Figure · Born 1964

Jeff Bezos

Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

The laugh, the ‘regret minimization framework’, the door desks — every long interview from the bookstore years to Blue Origin.

66: Videos
4: Audio
58: Milestones

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Every recording

In order, from 1996 to 2026.

1996
Newsweek On Air: ‘Books via the Internet’
The earliest known broadcast interview with Bezos: a segment on buying books over the internet in Newsweek’s weekly radio magazine, recorded less than a year after Amazon.com opened. He is billed simply as ‘founder, Amazon.com’.
1996
Computer Chronicles: ‘Online Shopping’
A 1996 episode of the long-running PBS technology show surveys early e-commerce sites — Amazon, Onsale, CyberCash, NetRadio, VeriSign and Cybergold — with a young Bezos among the guests, walking through how Amazon.com works. It is among the earliest video of Bezos on television.
1997
‘This is Day 1’ — the 1997 interview
The most widely shared early Bezos footage: a short camcorder interview in which the 33-year-old founder explains why he chose books (‘more items in the book category than any other category, by far’), cites the 2,300 percent annual growth of web usage that made him quit his job, and calls the moment ‘the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce’.
1997
BBC Money Programme: ‘Will Internet Shopping Ever Take Off?’
A BBC business-programme report asking whether online shopping is viable, with Bezos interviewed about Amazon alongside Daryl Mattocks of Cambridge’s Internet Bookshop and a bakery taking orders online. Early British television exposure for Amazon, a year before Amazon.co.uk existed.
1999
‘Nerd of the Amazon’ — 60 Minutes II profile
Bob Simon’s 13-minute profile of the 35-year-old ‘nerd’ running Earth’s biggest bookstore: Bezos at his door desk, driving his Honda, explaining the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, and insisting that Amazon could still ‘lose it all’.
1999
Charlie Rose: Bezos and Peter Neupert on e-commerce
Bezos’s first appearance on Charlie Rose, paired with Peter Neupert, the Microsoft veteran running the Amazon-backed drugstore.com, to discuss the explosion of electronic commerce. Rose presses both on whether internet retailers will ever make money.
1999
Charlie Rose: Bezos and Jerry Yang on internet strategy
Amazon’s Bezos and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, the two faces of the consumer internet in 1999, discuss their companies’ strategies with Rose, followed by Clayton Christensen explaining the ‘innovator’s dilemma’ that both are exploiting.
1999
ABC7 Chicago ‘Newsviews’ interview
A rare local-television sit-down from 1999 in which Chicago anchor Alan Krashesky quizzes Bezos about Amazon.com, then still thought of by many viewers as a bookstore, and about the economics of selling online.
1999
CNBC interview on Amazon’s plans
A 1999 CNBC interview in which Bezos says Amazon’s focus is ‘great customer service’, describes the distribution-center build-out and admits ‘what we’re trying to do is very complicated’ with no guarantee of success — ‘scale is important to us and we’re going to go after that kind of scale’.
2000
Charlie Rose: the customer-centric model and the future of online retail
A full hour with Rose in the first summer of the crash, in which Bezos defends Amazon’s customer-centric model and spending while its stock collapses.
2000
KING 5 ‘Evening Magazine’ profile
A short hometown television profile shot when Amazon occupied the art-deco Pacific Tower on Beacon Hill.
2000
‘Vision for Amazon’ — 50-minute interview
A nearly hour-long 2000 interview in which Bezos lays out Amazon’s mission and long-term ambitions at the moment the dot-com bubble was deflating. The uploader does not identify the original broadcaster; it may be a program or conference recording.
2001
Newsweek On Air: ‘The Amazon Mystery’
A radio interview from April 2001 — the nadir of Amazon’s stock and reputation — in which Bezos, billed as ‘Chairman of the Board, Amazon.com’, is questioned alongside technology writer Steven Levy about whether the company can survive and reach profitability.
2001
Academy of Achievement interview
The fullest early account of Bezos’s life in his own words: growing up with his grandfather on the Cotulla ranch, Princeton, D. E. Shaw, the ‘regret minimization framework’ that made him leave Wall Street, the drive west, the garage and the Cadabra/‘cadaver’ name mix-up, and surviving the dot-com crash.
2001
Charlie Rose: the founding of Amazon and the company today
Bezos returns to Rose a year into the crash to retell the founding story and argue that Amazon is a real business, not a bubble artifact, as it pushes toward its promised first profit.
