says pied-a-terre taxes are legitimate policy debates, but standing in front of Ken Griffin’s house as if he is harming New York is the wrong move.

[00:38:00]: The philanthropy section is less about generosity than dependence versus independence. Bezos says he gives to family homeless shelters because the average stay is under 180 days and the model teaches skills; he also argues that properly run for-profit companies usually create more total value than charitable giving.

[00:43:00]: The Washington Post discussion turns on whether journalism can still be subsidized as a public trust. Bezos says the Post was profitable after he bought it, then failed to adapt to the collapse of the local-newspaper monopoly model; his new editorial line is free markets and personal liberties.

[00:49:00]: On Trump and politics, Bezos says he still sees Trump as more disciplined than in the first term while insisting his own position is “on the side of America,” not a party. He says business leaders should work with presidents across administrations and give credit where policy is right.

[00:51:00]: The space section begins with a zero-sum fallacy argument: wealth is not like water in a drought, because investment grows the pie. Bezos connects his Amazon stock sales, capital gains taxes, and Blue Origin funding to the idea that investment is more like farming than hoarding.

[00:53:00]: Bezos says space data centers are real but not immediate. The two gating factors are energy becoming a larger share of terrestrial data-center cost and launch costs falling roughly tenfold; near-term terrestrial AI data centers still need to expand as fast as possible.

[00:56:00]: The AI jobs section is Bezos’s strongest deflationary case: he expects AI to create a labor shortage, not mass unemployment. The reason is productivity: AI gives software engineers and other workers “a bulldozer instead of a shovel,” makes food, housing, and permitting cheaper, and moves work up to problem selection and solution design.

[01:00:56]: Prometheus is not robotics, according to Bezos; it is an “artificial general engineer” for designing physical objects. He says his through-line across Prometheus and Blue Origin is AI, and that the company deserves separate focus because it can become a general tool for engineering.

[01:05:00]: The close returns to space economics: Bezos says space will be a gigantic industry regardless of the exact SpaceX valuation. Blue Origin is making solar cells from lunar-regolith simulant, wants to use moon materials because lunar gravity makes lifting cheaper, and sees the moon as the first step before Mars.

[01:09:00]: Bezos argues space is already part of everyday life through weather, GPS, communications, and national security. His long-view analogy is Kitty Hawk to the 747: a century from now, space industry may look obvious in hindsight, and Blue Origin is now considering outside capital because its future is more visible.

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Full video:

Jeff Bezos sits down with Andrew Ross Sorkin for an extended interview at the Blue Origin Rocket Park in Florida. In a wide-ranging conversation, the world’s fourth-richest person discusses America’s wealthiest class, U.S. tax policy, philanthropy, working with President Trump, and our country’s future. Bezos predicts AI-prompted deflation and an AI-prompted job shortage, and he doubles down on the concept of data centers in space. Plus, as owner of The Washington Post, Bezos comments on that newsroom’s mass layoffs and the current state of journalism.

Note: this YouTube upload does not expose captions, so this transcript was generated from the audio and then lightly formatted for readability.

Transcript

00:00-01:30

Bring in show music, please. Hi, I’m CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on a super-sized Squawk pod, Jeff Bezos from Amazon to Rocket Ships to the Washington Post and everything in between. Andrew Ross Sorkin sits down with Bezos at Blue Origin to discuss wealth. I pay billions of dollars in taxes. Again, if people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate. Productivity. Politics. politics. 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. AI and more, the world according to Jeff. We’re in a phase where every experiment is getting funded. The good ideas are getting funded and the bad ideas are getting funded. That is coming up. It’s Wednesday, May 20th. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand back you by in three, two, one, cue please. Good morning everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. I’m Becky Quick along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross-Sorkin and hi Andrew. No tie. Hey there, look at that. Nice to see you from afar. Is that a rocket ship behind you? with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin and hi Andrew. No tie. Hey there. Look at that. Nice to see you from afar. Is that a rocket ship behind you? Nice to see you from afar.

