CNBC Exclusive: Jeff Bezos Speaks with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin on "Squawk Box" Part I
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- Category: Business/Financial News
- Published on Thursday, 21 May 2026 11:31
- Written by Squawk Box
Amazon Executive Chairman & Founder, Blue Origin Founder and Project Prometheus Co-Founder & Co-CEO Jeff Bezos spoke live from the Blue Origin Rocket Factory in Merritt Island, FL on CNBC's "Squawk Box" with Andrew Ross Sorkin.
PART I
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Good morning. We are here on the factory floor this morning of Blue Origin. And we are here with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin. Also, of course, the founder of Amazon. It is great to see you. This is remarkable, by the way, just the scale of it. We've been talking about it all morning. But of all the people that we could talk to about everything that's going on in the country right now and the economy, A.I., jobs, space, we want to talk to you. And there is so much to talk about. We're going to touch on that policy, politics and so much more. But one of the topics that I thought we should talk about and maybe even start with—
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JEFF BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Is these days it feels almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading a headline about wealth in America, about the billionaire class, about wealth inequality and policy and everything else. And it's taken a uniquely critical turn, I think. And I'm so curious, before we even get into everything else, what you think about that right now.
BEZOS: Well, first of all, Andrew, I'm glad you're asking the question. I think it's a really important topic, and I think it's an important one to discuss because I see the same thing you do. You see it in a bunch of headlines. You see it in a bunch of places. And I've been thinking, I have been thinking about what is – what is driving this, because it does seem different from 10 years ago. And I think – I think what's going on is that it's kind of a tale of two economies. So, you have a bunch of people in this country who are doing really well, but you also have a bunch of people in this country who are struggling – struggling to pay rent, groceries.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so, what's, you know, what's happening here is politicians are using the kind of age old techniques. So, there's this tale of two economies, and they're using this age old technique of, you know, picking a villain and pointing fingers. But the problem is that doesn't solve anything. And so like, if you want to help the group of people who are struggling, you have to figure out real root causes and solutions. And that takes skill. You know, it's like the way we – if we have a problem at Amazon, you know, the way we would fix it is we would go in and we'd do the five whys and we'd try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix and then we fix it at the root, you're fixing it forever. It's a real solution.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And what we don't do because it doesn't work is just point fingers and blame people. It might feel good for 10 seconds, but it doesn't accomplish anything. And so, what could you really do? So, like I, you know, I –
SORKIN: That's what's next – do you have a plan?
BEZOS: Well, I have some ideas. I have some places to start. So, you know, if you know, I started thinking about this and doing some research. A nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year pays 12 – more than $12,000 a year in taxes. Does that really make sense? So, people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? Why is somebody –
SORKIN: At all?
BEZOS: At all. Why is some – why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes?
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SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And so – and by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3 percent of the taxes. It's only 3 percent. We can find 3 percent. So, we don't have – it's a small amount of money for the government.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: You know that – and really, it's – and the more I thought about it, to me, it's kind of absurd that we're doing this. You know, we shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense.
SORKIN: Okay. But then on the other end, the question is, should you be paying higher taxes to pay for the 3 percent component part of this that you think is going to need to be paid for, if not more than that, given the debts we have.
BEZOS: The – it's certainly a perfectly valid policy debate –
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: – to say, do we want an even more progressive tax system? So, you know, the kind of the line that gets quoted all the time is, you know, the wealthy should pay their fair share.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And we can argue about what the fair share is. That's a policy debate. That's okay. But the vilification is the thing that's just the distraction.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And by the way, if you really are being honest about it, we don't have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay 40 percent of all the tax revenue. The bottom half pay only 3 percent. We have already, and I think it should be zero. I don't think it should be 3 percent.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: I think it should be zero. So, we would be making more progressive that way. We actually have a spending problem and that's a skills issue. I mean, let me give you an example. The New York City school system –
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: They spend $44,000 per student, $44,000. That's 30 percent more per student than other big cities like Chicago, L.A., and Boston. And it's three times more than Miami and Houston. And by the way, New York City doesn't get better outcomes. So, what this, listen, let me, let me just say, if we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Your packages would take six weeks to arrive. We'd have to charge you $100 delivery fee. And then when the package did finally arrive, it'd have the wrong item in it anyway.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: We can't, that's a skills issue, Andrew.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: It's, it's not about, it's just competence.
