What’s next for Jeff Bezos? Will he do a Gates or a Musk?
The Amazon founder has very specific goals. The richest man on Earth wants us to leave this planet.
A few years ago a tweet featuring two photographs of Jeff Bezos went viral. In the first photograph, taken in 1998, the Amazon founder looked nerdy in a baggy sweater with thinning hair. In the second picture, dated 2017, he was transformed into a buff alpha male, all bulging biceps, shaved head and shades. The pictures were captioned: ” ‘I sell books’ versus ‘I sell whatever the f..k I want’ .”
Yet the truth is that while it was never just about the books, it was also never just about selling. The man who brought the new Lee Child thriller to our doorstep, the Alexa virtual assistant into our kitchens and The Man in the High Castle on to our screens doesn’t want merely to sell everything. He wants to do — some would say control — everything. And with a $US195bn ($256bn) fortune, he has the money to have a crack at doing so.
On top of being responsible for 45 per cent of ecommerce sales in the US, Amazon accounts for about half of the cloud computing industry, is seeking to provide storage and analysis of the world’s health data and plans to launch thousands of satellites to provide high-speed internet. Bezos also wants to be the man in high Earth orbit. That will do for a start anyway.
In this week’s message about his plan to step down as chief executive of Amazon and become executive chairman, Bezos said he would stay engaged on Amazon initiatives, “but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and my other passions”.
The Day 1 Fund is a $US2bn project to help homeless families and provide pre-schools in low-income communities. The Earth Fund, announced last year, will spend $US10bn on fighting climate change. Blue Origin is his private aerospace company, which has the stated ambition of “building a road to space so our children can build the future”.
Stepping back from day-to-day operations to try to build an even bigger legacy is not uncommon among the world’s richest people. Bill Gates, who changed the way we interacted with computers, is spending billions of his foundation’s funds on spreading vaccines around the world, on top of his other healthcare projects.
And then there is Bezos’s former wife, MacKenzie Scott. She received a $US38bn settlement when they divorced in 2019 after 26 years of marriage. Last year she gave more than $US4bn to food banks and emergency relief funds. That followed $US1.7bn given to causes including black colleges.
Bezos has very specific goals. The richest man on Earth wants us to leave this planet. This is something he has in common with Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and Space X. Bezos is locked in a race with his fellow star-gazing billionaires. He and Richard Branson are chasing the world’s most high-end tourist market with plans to take paying customers on suborbital flights. Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable rocket and capsule, which together look like a colossal phallus, do not bear close psychoanalysis.
However, Blue Origin has released amazing footage of a dummy, dubbed Mannequin Skywalker, flying in the capsule to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and making a parachute-assisted landing in the Texan desert.
These excursions are regarded by more ambitious would-be pioneers as entry-level space ventures because they offer only a few weightless minutes in space. Yet like Musk, who already flies passengers and cargo to the International Space Station and wants to colonise Mars, Bezos has grander long-term hopes. He is in favour of heading out into space to establish colonies.
He believes the only viable long-term solution to preserve our planet is to exploit the resources on other near-Earth objects. “We have to go to space to save Earth,” he has said. He was quoted in The Atlantic saying colonies would allow the human population to grow. “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system.”
In a graduation speech at his school in Miami, a local newspaper reported, he said he wanted “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park”. His girlfriend from school gave an interview saying Bezos founded Amazon to make the mountain of money required to build a space company. There “is some truth to that”, he later told Christian Davenport, a Washington Post reporter who wrote The Space Barons, a 2018 book about the new space race. Bezos told Davenport: “My singular focus is people in space.”
Franklin Foer, who has reported at length about Bezos in The Atlantic, wrote that before he settled on the name Amazon Bezos toyed with MakeItSo.com after a phrase used by Jean-Luc Picard, the captain of the starship USS Enterprise in Star Trek. Bezos has a cameo in Star Trek Beyond, and Foer writes that he named his dog Kamala after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate.
Saving the planet sounds noble, but Foer suggests Bezos has begun “to subsume the powers of the state” and has a huge interest in shaping the climate change debate so that it does not hurt his business.
Blue Origin is based on Bezos’s 12,000ha ranch in Texas. The other properties in his real estate portfolio include the Warner Estate in Beverly Hills, which be bought from David Geffen for $US165m, making it the most expensive home sold in LA.
When he gave a lavish party in LA in 2016, Bezos was photographed with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor. By January 2019 it was revealed that they were in a relationship. He and Sanchez met through her husband, a Hollywood agent. The mother of three is a qualified helicopter pilot and founded an aerial film and production company in Los Angeles.
Many have an uneasy relationship with Amazon — its big feet trample smaller retailers and its tax bills seem bafflingly small. It seems unlikely that Bezos is relinquishing the helm to do stuff to make us feel better about him. Yet if he achieves his space dream and helps to create a greener planet he will go down in history for more than building a shopping behemoth.
In his interview with Davenport he said the building of manufacturing infrastructure on near-Earth objects was something that would happen in the distant future, after he was no longer with us, “unless somebody does a good job on life extension”.
Maybe that’s what he meant by “other passions”. Might Bezos move into the longevity business? Or might he want to spend more time making sure everything in Amazon world is joined up? Yesterday I got a friend to ask his Alexa when tourists will be able to go into space. She replied: “Here is something I found on the web. According to CNBC.com NASA is opening up the International Space Station to tourists with the first mission as early as 2020.”
The Times
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