01:30-03:00

The rocket ships are cool. Set up where we are I think in just a moment but it’s pretty extraordinary. We’ve got a big show coming for you in just a little bit. Andrew set us up. Tell us what we’re all about today. So we are, hey Becky, we are here at Blue Origin’s Rocket Park. This is along Florida’s space coast and this is a huge campus where Blue Origin manufactures and tests its new Glenn Orbital Rockets, also the Blue Moon Lunar Landers. The Kennedy Space Center is right next door and our special guest this morning is Blue Origin founder and of course the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. And we’re going to talk a lot about space this morning. Weorgian founder and of course the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. And we’re going to talk a lot about space this morning. We’ll talk about his plans for the moon and future space exploration. But we’re also going to talk about so much else that’s going on in the headlines right now. We’re going to talk about wealth in America and wealth inequality and all the wealth taxes and what’s happening in New York with Mamdani and what’s happening in California and so many many other places we’ll talk about the Washington Post. We’re gonna talk about Amazon, his relationship with the president. We’ll talk of course about the AI revolution, his new project Prometheus, which is his AI efforts around robotics, and yes we’ll also talk about the economy and whether he sees any comparisons to the dot-com bubble. He has lived through it all. If there’s one person who I’ve wanted to talk to for a very, very long time about all of this and more, it is Jeff Bezos. And we’re going to spend a lot of time with him right here on Squawk. So I mean, you know, talk about a few things like the Washington Post and the moon. I mean, it just...

03:00-04:34

The scope. We’re going to hit everything. There is so much to discuss with him right now, and he is in so many ways at the center of it all. And by the way, there’s so much interest in space right now. SpaceX getting ready to file for its IPO. We’re all waiting for that filing as well. That’s going to have a big impact on the valuation ultimately of this company here. There’s been some reported talk of bringing in outside money for the first time to Blue Origin. Thus far he’s been financing all of that himself. So there’s just, there’s so many different places that we’re going to, we’re going to get into. I feel like I could listen for about four or five hours from that list of things that are going through. So I feel like it’s going to be jam, no matter how long you’re talking to him, it’s gonna be jam packed to get through all of those topics, Andrew. We’re gonna try, we’re gonna try, try our best. Do you think he’ll ever say no comment? Or you feel like he’s just ready to bear his soul today? And I think you’re gonna get a lot. You know, I think he wants to talk about everything and I think he’s prepared to talk about everything. And we’re going to try to get into it, all of it. I mean, there’s just so much going on in terms of just the economic piece of it, but there’s also the policy and politics piece of it. And there’s the sort of cultural zeitgeist piece of what’s happening with wealth in this country that I think we all want to understand the way he feels about it. He’s often considered sort of an avatar for the wealthiest in a way. His name is almost in the headlines, almost every day in that regard. So I think, you know, we’re going to get into all of those,

04:34-06:06

all of those component parts of our story this morning. I would like more wealth in the country, but that, that’s just me. But it is, it is nuanced. You’re right. But we look, look but in general let’s go with more more well and remember what in fact remember what he said about AI comparing it historically the only thing he come up with was electricity something that could be so transformative yeah I mean look at what how electricity it wasn’t that him, Andrew, that said, I think it was a previous. He’s talked about it as electricity, he’s talked about it as like fire. I mean, talk about something even more basic than that, you know, that is that, that big a deal. But he also, by the way, believes that we can maybe, you know, talk about data centers and the cost of the data centers and everything else. He was probably the first person, long before Elon Musk, to talk about putting data centers and everything else. He was probably the first person, long before Elon Musk, to talk about putting data centers and all of this infrastructure in space. I mean, one of his whole goals with what he’s doing here is about putting all of that up there so we can live here. And protect and preserve his place. I remember talking to him about this maybe 10 or 15 years ago and I thought, oh my god my god that’s I couldn’t even fathom what he was talking about it just didn’t make any sense but here we are it’s uh by the way we’re going to show you some images of this place because the scale of it guys is just extraordinary if you could see it three million square feet here and the size of these these spaceships that they’re building is just it’s just beyond that’s what I was going to ask is that like a rocket booster right behind you?

06:06-07:40

That is a rocket booster. And we’re going to show you that’s where we’re going to speak with Jeff. They’re setting up the set right there. But it is just unbelievable. It is unbelievable to behold. I’ve now been here twice. And even just to see the growth of it from where it was two years ago is, it’s just unbelievable. There’s no other word for it. There’s not enough time in the day for all the things that we want to hear from him. Do you guys remember using pay phones? Yeah. I used to get a pager, I mean that was amazing. Look at this thing, someone can reach me. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, call this. So that wasn’t that long ago for me. So look at, and then remember I always used to talk about the singularity when these machines know a billion times all human knowledge combined, maybe we can have a software hardware body that lets us live forever. These data centers, it’s happening. I mean I’m probably too late for some of us to live, that’s why I’m back to going to church on Sunday, just to cover my basis. But it’s just amazing how these advances, what we just talked about is if it’s normal. Isn’t it? Building a data center in space. Kurzweil may have been right about all of it. We’ll see. You might do it. You might make it. You want to live forever? I do. I do. Just so I can torture you. We all have our reasons. New developments Splayed across the front page of every newspaper this morning

