Jeff Bezos & Andrew Ross Sorkin at Blue Origin 5/20/26

26:20And it's three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn't get better outcomes. So 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. 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 of that money you think is trickling down to teachers?

27:07Not much. 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 affordability issue. By the way, more of that, 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 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.

27:45And Elizabeth Warren has made this point. 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, you know, I don't pay taxes. It's not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes. And it's a perfect, again, if people want me to pay more billions, then let's have that debate. But don't pretend, you know, that that's going to solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you. So you can't connect those two things.

28:26Not logically. You know, 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 sec. It's already been outlawed 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?

29:11If you want rents to come down, Econ 101, really simple. You need to, 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. 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.

29:58There'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, you know, certain agricultural crops, certain, you know, real estate transactions, Hollywood films. The tax code is 10 ,000 plus pages long because it has built in corporate loopholes for various things. But this is crony capitalism.

30:44And of course, it should be fixed. Well, that's my question. And therefore, 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 assets that you have, stock, and get loans against them. No, 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 and Prometheus and a bunch of other things, investments in small companies that I'm doing.

31:23So every time I sell, I pay taxes on that. 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. 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. 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, it's not going to help her at all.

32:03Let me ask you this. I'm going to... And so that's what you got to bring it back to. You know, 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. But part of it is... With bad outcomes. 70 % of the New York Public City school kids in eighth grade are at their reading level. Right. 70%. Only it's like it's actually 72 percent, 28 percent are there. Let me ask you about the anger, because there seems to be anger, at least from certain political sides of this.

32:41And 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 a billion dollars. 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. By the way, you've earned an extraordinary amount of money. You employ the largest employer, if not one of them, in the whole country. When you read that, what do you think? Well, it's not cracked on its face. Let me give you a simple example.

33:22Let's say you start a burger joint and you have 10 employees and you make a little bit of money. right until 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 burger it's you know raisin canes chicken And at what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical or it didn't.

34:03There 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. Right. 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 a 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.

34:36Well, 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 in Queens is$23 an hour. And 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 healthcare, the same healthcare 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.

35:22Now, that's absurd. Why would you charge somebody making$52 ,000 a year,$10 ,000 a year in taxes? It doesn't make any sense. You know what? That person has a chance to uplift themselves and to uplift their family and to learn more skills. But why are you taxing them so much? I really am puzzled by this. The more I think about it, why? Why? Well, you don't 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-terra tax in New York and what you thought of what's happened with this, with this Ken Griffin video that the mayor made.

36:11Well, 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 Pierre-Dieter tax. The second piece, which is not so good, is to go stand in front of Ken Griffin's house and act like he is 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 pire de terre tax is a, you know, there's a very, taxes on out-of-towners are very popular taxes.

36:51That'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 pire de 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. Right. Policy debates don't have to be finger pointing. This is the piece. So you're not going to sell your place. Unfortunately, it is an effective political technique. It's as old as the hills. Right. So when you don't know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them.

37:33But it won't solve the problem. The only thing that will solve the problem is skill. Right. And so really, it's a skills issue. You want to say that any corporate CFO worth their salt, the Amazon CFO could find 3 % in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. This is, 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. Yeah. On a personal level, what do you personally think of all this? I know we're talking about policy. Well, on a personal level, I think of my parents, and I think of how they uplifted me.

38:14I think of where they started. 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 at 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.

39:01And 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 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. 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.

39:40America 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 for 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, about AI. I'm very aware of this. And I think those people are dead wrong. We'll get into that in a sec, but you have a relationship with the president, President Trump.

40:15Now that you have this, I don't know, there's 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 it? 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, it's part of our job as citizens and as business leaders to share our ideas. And this one would actually help people.

40:50This 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, but a year or two ago, Warren Buffett wrote a fabulous letter where he said they always thought he was going to get 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.