SORKIN: But there's also a question about, you know, there's teachers unions in New York, for example.
BEZOS: None of this money is getting to the teachers. I promise you, if you're, if you're charging $44,000 per student, how much is that money you think is trickling down to teachers? Not much.
SORKIN: And so, you don't think it's about creating a livable wage for the teachers? I mean, that's part of the issue is sort of how do you create this livable wage—
BEZOS: By the way—
SORKIN: Affordability issue.
BEZOS: More of that, more of that, they could, that amount of spending should come down and more of it should go to the teachers. It's just if you look at the level of—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Administration in the New York public school system, it's off the charts.
SORKIN: Let me—
BEZOS: It's like they have all these middle managers and senior leaders. The money does not get to the teachers.
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SORKIN: Let me ask you a question, though, about great wealth, though. And the other issue around on the tax front is whether people of great means at the very, very top end. And Elizabeth Warren has made this point repeatedly. I think she's made it in reference to you and others, are able to pay a lower tax rate even though you're paying an enormous sum in taxes, a lower tax rate than maybe I am, for example.
BEZOS: These people sometimes say that, that, you know, I don't pay taxes. That's not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes. And it's a per -- again, if people want me to pay more billions—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Then let's have that debate. But don't pretend you know that this, that that's going to solve the problem. You could, you could double the taxes I pay and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens, I promise you. This is the, so you can't connect those two things, not logically. You know, there, there are more examples. Why is rent expensive? Why is rent so expensive? I recently saw somebody blamed it on Airbnb. Okay, Airbnb is not the cause of expensive rent. In fact, it's been almost, let me finish here one second. It's already been outlawed—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: In New York City. And rents are still very high. So, we know Airbnb isn't causing high rents. What's really causing high rent is government intervention. We subsidize demand with things like tax policy, which is fine, but at the same time, we constrain supply. We constrain supply with things like zoning and permitting. Why does it take so long to get something permitted to build? If you want rents to come down, econ 101—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Really simple. You need to, you can't sub -- you can't sort of subsidize supply. I mean, sorry, subsidize demand and constrain supply. If you do, prices are going to skyrocket. But this is not anybody's fault other than government policy. And this is fixable. Again, this is a skills issue.
SORKIN: Well, let me ask you about government policy, though, because the other piece of the argument is that the wealthy have extraordinary influence over government policy and have too much influence over government policy, by the way, over tax policy, over housing, over all of it.
BEZOS: I, but what I would say is that we have way too much corporate welfare, way too much corporate subsidies. We have, there's way too much influence in politics from business, in some cases, wealthy people who really focus on that, unions. There's a bunch of people interfering in the political process.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And if we can make that better, we should do that, too. That would be another root cause. You go back and figure out what is, what is happening there.
SORKIN: Yeah.
BEZOS: But yeah, it doesn't make any sense for the government to subsidize, you know, certain agricultural crops, certain, you know, real estate transactions, Hollywood films. This, the tax code is 10, 10,000-plus pages long—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Because it has built in corporate loopholes for various things. This is crony capitalism. And of course, it should be fixed.
SORKIN: Well, that's my question. And therefore, the question is, should people like you and your position advocate ways to fix it? I mean, one of the things people talk about is this policy of what they call "buy, borrow, die". This idea that you can take your, take assets that you have, stock, and get loans against them.
BEZOS: Andrew, as far as I know, there is, there's no truth to this "buy, borrow, die" thing. I don't even know where this comes from. And, you know, you can look at, I'm selling Amazon stock routinely. And that's how I fund Blue Origin—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And Prometheus and a bunch of other things, investments in small companies that I'm doing. So, I, every time I sell—
SORKIN: By the way, it may not be you.
BEZOS: I pay taxes on that.