07:40-09:10

President Trump’s settlement agreement with the IRS, Aiman Jevers joins us now with more. Hey, Jevers. George, let’s now with more. Hey, Amen. Yeah, hey to you, Joe. In an unprecedented arrangement, the Trump administration has barred itself from pursuing any and all claims against President Trump and his family that could have been made by the IRS, including his tax returns as part of a controversial $1.8 billion settlement between President Trump personally and the government that he leads. Now the protection extends to Trump, his family members, the Trump organization, and parties including trusts, parents, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries. It covers any pending tax audits of Trump and others the IRS may have been conducting. And the sweeping exemption of Trump and his family from normal obligations under tax law raises the question of whether Trump has directed his government to award him a settlement on favorable terms that no other American could get. It comes as part of the settlement of a $10 billion federal lawsuit against the IRS filed in Miami by Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and their company over the leak of Trump-related tax filings by an IRS employee. As part of that settlement, the Justice Department agreed to finance what is being called an anti-weaponization fund with $1.8 billion in taxpayer money, the fund would compensate alleged victims of law enforcement

09:10-10:41

actions under the Biden administration. Now Department of Justice Spokeswoman defended the deal, saying there would be little point in settling several significant claims if either party could simply turn around and seek to initiate more adverse claims that could have been pursued previously. Back up to you guys. So, Eamon, the tax code prohibits the president and also the heads of all the executive agencies from either directing audits or ending audits. And these are all audits, I think. Right. Some of these audits go back, I think, as of 2022, there are still audits open from 2015 to 2019, and it’s unclear whether any of those have been settled. The only exception to prohibiting that is for the Attorney General. Pam Bondi left. Yep. The President for acting AG has his personal lawyer blanched in there. Now, I am not defending it. I understand why Trump doesn’t like the IRS. I certainly do. And even before he ran for president, he used to complain all the time about being audited. And I think it got worse with the lawfare that he would say he was subjected to in the prior administration. So he was ready. I think he does things sometimes because he can, honestly, because he can and torpedoes be damned.

10:41-12:12

My question to you is, I mean, Democrats are up in arms, they’re gonna try and get the courts to stop this. The journal says it’s unclear who would have standing. What do they mean by that? Why would, or it might have to be Congress that would try to prevent this from being maintained the way it is. Sure, I mean standing is a legal term, meaning who has the right to sue, right? prevent this from being maintained the way it is. Sure, I mean standing is a legal term, meaning who has the right to sue, right? So the question is who’s harmed by this and then could therefore bring a case in court. And so, I’d leave that to the lawyers to argue whether any average taxpayer could say, I’m harmed by it because I have to follow the law and the president doesn’t. But we’ll see how that’s all adjudicated in the courts. But I think you’re right, say, you know, I’m harmed by it because I have to follow the law and the president doesn’t. But you know, we’ll see how that’s all adjudicated in the courts. But I think the president is doing this because he can. Yeah, Congress could step in, but the journal points out you’d need Republican votes, but not after the midterms, theoretically. So this, I mean, this could all be challenged in a couple of months. If if. Yeah, I think a Democratic Congress would certainly challenge this. And obviously if there’s a Democratic president in 2029, they could reverse this. But for the meantime, it does give the president some exemption from any kind of investigation or prosecution by the IRS. It’s just a sweeping thing. And you do wonder if, going backwards, right? And you do wonder what the reaction would be

12:12-13:42

if any other president had done this. I mean, I think this is the kind of thing where you see Trump doing things that other presidents really didn’t contemplate. I would like, you know, and here we’re going to get to what aboutism. I would like that Hunter Biden deal, past crimes, future crimes, former crimes, anything here, there, Biden ink. You mean the pardon? Yeah, totally, you know, blanket. So I mean, as I say, not defending it, it’s not my place to defend this, and I understand the ire. And I’m sure Andrew has once again in here. Well, Eamon, my question actually relates to where you were going, which is, if you get a Democratic president or Democratic control of the House and the Senate or something in 28, or maybe it happens in 32, or who knows when, what kind of look-back is even possible? And assuming, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but assuming that the president could ultimately, before he leaves office, pardon himself and everybody around him on the way out, does all this matter anyway? And is that going to become the new norm for presidents in this country? Well, I think the most important question is the question of the norms, right? I mean, what kind of presidency do we want in this country? Do we want a president who’s unaccountable to the law, who the assumption is we’ll pardon himself and everybody around him so that nobody has to follow the law during the administration? That’s a question for future Americans as to what kind of country you want to live in.