41:19You've talked about giving your wealth away, some$280 billion of it, mostly during your lifetime. Yeah. You're 62 years old now. Warren Buffett has said how hard it is to give money away. Yeah. He's not even sure that his kids in their generation are going to give it away. He's already starting to prepare to find another, the next generation to give it away. Yeah. How are you going to do it? Well, I give away billions of dollars to charitable causes. I'm going to continue to do that. I'm going to give away most of my wealth in my lifetime. But that's going to be hard. You have to give a lot of weight quickly.

41:55It's hard. 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. I give about$100 billion 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 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.

42:38Because 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 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 and maybe more. I want to say one more thing about this. I don't know yet the answer to your question. This is a very difficult thing to do, and it's going to take a lot of focus and work.

43:10But 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 know, when you create something like Amazon and you're saving it, 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.

43:53Thank 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 Shemitah. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. That's why people are voluntarily giving them money. 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. Amazon has already created tremendous value for the world, and I hope it will continue to create even more.

44:32It'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 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.

45:15Do you see what I'm saying? 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 asking 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.

45:49Yes. And there's a lot of people out there who said, Jeff's super wealthy. He's talked about this being a public trust. There'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 just subsidize the business? Because the post needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. But does it? Yes. I mean, that's the question. Some people say it should be a trust. And let me tell you why. Okay. Because it's a measure of its relevance. If people won't pay for our product, it's not a good enough product. It's like doing, it would be like poetry without rhyming.

46:32It's too easy. So 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. With 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. What's that? Don't follow the data on investigative reporting.

47:07The 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 into 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.

47:45Do 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 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. And we turned it around in two years, 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. So what do you think went wrong then?

48:25I 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 spend on this, but if you go back to the 90s, the local monopoly newspaper was the greatest business in the world. It was a printing press. The Washington Post had 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, 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, and this goes to the Washington Post piece of it and just the influence and money piece of it.

49:06Yeah. And it relates to the president of the United States. 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, you know, we did this at this Mar-a-Lago dinner. Everybody thinks that you went to Mar-a-Lago.

49:43It's not true. Not true. 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, they 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 Amazon's a big company. It makes a lot of decisions.

50:21But no, this idea that somehow that is a way of buying influence, It's just not correct. I can see what 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 those are founding pillars of America. It's one of the reasons that America has been so successful. Paul, 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.

51:08And 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 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.

51:47He 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. Yeah. And I'm curious now, here we are. Yeah, 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 it 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.

52:27But we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is. I'm not on the side. You know what? I'm on the side of America. And that is so important. like and that's where business leaders should be it's just no i think no i think we are but we get perceived as being like you know uh 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.

53:14You have to give him credit where credit is due. Let me pivot the whole conversation, if we could, to space. Because we haven't even got there, and here we are in this. It's a mecca of sorts. And it's really a remarkable thing to behold. It's amazing. 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?

54:01And 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 exceptions 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 they think that if there's a bunch of wealth over here, that there's a fixed buy. 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. So, and, and people get, um, they, their mental model is that wealth is like water in a drought or food in a famine.

54:52It's, you know, you can, 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. By the way, when I sold that Amazon stock, I paid capital gains on it.

55:34You 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. Yes. And I think you were even talking a couple years ago about putting data standards potentially in space. Before Elon, we're talking about data standards in space. Yes. How realistic is that really? 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. Yeah. The question, are data centers in space realistic?

56:07The 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. Elon's talked about two or three. It's probably a little ambitious. OK. 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.

56:50So 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, no clouds, no weather. And so that's a big energy. And 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 that the energy is not a big chunk. So that will probably change. And then the second thing is that launch cost has to come down very significantly by a factor of 10.

57:36That's what we're working on right here. That's what Blue Origin is doing. And this team is on fire doing that. You know, so we have a CEO named Dave Lemp, 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.

58:18This technology is real. And, you know, I mentioned my optimism a minute ago. We should definitely talk about that. 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, or whatever you want. 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.

58:55There is a fear in your generation 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 that you did not create. And I understand that fear. 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. 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.

59:36And they are saying, oh my God, you know, there are going to be no more radiologists because, you know, 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. Right. 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.

1:00:15If you're digging the basement to your house and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here. And 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. We're going to have, 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 everything, food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper and so on and so on.

