Read the full transcript of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in conversation with John Elkann, Chairman of Ferrari and Stellantis at Italian Tech Week 2025, Oct 3, 2025.
Welcome to Turin
欢迎来到都灵
JOHN ELKANN: We have arrived. Thank you, Jeff, for being here in Turin. Last time was 2017 and a lot has happened since.
JOHN ELKANN：我们到了。谢谢你，Jeff，来到都灵。上次是2017年，这期间发生了很多事情。
JEFF BEZOS: Yeah, for sure.
JEFF BEZOS：是的，确实如此。
JOHN ELKANN: So what you’re seeing today, we really started in 2016 and it was very much driven by trying to see how we could in Italy and in Turin, be more entrepreneurial and be more attuned with technologies of today and of tomorrow.
JOHN ELKANN：所以你今天所看到的一切，实际上是我们在2016年就开始做的，核心是探索我们如何在意大利、在都灵变得更具创业精神，并与当下和未来的技术更加契合。
And since then, if you look over the last decade in Europe, you’ve had investments going from $45 billion into the tech ecosystem to $425 billion. If you look at the programs which we’ve been involved, like Vento came out from that 2016 period, we’ve now invested in many companies with Italian founders in Italy, and outside of which 1B has just been acquired by Amazon. So thank you.
从那以后，如果你回顾过去十年欧洲的情况，投入科技生态的投资从450亿美元增长到了4250亿美元。再看我们参与的项目，比如源自2016年那段时间的Vento，我们现在已经投资了许多由意大利创业者创立的公司，既有在意大利的，也有海外的，其中1B刚刚被Amazon收购。所以谢谢你们。
JEFF BEZOS: Thank you.
JEFF BEZOS：谢谢。
JOHN ELKANN: And the event that was started in 2018, 100 people. Now we have 15,000 and we could have had more, but we’re constrained by capacity. And this has very much been driven by [Dial] and all the team that have made it possible to be here today.
JOHN ELKANN：还有这个在2018年启动的活动，当时只有100人。现在我们有15000人，而且本可以更多，只是受制于场地容量。能走到今天，很大程度要感谢[Dial]以及让这一切成为可能的整个团队。
JEFF BEZOS: Amazing, amazing. Very cool.
JEFF BEZOS：太棒了，太棒了。非常酷。
The Power of Optimism
乐观的力量
JOHN ELKANN: All of this to say that there’s a huge amount of optimism. The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen was very strong about why it’s important to be optimistic. What do you think?
JOHN ELKANN：所有这些都说明了强烈的乐观情绪。European Commission主席Ursula von der Leyen非常强调为什么保持乐观很重要。你怎么看？
JEFF BEZOS: Well, first of all, I get all weak need around entrepreneurs. I just love entrepreneurs and I always have, like missionary entrepreneurs, people who are doing it because there’s something about the mission that they just can’t not do it.
JEFF BEZOS：嗯，首先，谈到创业者我就“腿软”。我就是热爱创业者，而且一直如此，尤其是那种“传教士式”的创业者——他们之所以去做，是因为使命感让他们非做不可。
They’re so passionate about it. And I’m guessing that this room is full of such people.
他们对此充满激情。而且我猜在座的就是这样的人满满一屋子。
And I think you should be very optimistic. In fact, entrepreneurs need to be optimistic almost to the point of delusion. You need to be right there. There’s this, you may remember the great John F. Kennedy speech about going to the moon and other things. He says, “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
而且我认为你们应该非常乐观。事实上，创业者的乐观几乎需要接近“妄想”的程度。你必须到达那个状态。你们可能还记得John F. Kennedy那篇关于登月等议题的伟大演讲。他说：“我们之所以做这些事，不是因为它们容易，而是因为它们困难。”
But I’ve always thought that for entrepreneurs it should be a little different. “We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.” So that’s a useful attitude for entrepreneurs.
但我一直认为，对创业者来说应该稍微不同：“我们之所以做这些事，不是因为它们容易，而是因为我们以为它们会很容易。”这种态度对创业者很有用。
And, you know, Europe, you hear these things about Europe that it’s not enough dynamism in Europe. There’s too many regulations in Europe. Let me assure you, there are plenty of regulations everywhere. And what you need is that can-do attitude, that entrepreneurial attitude. That’s what drives people to success. And Europe has all of the ingredients they need to be a dynamic, entrepreneurial, you know, just a huge success. And you can tell it just from the people in this room.