13:42-15:16

But right now, I mean, I think tax law is very complicated. I would hesitate to offer any kind of opinion there. But I think Congress could wipe this away in the future and allow the IRS to go back and continue to look at some of those audits of the president if they’re just take a hypothetical. If the president did commit a tax crime in the past, this would then prevent the IRS now from investigating that. But if Congress undisputed that in the future, I would think that they could go back and redo it. Now, tax lawyers might jump all over me and say, well, no, because if it’s wiped out once, you can’t go back. There are no do-overs. I don’t know. But I think this, at least for now, gives the president enormous relief from any kind of pending audit or tax penalty that he might have been facing. And it’s a benefit to the president given by the president, right? And so the question for Americans is, is that what you want? And is that true, though, of the pardon piece, too? It meaning if he were to pardon himself at the end of his term, would that apply that you think the IRS could still go back? I would think that they couldn’t go back. If, yeah, if he pardons himself, right, I was just talking about the actual document that we have in front of us today. If he pardons himself, then they can’t go back. That’s lasting. And then the secondary issue I wanted to ask you real quick about was the other piece of this is obviously this 1.6 or 1.8 billion dollars that’s going to go out potentially to people who feel that there’s been, you know, government warfare against them of some sort, lawfare against

15:16-16:47

them. Is that something that you think will get undone in some other way later too? Well, it expires at the end of the president’s term, right? So this is a temporary thing that’s going to create this fund of money that is going to be the mechanics of it, how it’s going to get dispersed, who it’s going to get dispersed to, how those decisions are going to be made, is all pretty opaque right now. The vice president talked about this in the briefing room yesterday and said these decisions will be made simply on a case-by-case basis. But he declined to rule out the idea that you could send the taxpayers sending money to people who assaulted police officers on January 6. He said all that’s going to have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Not clear at all how that’s going to be handled, who’s going to handle it, and whether or not that information will ever become public. We don’t know that the Department of Justice will ever disclose who got this money. So you have what’s moving fast and low here. A lot of money moving fast and low, and it’s not clear where it’s going. In my experience in Washington, that’s always a danger for some kind of political use. And, Eamon, you go back to the original sin, and that is the leaking of Trump’s tax return by someone at the IRS, which allowed the $10 billion. But I don’t know whether the $10 billion lawsuit had a really good chance of succeeding. There are some that argue that it wasn’t going to succeed. So the president maybe was able to, president was able to say,

16:47-18:19

you know, since it’s the government, could have maybe some influence on whether it was settled. And then you come, and that’s where the 1.8 billion comes from. So at all. Yeah, I mean, if the president’s directing the settlement of his own case against himself, you know, seems like the outcome is pretty sure. Right. And that’s where the 1.8 comes from. All right. And as I say, some things are done because, Well, you know, it seems like the outcome is pretty sure. Right, and that’s where the 1.8 comes from. All right, as I say, some things are done because he can’t, and he is, he’s got a lot that he thinks that he needs to account for, that he thinks happened to him. So I’m not defending it, but I can understand it. Anyway, thanks, David. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, the Jeff Bezos of it all, rockets, the media, politics, and equality, the fourth richest man in the world is next. 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. Politicians are using this age-old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers. But the problem is that doesn’t solve anything. Welcome back to Squawk Pod from CNBC. We are bringing you now in full Andrew Ross Sorkin’s discussion with Jeff Bezos from Launch Control at Blue Origin’s Rocket Park in Florida. Now this is a working industrial floor with hundreds of workers actively putting together rockets so be warned you may hear some of that activity coming

18:19-19:55

up. Andrew takes things from here. 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 can talk to about everything that’s going on in the country right now, in the economy, AI, 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, 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’ve been getting to everything else, what you think about that right now? 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 have been thinking about, what is driving this? It does seem different from 10 years ago. And I think what’s going on is that it’s kind of a tale of two economies.

19:55-21:26

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. They pay rent, groceries. And so what’s happening here is politicians are using the kind of age-old technique. 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, 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 wise and we’d try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix. And then when we fix it at the root, you’re fixing it forever. It’s a real solution. 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, you know, I sort of... That’s a mess. Do you have a plan? Well, I have you know, I started, You have a plan? Well, I have some ideas. I have some places to start. So, you know, if, yeah, I, 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?

21:26-22:56

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 a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes. 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% of the taxes. It’s only 3%. We can find 3%. So we don’t have, it’s a small amount of money for the government, you know that. And really, 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. Okay, but then on the other end, the question is, should you be paying higher taxes to pay for the 3% component part of this that you think is gonna need to be paid for, if not more than that, given the debts we have? It’s certainly a perfectly valid policy debate to say, do we want an even more progressive tax system? So the kind of the line that gets quoted all the time is, the wealthy should pay their fair share.