SORKIN: But there are other people. By the way, Elon Musk, who takes extraordinary loans against his stock and as a result, isn't paying taxes in that moment. Now, when he sells stock, he pays.
BEZOS: And this is, you know, again, can we fix that, if that's a true loophole? I'm a little skeptical that that's a true loophole. But if it is—
SORKIN: OK.
BEZOS: Can we fix it? Then we should. That's, I don't—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: I don't think such a loophole should exist, but I want to get back to my primary point. When you fix that loophole, it's not going to help that—
SORKIN: It's not going to solve the full problem.
BEZOS: That nurse in Queens is, it's not going to help her at all.
SORKIN: Let me ask you this. Look, I'm going to—
BEZOS: And so, that's what, you've got to bring it to, you know—
SORKIN: Right.
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BEZOS: If you really want to have a progressive tax system, you also want that money to actually be helping and not just dissolving in, you know, in like administrative bureaucracy and not even getting to the teachers.
SORKIN: But part of it is—
BEZOS: And with bad outcomes. 70% of the New York public city school kids in eighth grade are at their reading level—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: 70%. Only, it's like it's actually 72 percent, 28 percent are there.
SORKIN: Well, let me ask you about the anger, because there seems to be anger, at least from certain political sides of this. And AOC recently said in a podcast, I'm just curious how you think about this, says there's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, she says. You can't earn $1 billion, just can't earn that, she says. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they're worth, but you can't earn that.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: By the way, you've earned an extraordinary amount of money. You employ, largest employer, if not one of them in the whole country. When you read that, what do you think?
BEZOS: Well, it's, it's not correct on its face. Let's give you, let me give you a simple example. Let's say you start a burger joint—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you have ten employees and you make a little bit of money.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Until you have this is, this one outlet. And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then you open a second outlet. And now you're making a little bit more money and you have 20 employees and you open a third outlet. By the time you've opened 1,000 outlets, you are a billionaire.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And by the way, this is a real life story. It happens all the time. It's In-N-Out burger. It's, you know, Raising Cane's Chicken. At what point did that money all of a sudden become unethical or it didn't? There was one outlet, and then there were two, and then there were three. What you're doing, the way, the way you make $1 billion or $100 million or $10 million or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you're going to end up with $1 billion.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you can, you know, just try it with a chicken franchise.
SORKIN: Do you think though—
BEZOS: But your chicken has to be good.
SORKIN: But there's the question of whether the people who are working at the burger joint ultimately should be paid more, that that's what creates the affordability gap.
BEZOS: Well, by the way, that's also if you want to change the minimum wage, change the minimum wage. Amazon, we have our entry level wage for, in Queens is $23 an hour. And that's, that works out to be like $52,000 a year. And this is an entry level job that doesn't require any educational attainment. It doesn't require any preexisting skills. We will train you. It's actually a great first job. On day one, you get full healthcare.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: The same healthcare program that our senior executives get, the same one I'm on. And so this is, this is actually a fantastic entry level job, $23 an hour. But guess what? They're still charging that person more than $10,000 in taxes.
SORKIN: And you think that person—
BEZOS: Now that's absurd.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Why would you charge somebody making $52,000 a year, $10,000 a year in taxes? It doesn't make any sense. Let them be, you know what? That person has a chance to uplift themselves and to uplift them—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Uplift them, or their family, and to learn more skills. This is, but like, why are you taxing them so much? I really am puzzled by this. You know, the more I think about it. Why? Well, you don't need that revenue.
SORKIN: The pieces that we have a big budget gap. And so, whether you're the federal government or whether you're a city, I mean, I was going to ask you about what you thought of the pied-a-terre tax in New York and what you thought of what happened with this, with this Ken Griffin video that the mayor made?
BEZOS: Well, there are two—
SORKIN: You have a place in the city.