2002
TechTV interview clips
Two short interview clips with Bezos from the cable channel TechTV, preserved in a 2013 dump of G4TV.com’s video archive, in which he discusses the future of Amazon. The original air date is not recorded.
2002
MIT talk: ‘Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company — Differentiating with Technology’
A technical talk given in the first weeks of Amazon’s turn to profitability: Bezos recounts the company’s first 30 days, the original home page and why he chose Seattle, then explains personalization, A/B testing and fulfillment optimization, and introduces the original Amazon Web Services program (the 2002 product-data API) with a demo by its manager Robert Frederick, before taking audience questions on pricing experiments, competitors and shipping costs.
2003
TED2003: ‘The electricity metaphor for the web’s future’
Bezos argues that the dot-com boom and bust was not a gold rush that is over but the equivalent of the early electricity industry: the ‘appliances’ that will make the web useful have barely been invented.
2006
EmTech keynote: ‘We build muck so you don’t have to’
Bezos’s first big public pitch for Amazon Web Services: after laying out Amazon’s scale — 59 million active customers, 35 product categories, 1.08 million seller accounts, 10.2 million square feet of fulfillment space and about $2 billion invested in its technology — he argues that the web has removed shelf space as the barrier for software entrepreneurs and that the new barrier is the back-end ‘muck’ that eats 70 percent of developers’ time, which Amazon will now rent out as S3, EC2 and Mechanical Turk.
2007
Charlie Rose: the Kindle
Hours after unveiling the Kindle, Bezos sits with Rose for a full hour to explain why Amazon built hardware, how the wireless store works, and why he thinks the book is the last analog bastion worth digitizing. The interview became the long-form companion to the launch.
2007
Kindle launch press event
Bezos took the stage at 9:41 a.m. with a tablet, a papyrus scroll and a picture of Gutenberg to argue that the book is a ‘500-year-old technology’ that ‘disappears when you read it’, then unveiled the 10.3-ounce Kindle with free Whispernet wireless delivery over Sprint’s network, 90,000 titles, bestsellers at $9.99 and a $399 price, demonstrating font resizing, dictionary look-up and the store before rolling a promotional video.
2007
NPR All Things Considered: ‘Amazon Rolls Out New Wireless Reading Device’
On the evening of the Kindle launch, Bezos tells NPR’s Michele Norris why electronic ink and built-in wireless make the $399 device different from ‘a long history of failed reading devices’, that new releases will cost $9.99 against $25 hardcovers, that the device took three years to build, and that ‘we were never going to out-book the book’.
2008
Fortune Brainstorm Tech on-stage interview
Two excerpts from Bezos’s session at Fortune’s 2008 Brainstorm Tech conference: in one he discusses Amazon’s strategy and, unusually for the time, his plans to build a commercial spaceship at Blue Origin; in the other, the first months of the Kindle and the future of reading.
2008
The Oprah Winfrey Show: Oprah’s ‘favorite new gadget’
Oprah Winfrey devotes a segment to the Kindle as her ‘favorite new gadget’ and brings on Bezos to explain the device, giving it the mainstream push that preceded the Kindle 2; Amazon emailed customers in advance to announce his appearance.
2009
Kindle 2 press event with Stephen King
Bezos unveils the slimmer Kindle 2 ($359, text-to-speech, 230,000 titles) fourteen months after the original, stating the goal of ‘every book ever printed in any language in under 60 seconds’, demonstrating a newspaper and a book on the device, then handing the stage to Stephen King, who reads from a novella written for the Kindle.
2009
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Bezos’s first late-night comedy appearance: he brings the Kindle 2 to Jon Stewart on the day it ships, calls its reading voice ‘a little freaky’, and mostly laughs while Stewart praises paper books as ‘comfortably low tech’, teases Amazon Prime and feigns shock at the $359 price.
2009
Charlie Rose: Kindle 2 and internet retailing
Bezos returns to Rose’s table after the Kindle 2 launch to talk about Amazon’s business model, what is new in the Kindle 2, and the future technologies he expects to change reading and retail.
2009
CNN Money interview on the Kindle DX
Short CNN Money interview segments in which Bezos defends the nearly $500 Kindle DX as ‘a great value’ and argues that it could be a lifeline for newspapers and magazines, weeks after the device’s unveiling.