22:56-24:28

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. 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% of taxpayers pay 40% of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3%. We have already, and I think it should be zero, I don’t think it should be 3%, I think it should be zero, so we would be making it more progressive that way. We actually have a spending problem, and that’s the skills issue. I mean, let me give you an example. The New York City school system. They spend $44,000 per student. That’s 30% more per student than other big cities like Chicago, LA, 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 this, listen, let me just say, if we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We’d have to charge you a $100 delivery fee. And then when the package did finally arrive, it’d have the wrong item in it anyway. That’s a skills issue, Andrew. It’s not about, it’s just competence.

24:28-26:01

But there’s also a question about, you know, there’s teachers’ unions in New York, for example. None of this money is getting to the teachers. I promise you, if you’re charging $44,000 per student, how much that money you think is trickling down to teachers? Not much. And so you don’t think it’s about creating a livable wage for the teachers? Part of the issue is sort of how do you create this livable wage affordability issue? More of that. That amount of spending should come down, and more of it should go to the teachers. If you look at the level of administration in the New York public school system, it’s off the charts. It’s like they have all these middle managers and senior leaders. The money does not get to the teachers. 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 a 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. These people sometimes say that I don’t pay taxes. That’s not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes. And it’s a permanent, again, if people want me to pay more billions, then let’s have that debate. But don’t pretend that that’s gonna solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not gonna help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. This is, so you can’t connect those two things,

26:01-27:33

not logically. There are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blame it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. In fact, it’s been almost, let me finish here, one sec. It’s already been outlawed in New York City, and rents are still very high. So we know Airbnb is 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, really simple, you need to, you can’t subsidize supply, I mean, subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are gonna skyrocket. But this is not anybody’s fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue. 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. But what I would say is that we have way too much corporate welfare, way too much corporate subsidies.

27:33-29:04

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 and if we can make that better we should do that too. That would be another root cause. We go back and figure out what is happening there. But yeah, it doesn’t make any sense for the government to subsidize certain agricultural crops, certain, you know, real estate transactions, Hollywood films. This, the tax code is 10,000 plus pages long because it has built-in corporate loopholes for various things. This is crony capitalism. And of course it should be fixed. Well, that’s my question. And therefore the the question is should people like you in 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 goings against them. And 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. And you can look at, I’m selling Amazon stock routinely. That’s how I fund Blue Origin and Prometheus and a bunch of other things, investments in small companies that I’m doing. So every time I sell, I pay taxes on that.

29:04-30:35

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. Well, 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, can we fix it, then we should. That’s, I don’t, 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. It’s not going to solve the full problem. That nurse in Queens is it’s not going to help her at all. Let me ask you this. I’m going to add. And so that’s what you’ve got to bring it back to you know if you really 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. But part of it is this. And with bad outcomes, 70% of the New York public city school kids in eighth grade aren’t at their meeting level. 70%. Only it’s like it’s actually 72%. 28% are there. 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, and Mr. 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 a billion dollars. Just can’t earn that, she says. You can get market power, you can break rules,

30:35-32:08

you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that. You, by the way, you’ve earned 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? It’s not cracked on its face. Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint and you have 10 employees and you make a little bit of money. Right. So you have this is this one, 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. Right. 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 a thousand outlets, you are a billionaire. Right. And by the way, this is a real life story. It happens all the time. It’s in and out of burger. It’s, you know, raising canes, 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 you make a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars or ten million dollars 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 a billion dollars. And you can, you know, just try it with a chicken franchise. Do you think though- But your chicken has to be good. But there’s the question of whether the people who are working at the burger joint ultimately should be paid

32:08-33:41

more that that’s what creates the affordability gap. Well by the way that’s also if you want to change the minimum wage change them in which Amazon we have our entry level wage for in Queens is twenty three dollars an hour and that’s that works up to be like $52,000 a year and this is an entry-level job doesn’t require any educational attainment it doesn’t require any pre-existing skills we will train you it’s actually a great first job on day one you get full health care the same health care program that our senior executives get, the same one I’m on. And so 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. And you think that person’s... Now that’s a third. Right. 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 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. The more I think about it, why? Well, you’ll need that revenue. The piece is 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

33:41-35:11

what happened with this handgrip and video that the mayor made. You have a place in the city. 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. 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, there’s a very, taxes on taxes on out of towners are very popular taxes that’s why there are hotel taxes and you know 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 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, but it’s a policy debate. Right. Policy debates don’t have to be finger pointing. This is the piece that. And it’s not to tell your place. 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

35:11-36:45

problem is skill. And so really it’s a skills issue. You want to say, but any corporate CFO worth their salt, the Amazon CFO could find 3% in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. could find 3% in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. There is so much waste in government spending. What do you think personally? I mean, you read these headlines. You see your name in them, whether it’s the Met Gala protests. On a personal level, what do you personally think of all this? I know we’re talking of policy. Well, on a personal level, you know, I think of my parents and I think of how they uplifted me and 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 up 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.