1:01:06Is there a transition cost? We could even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing. Like it should take, 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? Right. AI should be able to do it. 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 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.

1:01:42But how do you answer? I mean, Amazon's laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard Mark Zuckerberg. Not because of AI. But Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off. Is that because of AI? Jack Dorsey has. Because Jack Dorsey ascribes it directly to AI. Well, you'd have to talk to Jack about that. I don't know, but 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 to have the extraordinary valuation, I think that we're talking about, they have to create extraordinary productivity.

1:02:13Look, 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 is a software, a good computer scientist software engineer? 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 going to go away because that's the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at is figuring out, oh, okay, we want this.

1:02:57And 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. 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. Yes. That is really about AI robotics. No, this is just so you know, it's not surprising, but, you know, because we haven't said much about it.

1:03:31And I can't say much about it today either. It's a little premature for me to talk about it. But we are not 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 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. Because 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.

1:04:15And it's going to be amazing. And this is that thing, you know, as I say, 10 ,000 years ago, somebody invented the plow, and the whole world got wealthier. So the root of civilizational wealth is invention. So somebody had been in the plow, we all got wealthier. Much later, somebody had been in the steam engine, we all got wealthier. That's how this works. And you don't think this town is different? No, it's not different. It's even better. 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.

1:05:02Here's 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. 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. Right. Let's just stop taking money away from her. Right. Let me go back to space for a sec. Yeah. Because I'm so curious. Well, let me ask you one more question, Dr. 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.

1:05:34You oversee this. Dave Wimp is running a 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 Laursion? 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, 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.

1:06:16And we call 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. Right. And my time at Blue is largely spent on AI. And Prometheus, by the way, the tools that we're building are going to help companies like Blue immensely. 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 can get a lot of focus by having a separate company. SpaceX is going public. Yes. potentially at a$1.75 or$2 trillion valuation.

1:07:00By 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 valuation? Does that make sense to you? I don't know enough about their financials to have, I think maybe their S1 is gonna 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.

1:07:40So 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. Jeff, we're running out of time. We're going to take a quick break, if we could, and then we're going to come back on the other side. We'll be back in just a moment.

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1:09:35And we're back. This is Squawk Pod. We are back on the factory floor here of Blue with our exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos. And Jeff, what are you holding? I wanted to see what that was. You had it on the side there before. 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 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 the lunar regolith, fortunately, has a lot of silicon in it. Right. And so this is an actual solar cell that we produced with lunar regolith simulant.

1:10:27And 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 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.

1:11:09And 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. What's the timeline for you? You talk about lunar permanence, this idea of creating permanent, you know, working environments on the moon. Well, you know, with NASA, we will be building a 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. 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.

1:11:56It'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. So we have, you know, Amazon has Leo. Right. Blooming Kuiper. That's right. And we have two constellations in work. One is called TerraWave. It's a communications constellation with very high bandwidth. It serves a limited number of customers, but with very high bandwidth.

1:12:36So it's focused on 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. 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 U.S. has always enjoyed a 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.

1:13:20There's the idea that you could put mirrors in space that would reject the sun down 24 hours a day to power solar, for example. I don't know if it's 10 years, 20 years. 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? Well, I would argue you're already impacted meaningfully by space. And you have been ever since we had weather satellites. So, you know, hurricanes don't sneak up on you anymore. You know, ever since we have had weather satellites, we've been in a way better position. Same thing with communication satellites, which we've also had, you know, for many decades now.

1:13:59So 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. But it's your timeline question. Look, it's going to be a gradual thing, but 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 for that little right flyer 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.

1:14:46It is happening. 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, you know, I've funded Blue out of my own 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.

1:15:26It 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 experiment is getting funded. So what that means is the good ideas are getting funded and the bad ideas are getting funded.

1:16:04And 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 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.

1:16:48When 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 6 Eastern. Or follow Squawk Pod wherever you get your podcasts to get the best of our show in an easy-to-listen-to version that you can check out anytime you want.

1:17:28Tell 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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