BEZOS: Yeah, there's two different, I think there are two different things about that video. On the one hand, it's perfectly fine to have a policy debate about whether you want to have a pied-a-terre tax.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Right. The second piece, which is not so good, is to go stand in front of Ken Griffin's house and act like he's some kind of villain. Ken Griffin isn't a villain. He hasn't hurt anybody. He's not hurting New York. In fact, quite the opposite. And so that piece of it isn't right. And there was no reason to do that. A pied-a-terre tax is a, you know, a, there's a very, taxes on out of towners are very popular taxes. That's why there are hotel taxes. And hotels always have very high tax rates because why not tax the tourists? And there are limits. If you raise the hotel taxes too much, tourists stop coming.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Right? So, you have to be judicious. But I think that the pied-a-terre tax is a fine thing for New York to do. And, you know, they have to figure out. But it's a policy debate. Policy debates don't have to be finger-pointing. This is the piece.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And—
SORKIN: So, you're not going to sell your place in New York?
BEZOS: Unfortunately. It's a, it's, it is an effective political technique. It's as old as the Hills. So, when you don't know how to solve a problem, create a villain, blame them, but it won't solve the problem. The only thing that will solve the problem is skill.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so really it's a skills issue. You want to say any corporate CEO, CFO worth their salt, an Amazon CFO could find 3 percent in the federal budget on a Tuesday afternoon. This is, there is, there is so much waste in government spending.
SORKIN: Right. What do you think personally? I mean, you read these headlines. You see your name in them, whether it's the Met Gala protests.
BEZOS: Yeah.
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SORKIN: On a personal level, what do you, what do you personally think of all this? I know we're talking about policy.
BEZOS: Well, on a personal level, you know, I think, I think of my parents, and I think of how they uplifted me. I think of where they started. I think, you know, my dad is a Cuban immigrant. He came to this country right after Castro took over, and he was a 16-year-old boy who didn't speak a word of English. He came all by himself. His parents weren't allowed to leave. He was in a refugee camp in the Everglades, and he built himself up. My mom had me in, she was in high school. She was a 17-year-old mom. You know, it wasn't cool to be a pregnant mother in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. And she brought herself up. And so I look at that and I think, you know, I want to make sure that the people who are struggling today have a chance to do that, too, to bring themselves up, and maybe, you know, maybe they're going to be the next Steve Jobs, maybe they're going to be, you know, maybe one of their kids will be the next Steve Jobs, I don't know. But they, we can give them a better chance by eliminating their tax bill. I don't want to reduce it. I want to eliminate it. I think there's something very powerful about zero. You know, like we, zero is a better number than like $1. You know we don't charge; we have free shipping at Amazon. Not like 25 cents, shipping. Zero is a good number. When people are starting out and they're struggling, stop taxing them. We don't need it. We live in the wealthiest country in the world. America is the greatest country in the world. We have more entrepreneurial dynamism here than anywhere else in the world. This is the best time to be alive in America because we have access to capital is so easy right now. It's so good. And I'm talking about entrepreneurs—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And aspiring entrepreneurs. And that's, we should have so much optimism about the future.
SORKIN: Okay. Well, I want to talk about some of that optimism because there are some people who are very fearful, by the way, about A.I.
BEZOS: I know. I'm very aware of this. And I think those people are dead wrong.
SORKIN: We'll get into that in a second. But do you have a relationship with the president, President Trump?
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Now that you have this, I don't know if this is a policy position, the Bezos policy position for zero taxes on, I don't know what the wealth number is going to be. Do you plan to go to Washington to talk about this with them? I mean, is this something you want to be the advocate for?
BEZOS: I'm certainly going to advocate for this. You know, I've worked with every president since Bill Clinton, and I hope to work with, you know, the next couple of presidents, too, if they'll have me. But yeah, we have, it's part of our job as, as citizens and as business leaders to, to share our ideas. And this one would actually help people. This one would actually help people.
SORKIN: Right. Let me ask you, a social compact question—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Between wealth. I mean, part of this is a social compact issue between the wealthy and the less wealthy. And, you know, I don't know if you saw about a year or two ago, Warren Buffett wrote a fabulous letter where he said they always thought he was getting rich, but he never imagined that people were going to get as rich as Carnegie or Rockefeller. And he thought they would never imagine they'd get as rich either. Those people gave away extraordinary amounts of money. They built libraries. They built schools, all of it. You've talked about giving your wealth away—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Some $280 billion of it mostly during your lifetime.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: You're 62 years old now. Warren Buffett has said how hard it is to give money away.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: He's not even sure that his kids in their generation are going to give away. He's already starting to prepare to find another, the next generation to give it away.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: How are you going to do it?