36:45-38:16

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 zero is a better number than like $1, you know, we don’t charge with free shipping in 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 and aspiring entrepreneurs. And that’s, we should have so much optimism about the future. Okay. Well, I want to talk about some of that optimism because there’s some people who are very fearful, by the way, by AI. I’m very aware of this. And I think those people are dead wrong. We’ll get into that in a second but you have a relationship with the president. Now that you have this I don’t know if there’s a policy position the the Bezos policy position for zero taxes on I don’t know what what the wealth number is going to be. Do you plan to go to Washington to talk about this with them? And is this something you want to be the advocate for? I’m certainly going to talk about this with them? Is this something you want to be the advocate for? I’m certainly going to advocate for this. I’ve worked with every president since Bill Clinton, and I hope to work with the next couple of presidents, too, if they’ll have me.

38:16-39:46

But yeah, it’s part of our job as citizens and as business leaders to share our ideas. And this one would actually help people And this one would actually help people. This one would actually help people. Let me ask you a social compact question between wealth. And 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 it. About a year or two ago Warren Buffett wrote a fabulous letter where he said they always thought he was going to get rich but you never imagined that people were going to get as rich as Carnegie or Rockefeller. He thought they would never imagine they 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, some $280 billion of it, mostly during your lifetime. You’re 62 years old now. Warren Buffett has said how hard it is to give money away. He’s not even sure that his kids in their generation are gonna give away. He’s already starting to prepare to find another, the next generation to give it away. How are you gonna do it? Well, I give away billions of dollars to charitable causes. I’m gonna continue to do that. I’m gonna give away most of my wealth in my lifetime. But that’s going to be hard. But let me have to give a lot of weight. It’s hard. Quickly. And it’s also hard to do well. It’s easy to do poorly. Right. And 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.

39:46-41:22

I give about 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 these are, I really like these because they build independence. So 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’ve encouraged anyone to ask is thinking about doing charitable giving is does this giving create dependence or independence and you want to do things that create independence. How are you going to do that at scale? I mean 280 billion dollars and maybe more depending on how it is. I don’t know yet the answer to your question and 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 than the good that I do with my charitable giving. And I think this is an important point to make because people forget or they sometimes don’t see that when you create something like Amazon and you’re saving it, I get letters

41:22-42:52

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, Amazon creates from its own. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. That’s why people are voluntarily giving them money. 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. 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 is such an important point. I really want people listening to this to think about that, that for-profit companies properly run create tremendous value for the world. And they’re self-sustaining and they draw competition. If you can do something with a for profit model, you should. And then if you can’t figure out, there are market failures where it’s just not gonna work. If you wanna do room temperature vaccines, 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?

42:52-44:23

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. Okay, talking about markets. Yeah. I was gonna ask you about the news market. Yeah. Because you own the Washington Post. Yes. And one of the critiques, by the way, and this is maybe the wealth critique and everything else is, you know, we just said the company laid off about 30% of its staff. And there’s a lot of people out there who said, Jeff’s super wealthy. He’s talked about this being a public trust, it’s something that he bought early on. How much you care about that piece of it? Why lay people up? Why fire people? Why do you subsidize the business if in fact- Because the post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. But doesn’t it? Yes. I mean that’s a question people say it should be a trust. And let me tell you why. Because it’s a measure of its relevance. If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing it. It’s not a good enough product. It’s like 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. 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

44:23-45:53

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 gonna lay it off or which departments. I said, follow the data, follow the data. And I said, there’s one exception to this. What’s that? 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, 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 in the Doge. The post is going to continue to be an important institution. 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. 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. 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. We turned it around in two years, it was profitable for six years. I put all that money back in the post,

45:53-47:24

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. So really what wrong then? I mean you had this super successful period. Yeah, 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 spin 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 said 70% 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 it. Now you have to work hard to make a living in the news business. Let me ask you one related question to all of this. Yes. And this goes to the Washington Post piece of it and just the influence and money piece of it. Yes. And it relates to the President of the United States. Yes. the influence and money piece of it. Yeah. And it relates to the president of the United States. Yeah. 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. Yes, the Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die. Okay. So, 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. Everybody thinks that you went to Mar-a-Lago. It’s not true. Not true. We have denied it. Melania’s office has denied it.