还有，关于欧洲，你会听到一些说法，说欧洲缺乏活力、监管太多。让我告诉你，到处都有足够多的监管。你真正需要的是那种“能做事”的态度、创业者的态度。这才是推动人们走向成功的动力。欧洲具备成为一个富有活力、充满创业精神并取得巨大成功所需的一切要素。从这个房间里的人就能看出来。
JOHN ELKANN: Do you agree?
JEFF BEZOS: And of course, startup companies, small companies, thrive in moments of great and rapid change. Stability favors incumbents and rapid change favors small, dynamic, nimble startup companies. And so the world is so rapidly changing right now. There’s never been a better moment to be an entrepreneur. There has never been a better moment to be a startup company.
Multiple Paths to Entrepreneurship
JOHN ELKANN: And if you think about entrepreneurs and startup companies, Amazon now is a very large company. We are involved with very large companies. And there’s this idea that if you want to be an entrepreneur, you should drop out from college, start your own company.
Whilst if I look at my own experience, luckily I did not drop out from college and start my own company when I was studying engineering here. And I ended up working for a very large company back then, which was General Electric, where I did learn how to work, where I had colleagues from many different places who had a lot to teach me.
And I was wondering if you had a different path than dropping out from college and starting your company. If there are multiple paths and if working for big companies is also not exciting. And within a large company, you could still be entrepreneurial.
JEFF BEZOS: So there’s a lot packed in there. And I’ll tell you, my view on this is that it is possible to be 18, 19, 20 years old, drop out of college and be a great entrepreneur. And the world is, we have famous examples of that working, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera. But these people are the exception.
I always advise to young people, you know, go work at a best practices company somewhere where you can learn a lot of basic fundamental things, how to hire really well, how to interview, et cetera. There’s a lot of stuff you would learn in a great company that will help you. And then you can still, there’s still lots of time to start a company after you have absorbed it increases your odds, in my opinion.
I started Amazon when I was 30, not when I was 20. And I think that that extra 10 years of experience actually improved the odds that Amazon would succeed. So that would always be my…
JOHN ELKANN: And you finished.
JEFF BEZOS: I finished college and I enjoyed college and I think it’s been helpful to me. And then I went on and I worked for a really great company called D.E. Shaw & Co., where I learned a tremendous amount, tremendous amount there.
And by the way, as you mentioned, when you’re inside a big company, you can be entrepreneurial. Big companies need mavericks. They need people to lift them up and make them see new things. And it’s up to the leadership of big companies, good companies, best practices companies, when they get larger, they defend their mavericks. They don’t eject them. They figure out how to support them and keep them driving change inside the company.
Because really, most big companies get comfortable and the mavericks cause discomfort. And so it’s easy to keep them away and kind of drive them out, but you’ll lose so much that way. At Amazon and at Blue Origin, we’re very careful to keep our mavericks.
Opportunities Within Large Companies
JOHN ELKANN: And I think this is really important, Jeff, because what we’re trying to do here is show the future. Both from new companies who start, but companies also who transform and evolve. And being clear that working for our companies, for Amazon, for Stellantis, for Blue Origin, for Ferrari, for CNH, is exciting.
JEFF BEZOS: Gigantic opportunities inside those companies.
JOHN ELKANN: And you can also, on the back of that and the back of that experience, start companies that you would have had more difficulty in imagining if you started from scratch. And I think that’s important to share this experience with all of you.
The Influence of Grandparents
And among the experiences that also I felt was important and being more personal, one of the similitudes that Jeff and I have is we have had the fortune of having a very loving family. And among a loving family, we had very strong relationships with our grandparents. And particularly we had grandfathers who had a big influence in what we did.
So I had a grandfather. He was very young, 56 years old, and he spent a lot of time with us. And he really was able to do two things which have been very meaningful for me. On one side, always try and stimulate curiosity. And the way he would do that was always asking questions of what we think. And it’s quite rare that children get asked what they think. And in any different situation, if we go to a museum or if we meet someone, he’d always be interested and that stimulation of curiosity.
