Jeff Bezos 2.0: New wife, newish job, old vision

The Age

4 days ago

Jeff Bezos lives by a simple precept: limit the number of things you would wish you had done differently when you are 80. He calls it, with habitual nerdiness, the ' regret-minimisation framework '. In 1994, it led him to forsake cushy work at a hedge fund to start Amazon. It is behind the big bets, from the Prime subscription service to AWS cloud computing, that have made the company into a technology titan valued at $US2.3 trillion ($3.5 trillion) and himself into one of the world's richest people.
It also explains why, six years ago, Mr Bezos left his first wife of 25 years for a former TV presenter, Lauren Sánchez. And why he blew, on some estimates, $US50 million ($76 million) to rent out Venice for three days for their opulent nuptials starting on June 26 – the predictable antiplutocrat pushback be damned.
The 61-year-old Mr Bezos presumably has an even better idea today of what his octogenarian self might regret than he did at 31, 41 or 51, when his 80th birthday was far off. To get an inkling of his current calculus, look at how he spends, first, his time and, second, his $US240 billion ($365 billion) fortune.
Once the billionaire is back from his honeymoon, details of which are as hush-hush as the wedding was loud, he will return to his other love – Blue Origin. Mr Bezos has been a card-carrying space cadet since watching the Apollo 11 moon landings in 1969, when he was five. In 2000, he founded the rocketry firm – credo: ' gradatim ferociter ' (step by step, ferociously) – to make space travel cheaper with reusable craft. The ultimate goal is to enable humanity to keep growing in resource-rich and unpollutable space while letting Earth thrive as a planet-sized nature reserve.
Until he retired as boss of Amazon in 2021, he blocked out the same half-day every work week (plus Saturday mornings) to turn this science-fiction into business fact. One of the reasons for quitting Amazon was, Mr Bezos has confessed, that Blue Origin was going about its mission too gradatim and not ferociter enough. SpaceX, a rival two years its junior, was sending dozens of payloads a year into orbit. Blue Origin had yet to launch any.
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So in the past four years he has, by his own admission, been devoting 90 per cent of his time to Blue Origin. He wholly owns the company but does not run it day to day. That is the job of David Limp, whom Mr Bezos pinched from Amazon in 2023, where he oversaw various device-related projects, including the Alexa digital assistant, the Kindle book-reader and Project Kuiper, a satellite-broadband initiative to challenge SpaceX's Starlink system.
According to people in the know, though, Mr Bezos is a de facto co-CEO, as well as troubleshooter-in-chief. He is constantly on the lookout for ways to make Blue Origin's four factories and seven field offices around America run more efficiently. It is hard, for instance, not to see his ruthless hand in the firm's decision in February to lay off a tenth of its 14,000-strong workforce. No regrets there, at least not for Mr Bezos.
There have been fewer of them elsewhere in the business lately, too. Two years ago, Blue Origin was awarded the contract to develop a lander for NASA's planned crewed return to the moon. In January, it pulled off the long-delayed virgin voyage of its New Glenn rocket. It reached orbit on the first try (though the reusable first stage was not recovered in the manner that SpaceX now routinely deploys). A second launch is planned for August.