47:24-48:58

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, 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, but I didn’t. And so, you know, Amazon’s a big company, it makes a lot of decisions. But no, this idea that somehow that is a way of buying influence is just not correct. I can see what they say this. And by the way, the same thing at the post, I want the post 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 those are founding pillars of America. It’s one of the reasons that America has been so successful. 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. And they can be interfered with a bit. But there’s a limit. If you interfere too much with too

48:58-50:32

much regulation or too much, there’s just the right amount. Too much. And the golden 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? Completely. When I last interviewed you, it was about two years ago, President Trump had just won. He was not the president yet. And I had asked you what you thought of him at the time. And you said that you thought that he had mellowed, that he was calmer. And I’m curious now, here we are. I still think that. 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? 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’s, 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. I’m not on the side. This is, I’m on the side of America. And that is so important. And that’s where business leaders should be. And do you think they’re not? No, I think we are, but we get perceived as being partisan or whatever. I was helping

50:32-52:07

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, people that are Trump has lots of good ideas and he’s done a lot of he’s been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due. Let me pivot the whole conversation we put 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 a remarkable. It’s amazing. Thank you. This is what you’re looking at here is billions of dollars of investment. And it’s also employing 14,000 people and it has an unbelievable future. It’s very exciting. So you’ve talked about this. 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 there’s kind of zero-sum fallacy. So they think that if there’s a bunch of wealth over here, that there’s a fixed pie. We’ve got one pizza and there are seven people

52:07-53:37

and there are eight slices. Who’s gonna get two slices? That is not how economies work. So it isn’t a fixed pie, it grows. So, and people get, their mental model is that wealth is like water and a drought or food in a famine. You could hoard food in a famine. You could hoard gasoline in an energy crisis. You could hoard water in a drought. You could hoard toilet paper in a pandemic, as people did. But you can’t hoard investment. So 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. 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. By the way, when I sold that Amazon stock, I paid capital gains on it. 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. And I think you were even talking a couple years ago about putting data centers potentially in space before you on, we’re talking about data centers in space. How realistic is that really? 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 gonna be

53:37-55:12

moving stuff to space. Yeah. The question, are data centers in space realistic? The answer is yes. The timeline is harder to answer. So, some of the timelines you hear are very short. They’re probably not right. People would talk about two or three years. That’s probably a little, Elon’s talking about two or three years. It’s probably a little ambitious. Okay. But I think what Elon would tell you is if you don’t set an ambitious timetable, 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. Okay. So today, terrestrial data centers typically spend less than 15% 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. Right. No clouds, no weather. And so that’s a big energy of 15% 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 right 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

55:12-56:48

on right here. That’s what Blue Origin is doing. And this team is on fire doing that. You know, so we we have you see 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. 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? 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 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. So let’s go there then. I wanted to stay in space, but let’s go to that. We can come back. We can be in space too, but whatever you want. But that’s no, but that’s fascinating because I don’t know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend. Yeah. There is a fear. There is a fear in your generation, yet that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess

56:48-58:21

that you did not create. And I understand that fear. The students were booing because they, every time you mentioned AI, they were booing because I think they’re deeply fearful and worried about whether they’re going to have a job. Yeah, 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, you know, there’s going to be no more radiologists because, you know, AI can read x-rays better than a radiologist can and they’re 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. What they now can give you is you’ve been digging out a basement for your house digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody’s 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 gonna and what’s really gonna happen is we’re gonna have so much productivity in our economy that for example, this is 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.

58:21-59:53

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 get, food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper and so on and so on. Is there a transition cost to be dairy? We can even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing. Like it should take, when you, if you are a builder, why does it take you six months, nine months, two years, five years, depending on what you live in, to get a building permit? Like I should be able to do it. Like I should be able to do it. I should do that in ten seconds. And it should give you a yes or no in 10 seconds and then you should have your authority to build it. 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. But how do you answer, I mean, Amazon’s laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard Mark Zuckerberg. Not because of AI. Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off. Is that because of AI. Jack Dorsey has George George. George describes it directly. Well you’d have to talk to Jack about that. I don’t know. He must have had a lot of extra people. We’re not seeing those same kinds of things. 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 have the extraordinary valuation. I think that we’re talking about they have to create extraordinary productivity. Can I give you a different lens to view this?

59:53-1:01:23

So if I’m a software engineer I need to up level and think to myself what am I really doing? What is a software a good computer scientist, software juke? What we really do is we identify problems and we help solve them. And the code is almost just 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? Totally. And that’s not gonna go away. Because that’s the kind of thing that humans are gonna be good at is figuring out, oh, okay, we want this. And they’re gonna work with that tool to build the system. But we humans are never gonna run out of problems. And we’re never gonna 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. There’s an argument, or there’s a concern about, there’s white collar workers on one end. And then I was going to mention, you have a new company called Prometheus. That is really about AI robotics. No, this is just so you know. It’s not surprising, but 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’re building tools

1:01:23-1:02:55

that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects. So you’ve heard of CAD 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 going to be amazing. And this is that thing, you know, as I said, 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 who’s been in the plow, we all got wealthier. Much later, somebody who’s been in the steam engine, we all got wealthier. That’s how this works. And you don’t think this time is different? No, it’s 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. You hear Sam Altman talk about the need for universal, potentially universal basic income. There’s a question, but this gets maybe to the wealth about the concentration of wealth. Instead of universal basic income. There’s a question, but this gets maybe to the wealth about the concentration of wealth. Instead of universal basic income, how about we stop taxing nurses who make $75,000 a year? Do we don’t need to give her universal income yet?