BEZOS: Well, I, I give a, I give away billions of dollars to charitable causes. And I'm going to continue to do that. I'm going to give away most of my wealth in my lifetime.
SORKIN: But that's going to be hard. But you have to give a lot of ways quickly—
BEZOS: It's hard and it's also hard to do well. It's easy to do poorly.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And what you, in my view, you don't want to create dependence with your wealth. One of the things I fund that I really, really like is family homeless shelters. I give about 100 and, 100 million or so every year to 30 or 40 different family homeless shelters. These are usually women with children. The motto that I have is, no child sleeps outside. And this, these are, I really like these because they build independence. So, they, the average stay in these shelters is usually less than 180 days. They teach people skills. They teach people how to interview. They teach a bunch of things because mothers with kids, usually mothers with kids, sometimes fathers, but usually mothers with kids. They really do want to stand on their own two feet. So, like when you start talking about charity, one question I would encourage anyone to ask is thinking about doing charitable giving is does, does this giving create dependence or independence?
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And you want to do things that create independence?
SORKIN: How are you going to do that at scale? I mean, $280 billion and maybe more.
BEZOS: I want to say one more thing about this. I don't know yet the answer to your question. This is a, this is a very difficult thing to do, and it's going to take a lot of focus and work. But I want to make one more point here, which I think is really important, even though I'm going to give away the majority of my wealth if I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Than the, than the good that I do with my charitable giving. And I think this is an important point to make because people, people forget or they sometimes don't see that when, you know, when you create something like Amazon and you're saying, I get letters from new mothers all the time that say like, I have no idea what I would be doing right now if I didn't have Amazon, thank you. Or what we did in the pandemic, when people could really see what an essential service we provided to them. And so, you know, this is where, Amazon creates tremendous value. And by the way, all companies are creating value of some kind. That's why people are voluntarily giving them money.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: You know, nobody is forcing somebody to use a particular product. You're choosing to do it because that product is giving you value. And so, if you create a company, Blue Origin will create tremendous value for the world. Prometheus will create tremendous value for the world. And Amazon has already created tremendous value for the world, and I hope it will continue to create even more. It's not just the consumer side, it's with AWS, too. But this, this is such an important point. You know, I really want people listening to this to think about that, that for-profit companies properly run a tremendous value for the world. And they're, and they're self-sustaining and they draw competition. If you can do something with the for-profit model, you should. And then if you can't figure out, there are market failures where it's just not going to work. If you want to do room temperature vaccines, you know, there's not a big market for that because wealthy countries have refrigeration. And so, there are market failures where you really can't, you know, there's no real market for family homeless shelters. Do you see what I'm saying?
SORKIN: But let me—
BEZOS: But for most things, there is a market and you should do that. And you are creating tremendous value that way. And so everybody out there who's a potential entrepreneur make sure you focus on that. You will be creating value for society if you're successful at pleasing your customers.
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SORKIN: Okay. Talking about markets—
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: I was asking you about the news market.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Because you own "The Washington Post".
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: And one of the critiques, by the way, and this is, this is maybe the wealth critique and everything else is, you know, we just you, the company laid off about 30 percent of its staff.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: And there's a lot of people out there who said, Jeff's super wealthy. He's talked about this being a public trust. That's something that he bought early on. How much do you care about that piece of it? Why, why lay people off? Why fire people? Why don't you subsidize the business if in fact—
BEZOS: Because "The Post" needs to be a profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet. It needs to be.
SORKIN: But does it?
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: I mean, that's the question. Some people say it should be a trust.
BEZOS: And let me tell you why.
SORKIN: OK.