2009
Video message to Zappos employees on the acquisition
On the day Amazon announced it was buying Zappos, Bezos — in a polo shirt, standing at a whiteboard in a bare room — recorded a message for Zappos employees distilling ‘everything I know’ into four lessons: obsess over customers, invent, think long-term, and remember that ‘it’s always Day 1’.
2010
We are what we choose
Bezos returns to his alma mater to deliver the Baccalaureate address, built around the story of his grandmother and his grandfather’s lesson that ‘it’s harder to be kind than clever.’
2010
Charlie Rose: the new Kindle
Bezos sits with Charlie Rose the evening after Amazon unveiled the $139 Wi-Fi Kindle, insisting the device should remain ‘for uncompromised reading’ rather than chase the iPad.
2011
Kindle Fire unveiled
Bezos’s first full product keynote in the Apple style: he walks through the $79 Kindle, Kindle Touch and the $199 Kindle Fire tablet with its Silk browser, framing Amazon as selling ‘premium products at non-premium prices’ and the Fire as a service, not a device.
2012
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Bezos brings the new 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD to Fallon’s couch, deflects questions about an Amazon smartphone, and tells the story of driving packages to the post office with MacKenzie in a Chevy Blazer in 1995.
2012
Charlie Rose: Amazon’s holiday push
In the middle of a rare publicity week, Bezos tells Charlie Rose that Amazon is ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,’ explains why it sells Kindle hardware at cost and makes money when people use it, and discusses physical expansion and competition with Apple and Google.
2013
60 Minutes: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos looks to the future
In a heavily promoted segment aired the night before Cyber Monday, Bezos walks Charlie Rose through a 1.2-million-square-foot fulfillment center, defends selling the Kindle Fire HDX at break-even, and then unveils ‘Prime Air’ octocopter delivery drones, saying 30-minute drone delivery is ‘years’ away and depends on FAA rules.
2014
Fire Phone launch
Bezos spends roughly ninety minutes demonstrating Amazon’s first phone to an invited audience in Seattle: the four-camera ‘Dynamic Perspective’ head-tracking display, the Firefly recognition button, Mayday support and a year of Prime.
2014
Ignition 2014: the Business Insider interview
A rare long-form interview, given weeks after Amazon wrote off $170 million of Fire Phone inventory and reported a $437 million quarterly loss.
2016
Code Conference 2016
Bezos’s first Code Conference appearance: he says heavy industry should eventually move off Earth, calls Blue Origin ‘the most important work I’m doing,’ describes Alexa and machine learning as a ‘golden era’ of technology, and, asked about Donald Trump’s attacks on him and The Washington Post, says Trump’s behavior ‘is not appropriate for a presidential candidate.’
2016
Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit
Three weeks before the 2016 election, Bezos tells Walter Isaacson that Donald Trump’s threats against the press ‘erode our democracy around the edges,’ that his first instinct to take Trump’s attacks lightly ‘was a mistake,’ and jokes that ‘I have a rocket company, so the capability is there’ to send Trump to space.
2016
Pathfinder Award: why we must go to space
Receiving the Museum of Flight’s Pathfinder Award for his Blue Origin work, Bezos explains why he believes humanity must expand into space to keep growing its energy use, walks through Blue Origin’s step-by-step approach (‘gradatim ferociter’), and takes questions from Boeing chief pilot Steve Taylor about the company’s culture and tortoise mascot.
2016
Pathfinder Awards: management style, drones and the 10,000-year clock
Companion clips from the same Pathfinder evening: Bezos on changing your mind (‘anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world’), six-page memos, growing the size of failures, printable drone landing symbols, Amazon’s 40-plane air fleet and the $42 million Clock of the Long Now on his Texas land.
2016
Charlie Rose: a conversation with Jeff Bezos
A full-hour Charlie Rose conversation recorded the week Amazon reported its sixth straight profitable quarter and days after Bezos’s Vanity Fair and Pathfinder appearances; topics per contemporaneous summaries include Amazon’s culture of invention, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and the 2016 election.
2017
‘Why it’s always Day 1’ (all-hands clip)
Asked by an employee what ‘Day 2’ would look like, Bezos answers: ‘Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.’
2017
Space Symposium: inside the New Shepard capsule
Bezos lounges in a full-scale mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, shows off the booster that has flown to space five times, and tells reporters that ‘the only thing that’s disruptive is customer adoption’ and that cutting launch costs by 10x or 100x will ‘unleash’ entrepreneurs in ‘a golden age of space exploration.’