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Let’s just stop taking money away from her. 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 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. And 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 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. What I do, my through line for the last few years has been AI. And so, you know, I’ve been on the machine learning track for 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 AI. And it has so much potential, so my time at Amazon is spent on AI, my time at Prometheus is spent on AI, Prometheus is really an AI company, and my time at Blue is largely spent on AI. And Prometheus, by the way, the tools that we’re building are gonna help companies like Blue immensely. And you, but rather than do it inside Blue or rather than do it inside one of the others? 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.

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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 that are very excited about that. I heard a little bit about that as I was walking through. What do you think about that value? Does that make sense to you? I don’t know enough about their financials to have, I think 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 based on the financials and how much of it is a bet on the future. One thing I can tell you for sure is that space is going to be a gigantic industry. So in terms of particular, 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. Jeff, we’re almost, we’re running out of time. We’re going to take a quick break, if we could, and then we’ll come back on the other side and we’ll be back in just a moment. And we’re back. This is Squawk Pod. We are back on the factory floor here of Blue with our exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos. Jeff, what are you holding? What did you see what that was? You had it on the

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side there before. This is a solar cell that we, Blue Origin made out of lunar regolith. Lunar regolith is the dust on the surface of the moon. This is this is lunar regolith. This is a lunar regolith simulant. It has exactly the same composition as lunar regolith does. And we’re working on building, making solar cells out of Lunar Regolith. And so that Lunar Regolith fortunately has a lot of silicon in it. And so this is an actual solar cell that we produced with Lunar Regolith Simulant. And will this be on things that are ultimately on the moon or just in space? It could be both. So ultimately, you may build data ultimately on the moon or just in space? It could be both. So ultimately, you may build data centers on the moon, empower 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, because this is the garden planet

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and we want to keep nature here the way it is. What’s the timeline for you? You talk about lunar permanence, this idea of actually creating permanent, working environments on the moon. Well, with NASA We will be building a lunar base on the moon Lord’s it has a big contract with NASA to go lunar lander and NASA’s 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, it has eternal peaks of light. We can build a whole bunch of things on the moon. The economics though for this business, at least in the short term, are about satellites, right? It can be about satellites and data centers. Amazon has Leo. Right. And that’s right. And we have two constellations in work. One is called TerraWave, the communications constellation with very high bandwidth. It serves a limited number of customers 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 for now, I would say yes.

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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 U.S. national security. And so we also focus a lot on that. There are all sorts of wild things we hear about, things that could happen in space. It’s the idea that you could 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 gonna either be in space or be impacted in a meaningful way by all of us? 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 communication satellites, which we’ve been in a way better position. Same thing with communication 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 gonna see it with Leo. But it’s your timeline question. Look, it’s going to be a gradual thing, but it a hundred years from now, you won’t believe what has happened. And remember,

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the best way to think about a hundred years is to think about Kitty Hawk. And what happened, you know, for that little right flyer that, you know, that only flew a few hundred 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, and it’s probably going to happen faster than most people think. Dave Limp who runs Blue for you. There was a memo that leaked to the financial times. You’re thinking of taking outside money for the first time. Yeah. So when’s that going to happen? What does that look like? Well, we finally have enough visibility into our future and our financial success that I’ve funded Blue out of my own pocket by selling Amazon stock 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. So it’s not happened yet. It has not happened yet. And finally, because we’re going to run out of time, you’ve lived through a whole bunch of economic cycles, including 1999. Yes. When people called, you know, there were a lot of questions about whether Amazon was going to continue. Yes. 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... We’re in a phase where every

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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 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 cycles can actually be very healthy because they drive the technology forward. And so we shouldn’t worry about being in a bubble? 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. Jeff Bezos, thank you for a great conversation. My pleasure. I really appreciate it. Thank you so very, very much. You made it. That is the end of our very special Squawk pod today. Thanks for listening. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Tune in weekday mornings on CNBC at six Eastern or follow SquawkPod wherever you get your podcasts to get the best of our show in an easy to listen to version

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that you can check out anytime you want. Tell a friend to follow too. Have a great day. We’ll meet you right back here tomorrow. We are clear. Thanks guys.

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