And the second thing is responsibility. Since very young, he really would want us to make choices. And choices could be like, he liked to watch movies, had a very, very short attention span. So if the movie wasn’t good, five minutes was gone. If you like, go half the way to the movie, that was success. And so we always had to choose the movie he would see.
And so going from those small responsibilities to bigger responsibilities like taking care of something that he thought was important or a guest that he had and that trust in us and that sense of responsibility are things that stayed very much with me. And I know you also had incredible grandparents and incredible grandfather. What stays as of today from him, from what he taught you?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, you’re right. This is something we have in common. My mother had me when she was very young. She was, she had just turned 17 years old. She was still in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In fact, they tried to kick her out of high school for being pregnant. And my grandfather said, “No, you can’t kick her out. It’s a public school. She gets to finish high school.”
So anyways, there she was, pregnant with me in high school and finishing her whole senior year after I was born. And because she was so young, my grandparents took me every summer so that she could have some other kind of life for a few months. When you were a very, very young mother, you grow up very fast.
And so every summer from the age of three or four until I was about 16, I went and spent with my grandparents on their ranch in South Texas. And my grandfather at that point, so I only knew him as a rancher. He had done a bunch of things in his life, but at that point, he was a rancher.
And he did, and this is quite common, I think, in rural areas, that people do everything themselves. He did his own veterinary work. He repaired everything. He had this D6 Caterpillar bulldozer that he bought for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. And we spent an entire summer fixing it. And to get the transmission out of the thing, we had to build our own crane.
And so he had an incredible resourcefulness to him. You know, he believed he could solve any problem. And I sort of watched him, you know, his veterinary work on the cattle. He would make his own needles. He would get a little piece of wire and heat it up with a blowtorch and pound it flat and then sharpen it and drill a little hole through it. Some of the cattle even survived.
A Lesson in Kindness
JOHN ELKANN: And I remember a very meaningful lesson that he gave you when you were in the car with your grandmother who used to smoke.
JEFF BEZOS: Yes, that was a very formative moment for me. And I thought I was a very smart little kid. I was very confident. And I’m only at this point, maybe 10 years old. And this was, you know, this would have been 1974. And there were a lot of radio commercials on the car radio about how smoking cigarettes kills you. This was ten years after the US Surgeon General’s warning, and it was still like there was big campaigns to get people to stop smoking.
And one of these radio commercials said, “Every puff on a cigarette takes two minutes off of your life.” And my grandmother was a chain smoker. She smoked all day long. And so always when we were in the car, she would have the window down and she’d be smoking the whole time. And I hated this. I thought it smelled bad and I didn’t like it.
And I was listening to these radio commercials and so I decided I would calculate how many years of her life she had taken off. But if every puff is two minutes, and I did some estimating and I stood up in the back of the car and I proudly announced that she had taken, I don’t remember what the number was, let’s say seven years off of her life.
And I thought in my 10-year-old brain that they were going to congratulate me for being so clever. And instead she burst into tears. And I was taken aback. My grandfather pulled the car over on the side of the road and he had never said one harsh word to me, by the way, in our entire relationship he never did say a harsh word to me, by the way.
And so he pulled me around, he took me out of the car and took me out to the backside of the car, she’s still in the front seat, tears coming down her cheeks. And he said to me, I had no idea what he was going to say. And he said to me, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than it is to be clever.”
Technology with Kindness
JOHN ELKANN: And the reason I think this is a very meaningful lesson is because there’s this idea that technology is clever but not kind. And in some ways it’s a choice. And technology is just a tool that one can use.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s right.
JOHN ELKANN: And you need to be clever to make technology, but you can’t be kind in applying it. And I do think that for most of all, you should also feel very at ease not only in being clever, but equally being kind in what you do and the demonstration of what you’ve built and what Amazon is doing.
And in similar ways, different conversations over the years we’ve had of this idea that business is a harsh environment. There’s a very important humane side of it. And then what we do is really we put technology and cleverness into the service of others. And you can do that in a way which is kind and valuable.
