Video2018

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.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

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.’