2017
Apollo exhibit opening: talk with students
At the opening of the Museum of Flight’s Apollo exhibit, which displays Saturn V F-1 engine parts Bezos’s expedition raised from the Atlantic in 2013, Bezos tells students about watching Apollo 11 at age five, the engine recovery and Blue Origin’s plans.
2017
Summit LA17: a conversation with Mark Bezos
The most personal Bezos interview of the Amazon-CEO years: his brother Mark asks about their grandfather’s ranch (castrating cattle, fixing a bulldozer), their parents, how Jeff thinks about risk and decision-making, and why he ‘hates the Plan B argument’ for space.
2018
‘Alexa, open the Spheres’
Bezos opens Amazon’s three glass domes by asking a ‘special friend’ for help: ‘Alexa, open the Spheres’ (‘OK, Jeff’), thanks real-estate chief John Schoettler, and after a tour pronounces that ‘the plants look happy.’
2018
Axel Springer Award conversation
Accepting the Axel Springer Award in Berlin, Bezos gives his most personal interview to that point: his childhood and his parents, meeting MacKenzie at D. E. Shaw, why he sells about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin (‘the most important work I’m doing’), why he bought The Washington Post, and what it is like to have the U.S. president as a critic.
2018
ISDC 2018: ‘We will have to leave this planet’
Accepting the National Space Society’s O’Neill award, Bezos tells Alan Boyle that ‘we will have to leave this planet... and it’s going to make this planet better,’ explains why ‘you cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room’ and why Blue Origin’s job is to build the infrastructure that will let future entrepreneurs do so, and reiterates ‘we don’t skip steps, and we’ve got to go back to the moon.’
2018
Economic Club of Washington: the Rubenstein interview
In the most-watched Bezos interview of the decade, David Rubenstein draws out the story of Amazon’s founding, the 1990s dot-com bust, the Kindle, AWS, the ‘two-pizza’ and ‘six-page memo’ rules, why he gets eight hours of sleep and makes ‘three good decisions a day,’ and why he bought The Washington Post.
2018
Air, Space and Cyber Conference fireside chat
Six days after the Economic Club interview, Bezos sells an Air Force audience on reusable rockets and cloud computing: ‘you never want a fair fight,’ launch cadence must rise with less lead time, New Shepard ‘will be putting people in space this coming year,’ and government customers benefit from being ‘co-customers’ of AWS.
2018
WIRED25: Bezos on Blue Origin and defending the country
A week after Google withdrew from the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud contract, Bezos tells Steven Levy that ‘if big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,’ says he will put more than $1 billion into Blue Origin in 2019, and explains why he will not live to see the company’s long-term mission fulfilled.
2019
Going to space to benefit Earth: the Blue Moon reveal
In his first full-length public presentation of Blue Origin’s vision, Bezos argues that Earth is ‘the best planet,’ that heavy industry must eventually move off-world, and that O’Neill-style rotating colonies could house trillions of people.
2019
re:MARS fireside chat
Closing Amazon’s first re:MARS conference, Bezos explains Project Kuiper (‘the goal here is broadband everywhere’), why Amazon must now do things big enough to ‘move the needle,’ and why ‘the reason we go to space... is to save the Earth.’
2019
JFK Space Summit fireside chat
A month before the Apollo 11 anniversary, Bezos tells Caroline Kennedy why going to the Moon is harder now than in 1962 (‘the thing that slows things down is procurement’), argues that settling space ‘is not optional,’ and calls spaceflight a problem ‘God set up as achievable, but just barely.’
2019
Reagan National Defense Forum fireside chat
Weeks after Amazon sued over losing the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft, Bezos tells the defense establishment that ‘if big tech is turning their back on the Department of Defense, this country is in big trouble,’ that ‘we are the good guys,’ and that the Pentagon’s procurement system must move faster; he also discusses Blue Origin and the New Glenn program.
2020
House antitrust hearing: first congressional testimony
Bezos’s first appearance before Congress, by video link alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai. His opening statement tells the story of his mother Jackie, a 17-year-old high-school student when he was born, his adoptive father Miguel’s flight from Cuba, and the garage start of Amazon.
2021
‘I want to go on this flight’
In a short self-shot video Bezos says ‘ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space’ and asks his brother Mark on camera to join him (‘I really want you to come with me. Would you?’), announcing that both will fly on July 20.