Long-Term Thinking and Business Relationships
JEFF BEZOS: Yes. And I think long-term thinking squares these things. So whenever you’re in a situation where it seems that short term you’re doing a business deal with someone and if you think you’re never going to deal with them again, then maybe you would come to a certain answer. But if you realize I’m probably going to deal with this person for the rest of my life, in one way or another, you come to a different answer.
And so long-term thinking, whether it’s with your customers or your business partners, or even with family members and loved ones, thinking about, “Okay, what do I want this to be like, not just right now, but five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.” So, you know, in retail, I would always rather lose a sale than lose a customer. And you’re thinking long term, and shareholders and customers and the business, everyone is aligned if you think out 10 or 20 years.
JOHN ELKANN: And that is also important in moments like the ones we’re living, where there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of angst. If you just get devoured by now, you’ll lose the optimism for tomorrow. And I do feel that if you do look at long term and if you think on decades rather than months, yes, what matters today is important for 10 years. And if you have that idea that 10 years things will be better and that we will have made progress, it helps today. And it does relieve a lot of angst.
Building Strategy Around Customer Needs
JEFF BEZOS: It also helps you decide what to focus on. So if you know, in a world that’s rapidly changing and because of AI and all the technologies we have and the dynamism in the world, so many things are changing and they’re changing so rapidly. So if you think long term, it forces you to think, “What are the points of stability? What is not going to change?” And one of the things that changes very slowly is customer needs.
And so you can build a strategy around customer needs that will have durability, it will be durable in time. So an example at Amazon is that customers like fast deliveries. And so you could, you’d be, you would never expect 10 years from now, it would be impossible to imagine a customer saying, “I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.” Or “I love Amazon, I just wish your prices were a little higher.” Or at Blue Origin, “I love your rockets, but I just wish they were a little less reliable.”
And so you can—these ideas, these big ideas that are customer based, they start with the customer. It’s an idea that is in the customer’s brain. Those are the ones. Because human nature doesn’t change rapidly. And so what we as customers want tends to change slowly. And if you base your energies and direction and strategies and tactics, everything that makes a company effective around those customer needs, then you can change the details of how you get there all the time.
Because the world is changing. The technologies will change, your competitive set will change, everything will change except those needs. And so that’s another way that long-term thinking is protective because it forces you to think about the real customer needs to center those as your big ideas and then put energy into them in a hundred ways and to be very dynamic.
I always say be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. And you have to be, because the world is changing and you change your mind. I’ve noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot. People who are wrong a lot are very stubborn on the details.
JOHN ELKANN: And that is also self-awareness of how reality is rather than how one would want it to be.
JEFF BEZOS: This is so true. You know who’s undefeated? Reality. Reality wins every time. It’s completely undefeated.
The Inventor’s Mindset
JOHN ELKANN: I think this is really important, particularly to who is starting their careers, to make sure that that reality is really key in what you do. And the other part that I think is really valuable—Jeff and today we wanted to speak about dreams and to be able to be dreaming and be building and sometimes you just dream, but you’re not able to build. Other times you just build but can’t dream.
And a lot of people know you as a founder, as a builder. But the reality, and I’ve been fortunate to know part of that reality well, is the inventor. And Amazon was an invention. Blue Origin is an invention. And there are many inventions that you’ve been making. And that’s what really is interesting for you. How can you make sure that as you invent, and one of the main topics that we’ve discussed is how it’s important to wonder, how it’s important to explore. But as you invent and you wonder, how were you able not to get lost?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, that is such a good question. And you know, really my best thing, my favorite thing, is to be with a small group of people with a big whiteboard in front of me and inventing. I am an inventor. This is my fundamental nature.
And I remember one time we had an executive at Amazon for many, many years, a guy named Jeff Wilkie, who was instrumental in the success of the company. We’ve been gifted with a large number of fantastic executives, including Diego Piacentini, who I think might be in the audience somewhere. And thank you, Diego. Diego’s contributions to Amazon are legendary and to Vento too.
JOHN ELKANN: Thank you, Diego.
Releasing Ideas at the Right Rate
JEFF BEZOS: And so one day in the early days, because I literally put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with 100 ideas in half an hour. And early in Amazon’s history, Jeff Wilkie came to me—one day he worked for Amazon for a quarter of a century, but this is when he probably knew me only for a year. And he said, “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.”
