Jeff Bezos on Diversification

Amazon Web Services was launched in the spring of 2006 with the introduction of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which solved what AWS's own history describes as a major problem: how to store data while keeping it highly secure and maintaining privacy and control. A few months later, the launch of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) gave customers instant access to compute capacity, ensuring that anything a customer could have done with a massive data center could be done remotely with practically the click of a button. The company framed the launch as a complete rethinking of IT infrastructure so that anyone — even a kid in a college dorm room — could access the same powerful technology as the world's largest and most sophisticated companies. The bet turned an internal retail infrastructure into a pay-as-you-go utility, quietly seeding what would become Amazon's highest-margin business.

Bezos founded Blue Origin with the stated goal of creating a future in which millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth — a vision he articulated repeatedly in interviews and on the company's first crewed flight in 2021. In a 2023 conversation with Lex Fridman, Bezos described the long-range case for space settlement: the solar system could support a civilization far larger than Earth's, but only through giant space stations built from materials sourced from the moon, near-Earth objects, and the asteroid belt, because planetary surfaces are simply too small. He framed heavy industry as something that should eventually move off Earth to preserve the planet, with Earth zoned residential and light industrial. He also pointed to his long-running support for the 10,000-Year Clock project, designed by Danny Hillis, as a symbol of long-term thinking — a clock that ticks once a year, chimes once a century, and cuckoos once a millennium.

On July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket carried Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen on the vehicle's first crewed suborbital flight. The capsule accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound, reached an altitude of 107 kilometers (66 miles), and the crew floated in microgravity for several minutes before the capsule returned under parachutes, ending the mission after ten minutes and ten seconds. Bezos told CNBC after landing that the flight was a tiny little step of what Blue Origin intended to do, framing the company's purpose as building reusable space vehicles — the only way, he said, to build a road to space so that his children's generation could build the future. The launch placed Blue Origin inside the private spaceflight market alongside Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

On June 16, 2017, Amazon announced it would acquire Whole Foods Market for $42 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $13.7 billion, including Whole Foods Market's net debt. The press release quoted Bezos praising Whole Foods for offering the best natural and organic foods and making it fun to eat healthy. Whole Foods co-founder and chief executive John Mackey framed the deal as an opportunity to maximize value for shareholders while extending the grocer's mission and bringing higher quality, experience, convenience, and innovation to customers. The press release committed to Whole Foods continuing to operate stores under its own brand, with Mackey remaining as chief executive and headquarters staying in Austin, Texas. The acquisition closed later that year and precipitated a broad sell-off in the shares of traditional supermarket chains, marking Amazon's first major move into physical grocery retail.

On August 5, 2013, the Graham family announced the sale of the Washington Post newspaper to Jeff Bezos through a newly formed holding company called Nash Holdings LLC, for $250 million in cash. The Washington Post's own reporting on the deal noted that the purchase price was richer than what many other legacy print properties had fetched in recent years, and quoted analyst Craig Huber observing that the same newspaper would have sold for $2 billion a decade earlier. The transaction included the newspaper and closely held related ventures but excluded the downtown Washington office buildings, the Robinson Terminal warehouses in Alexandria, the Post-Newsweek television stations, and stand-alone properties including Slate, The Root, and Foreign Policy. Bezos, then primarily known as Amazon's founder, bought the paper personally rather than through Amazon — a structural choice that gave him editorial independence and positioned the acquisition as a side bet on the future of journalism.