2021
NS-16 post-flight press conference
Two hours after landing, Bezos, in flight suit and cowboy hat, describes the view (‘fragile’) and the weightlessness, thanks ‘every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all this’ (a line that drew wide criticism), and announces the $100 million Courage and Civility Awards to Van Jones and chef José Andrés.
2021
New Shepard first human flight (NS-16)
Fifteen days after handing the Amazon CEO job to Andy Jassy, and on the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11, Bezos flies to 107 km on New Shepard’s first crewed mission with his brother Mark, 82-year-old Mercury 13 aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen.
2021
NS-18 webcast: William Shatner’s flight
Bezos is on camera as host rather than passenger: he opens the capsule hatch and stands, champagne in hand, as a visibly shaken 90-year-old William Shatner describes the ‘blackness’ of space (‘what you have given me is the most profound experience’), a moment widely replayed because Bezos turns away to spray champagne mid-speech.
2021
Ignatius Forum: Our Future in Space
A surprise guest at the cathedral’s annual Ignatius Forum, Bezos describes the ‘overview effect’ of his July flight, says he spends more on the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund than on space, proposes moving heavy industry and solar farms into orbit, and sketches O’Neill colonies housing a million people each; he calls terraforming Mars ‘very, very challenging.’
2022
Tribute to his father at the Ellis Island award
Bezos chokes up while describing his adoptive father Miguel, who left Cuba alone at 16 with no English, as an ‘intense, hard worker’ with ‘an easy smile and self-deprecating humor’: ‘My brother, sister and I could not have had a better role model.’
2022
CNN: ‘I will give away most of my wealth’
In his first joint interview with Lauren Sanchez, Bezos says for the first time that he plans to give away the majority of his fortune in his lifetime (‘the hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way’), announces a $100 million Courage and Civility Award for Dolly Parton, and warns consumers to ‘batten down the hatches’ before a possible recession.
2023
Lex Fridman Podcast #405: Amazon and Blue Origin
Bezos’s longest recorded conversation: two-plus hours on his Texas childhood and grandfather’s ranch, rocket engineering and the New Glenn program, the physics of lunar landers, Amazon’s founding and ‘Day 1’ culture, the six-page memo, ‘disagree and commit,’ how he structures his mornings, and his views on AI and humanity’s long-term future.
2024
DealBook Summit: from Amazon to space
A month after the election and six weeks after he killed The Washington Post’s planned Harris endorsement, Bezos tells Sorkin he is ‘very optimistic’ about Donald Trump’s second term and its deregulatory agenda, says he will try to talk Trump out of the idea that the press is the enemy, defends the non-endorsement decision, and discusses Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Amazon’s AI investments and his fiancee Lauren Sanchez’s role in his life.
2025
Italian Tech Week 2025: ‘Dreaming and Building’
Bezos tells John Elkann that AI is in an ‘industrial bubble’ in which ‘society benefits from those inventions’ even if investors lose, that ‘we’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space’ within ten to twenty years, and that entrepreneurs ‘need to be optimistic, almost to the point of delusion.’
2026
CNBC Squawk Box from Blue Origin’s Rocket Park
Bezos’s first extended television interview in years: he describes his AI startup Prometheus for the first time (‘we have nothing to do with robotics’; an ‘artificial general engineer’, ‘a very, very modern version of CAD’), lays out Blue Origin’s plan for orbital data centers, and, in a segment on wealth and inequality, criticizes New York City school spending as not buying better outcomes.
2026
Prometheus co-CEOs on CNBC
On the day Prometheus announced a $12 billion Series B at a roughly $41 billion valuation, Bezos and physicist Vik Bajaj give their first joint interview: the company is building end-to-end design-to-manufacturing AI (Bajaj’s example is a jet engine); ‘this is a capital-intensive startup’; an IPO is ‘too early to think about’; and they spoke because the story was ‘kind of leaking out... if you let that just be a complete void, they’ll fill it with nonsense.’
2026
Fox News Special Report: ‘to the Moon, to stay’
Bezos tells Bret Baier that ‘we have to beat China to the moon, and I believe we will,’ that he is confident of a 2028 landing and a sustained lunar base, that New Glenn will return to flight in December after its May engine-test explosion, that Blue Origin has asked the FCC for 50,000-plus satellites to serve as orbital data centers, and that AI productivity could let families ‘live on one income.’