And this was such a shocking idea for me. And as a founder, I had the great luxury of always being able to hire my tutors. They would hire these experienced senior executives, brilliant people like Diego and Jeff Wilkie, and there were several others, too. And I would listen to them and they would teach me.
And Jeff said, “You have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week to destroy Amazon.” I was like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “You have to release the work at the right rate that the organization can accept it.” And he was a manufacturing expert. And so his view of the world was, every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, work in process. And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. And in fact, it was creating distraction.
And so he said, “Look, you have to figure out when to release these new ideas at a rate that the organization can accept them.” And this was—I mean, this sounds so obvious, but it was not obvious at the time to me. And this was a profound insight for me.
And so I started prioritizing the ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organization was ready for the ideas. And then I also started figuring out, how can I build an organization that can be ready for more ideas? That’s about having the right senior team and the right leadership and getting those people the executive bandwidth so they could do more ideas per unit time.
And that is what we built. We built a company that’s very good at inventing and doing more than one thing at a time. And you do want to build as the company gets bigger, you do want to be able to do more than one thing at a time. But that idea of releasing the work was very profound for me, and it made us operationally more effective while still being inventive.
JOHN ELKANN: And you think you’re a better inventor on the back of that. So the actual inventions that probably—
JEFF BEZOS: Because it also forces you—if you are releasing the ideas through time, it forces you to prioritize them better. You end up sharpening the ideas better. And so, yeah, probably does.
The Importance of Wandering
But you have to wander. Thank you. Wandering. Just one more thing on wandering. Wandering is so important because wandering is a kind of humility. So sometimes when people think about, “Oh, how much should I wander? Wandering sounds so inefficient.” But the only way to go straight to your destination is if you know where you’re going. And sometimes you know where you’re going, but sometimes you don’t.
And so wandering is that acknowledgement that in life and in business and in exploration and in invention, in building a company, a lot of the time you can see the mountaintop, but you can’t see the trail and you have to explore and you have to wander. It may feel very inefficient, but it’s actually very valuable. And it’s really a recognition, it’s a humility that you don’t know where you’re going.
JOHN ELKANN: But inventing has a dose that is not efficient. And it does require time to get ideas, to learn to dream.
JEFF BEZOS: Yes.
JOHN ELKANN: On the other hand, you need to be efficient once you start building that.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s right.
JOHN ELKANN: And iterate.
JEFF BEZOS: These are different things for different times. Sometimes when you know where you’re going, yes, you should be very efficient.
Work-Life Harmony
JOHN ELKANN: How to put it in harmony and not balancing? And I know you don’t like to balance, right? And so how can you put in harmony the dream side and the built side?
JEFF BEZOS: And by the way, just to fill that out a little, I don’t love the word balance because it implies a trade-off. I’ve often had people ask me, “How do you deal with work-life balance?” And I’ll say, I like work-life harmony because if you’re happy at home, you’ll be better at work. If you’re better at work, you’ll be better at home. These things go together. They’re not a strict trade-off.
And it’s true, I think for exploration, but also determined execution, you just need to do both. And they actually do feed each other. It’s the things that come out of the execution gives you new data and new ideas about what the next step should be in your exploration. So the two things don’t work against each other, they work together.
JOHN ELKANN: And how—so how would you advise young founders in practical terms, to be able to be in harmony with both?
Advice for Young Founders
JEFF BEZOS: The touchstone, the thing you always go back to is those customer needs. So that’s the only way that I could advise any founder or entrepreneur is to deeply understand what are the big ideas that their customers want. And you can’t—you should ask them, ask your customers, but it’s not sufficient. You also have to invent on their behalf because the biggest breakthroughs, the most important ideas, customers don’t know to ask. They don’t know to ask for those things. That’s why you have to dream and you have to use your intuition and your gut and your heart.
All of the data that gets used in business is essential. If you’re in business and you’re not looking at your data, trust me, your competitors are going to beat you. But if you’re only looking at your data, you also will not win, or at least not win big. Because the most important decisions that every person makes when they’re building something new is made with intuition. You cannot prove it, but you have an instinct and a hunch, and then you’ll pay attention. If that turns out to be wrong, it won’t be a big deal. You’ll correct.
