DealBook Summit: from Amazon to space

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.’

4. 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.’

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.’

9. 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.

10. 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.’

11. 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.’