Economic Club of Washington: the Rubenstein interview

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

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.’

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.’

5. 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.

6. 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.’

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.’

12. 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.’

13. 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.