Lessons from the Internet Bubble
JOHN ELKANN: I’d like to go back in the future. Twenty-five years ago, I was studying here in Turin, not very far away, in the engineering school. It was the miracle of Internet and mobile phones together. I was actually doing a startup called [Cha Web], which was a portal. There were many portals. Portals were also being financed by vendors who were selling you technologies and financing that technology and e-commerce was going to be everywhere.
Penetration rates seemed incredible. The speed at which that was going to happen was imminent. And it was exciting and incredible. And Amazon existed and it was already a public company then. And then it just blew up. Everything blew. And you had the Internet bubble.
Today we have similarities with AI and we have this incredible sense of optimism and excitement and everything is going to be there. Now, how do you feel about this moment and what do your instincts taking us back 25 years ago can help us detect? Because my instincts are of caution.
The 2000 Dot-Com Crash and Business Fundamentals
JEFF BEZOS: Well, okay, so to take you back in time, in the year 2000, when the Internet bubble burst, Amazon stock in a very short period of time went from $113 a share to $6 a share. And by the way, it’s split many times since then. I don’t know, 20 for one or maybe even more. I don’t have the number. So these prices have nothing to do with today’s stock prices.
But to go from 113 to six in a short period of time was very concerning. And shareholders were upset. Employees were nervous. All of our employee base, their parents were all calling our employees and saying, “Are you okay?” This was the environment of great nervousness.
But I looked at the numbers in the business and every month as the stock price went from 113 to 6, a number of customers went up every month. Our gross profits went up every month. Our operating expense, we were still in a loss position, but our losses as a percentage of sales went down every month. Every single business metric, new customers, customer repeat purchases, everything that we were monitoring through that entire period, kept getting better.
And so that’s one observation about bubbles in general. The fundamentals can be disconnected, the fundamentals of the business. And of course, as entrepreneurs, you’re focused on the fundamentals of the business. The stock price is an output, an ultimate output. You actually have very little control over it.
Benjamin Graham, the great investor, is famous for saying, “In the short term, the stock market is a voting machine. In the long term, it’s a weighing machine.” And so, as founders and entrepreneurs and business people, our job is to build a heavy company. We want to build a company that when it is weighed, it is a very heavy company. We do not want to focus on the stock price. And so that will be misleading because it can be disconnected from the fundamentals. And when bubbles happen, that’s one thing that happens.
AI and the Nature of Industrial Bubbles
The second thing that happens when people get very excited, as they are today about artificial intelligence, for example, is every experiment gets funded, every company gets funded, the good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And so that’s also probably happening today.
But it doesn’t mean that anything that’s happening isn’t real. Like AI is real, and it is going to change every industry. In fact, it’s a very unusual technology in that regard, and that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.
Today we talk about AI first companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Mistral and so on and so on and so on. There are so many startup companies that are kind of AI companies of various kinds, and that’s normal for this phase. But that is not the biggest impact that AI is going to have.
The biggest impact that AI is going to have is it is going to affect every company in the world. It is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up. I mean, by every company, I literally mean every company, every manufacturing company, every hotel, every consumer products company, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that is hard to fathom, but it’s real.
There is no doubt. We don’t know how long it will take exactly. We don’t know how quickly that transition will occur. And it’ll probably occur at different rates in different industries, but that is very real.
Now, what the stock market does, which is when we think of bubbles, we think of valuations and market caps and things like this, and how many billions of dollars are being invested in these six people at a $20 billion valuation, even though they just started yesterday. That’s very unusual behavior. Investors don’t usually give a team of six people a couple of billion dollars with no product. It’s rare and that’s happening today.
But the great thing about industrial bubbles, this is a kind of industrial bubble as opposed to financial bubbles. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. If you go back like the 90s had a biotech bubble and there were a bunch of pharma startup companies that were designing drugs and using new techniques and the world got very excited, the investment world got very excited. As a group they all lost money. But we did get a couple of life saving drugs.
A bubble like a banking bubble, a crisis in the banking system, that’s just bad. That’s like 2008. And so those bubbles society wants to avoid, the ones that are industrial are not nearly as bad. It could even be good because when the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions. They still get those life saving drugs. And that’s what’s going to happen here too. This is real. The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.
Lessons from the Internet Bubble
JOHN ELKANN: If we go back 25 years ago when the Internet was in that bubbleish moment, no one would have predicted a lot of the industrial benefits.
JEFF BEZOS: Exactly.
JOHN ELKANN: That industrial benefit and the fiber, huge investment that we’re putting in for.
JEFF BEZOS: It’s a perfect example that all of that fiber, fiber optic cable that got laid and by the way, the companies who laid all that cable went out of business. They literally went bankrupt. But the fiber optic cable was still there and we got to use it.
JOHN ELKANN: And the telco companies who owned the customers and who had a very strong moat ended up not being the companies that emerged.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s right.
JOHN ELKANN: And a lot of the infrastructure that was made for e-commerce ended up actually working.
JEFF BEZOS: Yes.
JOHN ELKANN: And in some ways what is really important in the moment we’re living now is on one side to be extremely optimistic that the societal and beneficial consequences of AI like we had with Internet 25 years ago are real and there to stay.
Multiple Golden Ages
JEFF BEZOS: 100%. And by the way, it’s not even just AI. We are all gifted. Everybody in this room, we’re gifted to live in a moment of time when there are multiple golden ages going on. So you have space travel is in the middle of a golden age. AI and AI is several different things. By the way, middle of a golden age robotics, middle of a golden age. It’s extraordinary. There’s never been a better time to be excited about the future. And as I said earlier.
JOHN ELKANN: Thank you.
JEFF BEZOS: This rapid rate of change is fantastic for entrepreneurs.
JOHN ELKANN: And I think what’s really important of what we just discussed is on one side to de-correlate the bubbles and their bursting consequences that might or might not happen from the actual reality.
JEFF BEZOS: Exactly.
JOHN ELKANN: And that if you look at AI similarly to the Internet or similarly to electricity, it’s going to be broadly diffused.
JEFF BEZOS: Correct.
JOHN ELKANN: And it will go everywhere and everyone from us as people to companies will be using it and benefiting from it.
JEFF BEZOS: That’s right.
JOHN ELKANN: And so we need to just be extremely open in being able to adopt it and not necessarily think like back in the days that electricity was only going to be applied for light bulbs or electricity was only going to be applied for a fridge.
Civilizational Abundance Through Innovation
JEFF BEZOS: Civilizational abundance comes from our inventions. So 10,000 years ago, or whenever it was, somebody invented the plow and we all got richer. And that’s what happens one step at a time. We build tools and the tools increase. I’m talking about all of civilization. These tools increase our abundance and that pattern will continue. And AI is a gigantic part of that. Space travel is going to be a big part of that. I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now.
The Future of Technology and Blue Origin
JOHN ELKANN: And as we come to a conclusion of this talk, though, I would have enjoyed to continue it for much longer, Jeff. The future we have ahead and as you said, we should be very encouraged by its future. And we had during these days a lot of what’s happening which is at the intersection of software and hardware, at the intersections of bits and atoms.
And we had here one of our companies, CNH CEO Gary spoke about tech and iron agriculture equipment and how that’s becoming very different and somehow these are becoming robots, cars. We had Archer company, we’re associated and how cars are becoming flying cars. The reality is my daughter Vita, who’s here, was very disappointed when I showed her a flying car, which is a child of a helicopter and a drone. And it’s not actually a car that then flies, but it will happen.
And healthcare, which is a sector where we’ve been spending a lot of time and looking at machines that Philips do, where surgery is going to become more and more precise and more and more clever thanks to this combination.
We are in Turin, which not only has its roots in cars and automotive, but also in aviation and space. Because from the engines that were applied to cars and multiple machines, trucks, agriculture equipment, they also went in planes and ultimately on rockets. Combustion will stay on rockets. And we have a very strong base in Turin. A lot of companies, a lot of excitement.
You’re spending a huge amount of time in Blue Origin. Very few people know how hard you’re working on it. And the truth is you haven’t really stepped down. On the contrary, you just went much faster forward. Can you tell us a little bit about how the world looks like 10, 50 years from now?
JEFF BEZOS: Well, so I am working very hard on Blue Origin. I’m working very hard on AI. I’m the least retired person in the world and I will never retire because work is too much fun. It will never happen.
JOHN ELKANN: And Lauren is for it.
JEFF BEZOS: She knows it makes me happy. And so look, Blue Origin. At the end of this month, or maybe the first week in November, we’re going to launch our New Glenn vehicle and we’re sending NASA’s Escapade satellite into orbit around Mars. So that’s about to happen.
We are building a lunar lander that is going to land on the moon here in just a few years. And also very exciting, it’s hydrogen powered. We develop being 20 degree Kelvin, very, very cold, 20 degrees above absolute zero. 20 Kelvin, electric powered, solar powered cryo coolers so that we can keep liquid hydrogen liquid and have it be a storable propellant in space.
This is very hard to do. We already have made amazing progress on it because hydrogen is the highest performing fuel for rocketry, for space travel. But it has this problem that it has to be kept so cold that historically hasn’t been able to be used on deep space missions because it just boils away. So we’re solving that problem, making hydrogen a storable fuel.
We are doing R&D into how to build solar cells, solar cells from lunar regolith on the surface of the moon. Because if you’re going to go to the moon and stay on the moon, you need to be using the resources of the moon. You need to be harvesting the moon to make that cost effective.
The Moon as a Launch Pad
JOHN ELKANN: So the moon will be a launch pad.
JEFF BEZOS: The moon is a gift from the universe. It’s so close to Earth, it’s only three and a half days away. We can launch and get to the moon anytime. Unfortunately, to get to other planetary bodies, they have very rare launch windows. Mars, you can go to Mars once every 26 months or so.
And so the moon is really a gift. And it has a very low gravitational field, only a sixth of Earth, which means it takes about 30 times less energy to lift a kilogram of mass off the moon than it does to lift it off the Earth. So we can use the moon as a rocket fuel depot to go to the rest of the solar system.
One of the things that’s going to happen in the next, it’s hard to know exactly when it’s 10 plus years, but I bet it’s not more than 20 years. We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space because we have solar power there 24/7 and the solar power there is, there are no clouds and no rain, no weather, so you can build.
We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades. And so space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better. It already has happened with weather satellites, it’s already happened with communication satellites. The next step is going to be data centers and other kinds of manufacturing.
The Future of Travel
JOHN ELKANN: And will we be able to travel on Earth faster?
JEFF BEZOS: Yeah, I think so, eventually. This is very challenging kind of hypersonic travel on Earth. The point to point ballistic travel, it doesn’t break any laws of physics. It’s difficult in some ways. Rockets tend to be very noisy, so people probably don’t want them like in their downtown areas. So we’ll have to figure out exactly how that works. But there may be other ways of doing hypersonic travel too. So I do think that will happen.
JOHN ELKANN: And living in space, when do you think we’ll be living in space?
The Future of Human Life in Space
JEFF BEZOS: Well, I believe we’ll have in the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space. That’s how fast this is going to accelerate.
It’s interesting too because they’ll mostly be living there because they want to. Our robotic technology is getting so good, we don’t need people to live in space. Anything that we need done, if you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we will be able to send robots to do that work. And that will be much more cost effective than sending humans.
JOHN ELKANN: And if you were to advise a movie or a book of sci-fi that’s in your view, more truth to what we expect, what would that be? And I’m asking because I know you love sci-fi and I love sci-fi. I still disappointed myself of seeing how you always read and see these movies and it never happens.
Science Fiction and the Future of AI
JEFF BEZOS: I’ve read so much science fiction just starting in that little town in South Texas where I spent my summers with my grandfather. Someone had donated his science fiction collection to the local library, which is this town of only 3,000 people. And over the course of a few summers, I read my way through that, all the classics: Asimov and Heinlein and so on.
Something that I would recommend is the Culture series, only because it has such an interesting utopian take on the intersection of humanity and artificial intelligence. And I think there’s so much talk about that right now. Not that this is the way it’s going to be or anything, but it’s just a very interesting way to think about these super intelligences.
We didn’t have time to talk about that, but I find so many people nervous or anxious or even a little disappointed, discouraged or depressed by thinking about this coming. You know, right now computers can easily beat us at chess. Once they can compete us at anything, do we have meaning in our lives? I think the answer to that is 100% yes. We will still have meaning in our lives.
JOHN ELKANN: Grazie. Thank you.