BEZOS: Because it's a measure of its relevance. If people won't pay for our product, we're not doing, it's not a good enough product. It's like, you know, doing, it would be like poetry without rhyming. It's too easy. So, we want it's got to be something that people will pay for because that's a signal.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: It's a signal that we're providing a relevant service. Your paper, "The New York Times", you guys make a ton of money. You guys are doing very well financially, and you're providing a service that people are willing to pay for. We can do that, too. And guess what I told them, you know, when we were planning those layoffs. I didn't pick who was going to get laid off or which departments. I said, follow the data, follow the data. And I said, there's one exception to this.
SORKIN: What's that?
BEZOS: Don't follow the data on investigative reporting. The heart of "The Post" is investigative reporting. And guess what? Our newsroom today, even after the layoffs—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Is still larger than when we did Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. And so, and we just won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the most prestigious prize, but most prestigious Pulitzer for our investigation into DOGE. So, "The Post" is going to continue to be an important institution. And in fact, it's going to be a more important institution because of this financial discipline. It needs to be relevant to readers. It needs to stand on its own two feet. I don't want it to be a charity. It doesn't need to be and it shouldn't be.
SORKIN: Do you want to own it? And the reason I ask is you've talked about how you are, by default, to some degree a conflicted owner, given you own all of these other businesses.
BEZOS: I think an ideal owner, yes. My vision is still to make sure "The Post" is a, you know. when I bought "The Post," it was very unprofitable when I bought it. The newsroom was even smaller than it is today. And we turned it around in two years, it was profitable for six years. I put all that money back into "The Post," grew the newsroom, so we've shrunk it back some now, but we haven't shrunk it back to what it was when I bought it.
SORKIN: So, what do you think went wrong then? I mean, you had this super successful period.
BEZOS: Yes, what went wrong is we did not adapt. So, this is what, the news business, if you go back to the, I don't know how much time you want to spend on this, but if you go back to the 90s, the local monopoly newspaper was the greatest business in the world. It was the printing press. "The Washington Post" had 70 percent of households in the Washington metro area, and it made money hand over fist. We live in a completely different environment now. It's not even, it's nothing like, now you have to work hard to make a living in the news business.
SORKIN: Let me ask you one related question to all of this, and this goes to "The Washington Post" piece of it, and just the influence and money piece of it. And it relates to the president of the United States.
BEZOS: Yes.
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SORKIN: And there is a view among critics that say that part of what you have done or are doing is trying to placate the president, with either the sort of shift in the tone of what's happening at the paper, or even some of the things that Amazon, the decision to make the documentary around Melania, for example.
BEZOS: Yes, the Melania thing is a falsehood that will not die.
SORKIN: OK. Tell me.
BEZOS: So, it, you know, I see reported all the time that somehow, I was involved in this, and I know we did this at this Mar-a-Lago dinner.
SORKIN: Everybody thinks that you went to Mar-a-Lago.
BEZOS: It's not true.
SORKIN: Not true.
BEZOS: We have denied it. Melania's office has denied it. It's not true. I had nothing to do with that. By the way, it appears it was a good business decision. You know, it did very well in theaters. It's done very well on streaming. People are very curious about Melania. So even though I had nothing to do with it, you know, it appears that the Amazon team made a very wise business decision. I also had nothing to do with "Project Hail Mary," which I regret because it's an incredible success. I wish I had greenlit that.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: But I didn't. And so, you know, Amazon's a big company and makes a lot of decisions. But no, this idea that, you know, that somehow that is a way of buying influence, it's just not. It's just not correct. I can see why people say this. And by the way, you know, the same thing at "The Post." You know, I want The Post's opinion section to stand for free markets, kind of what I've been talking to you about today, free markets and individual personal liberties. I think that's those are founding pillars of America. It's one of the reasons that America has been so successful. This I mean, we have an incredible history. In 1917, we had the same GDP per capita and the same population size as Argentina. Those two countries diverged completely. And it's because of our system. It's the way that we have organized ourselves to be productive. And business can do that, you know, and they can be interfered with a bit. But there's a limit. If you interfere too much with too much regulation or too much, there's just the right amount, too much, and the golden goose, the goose that lays the golden eggs can stop laying golden eggs. You don't want that to happen. This is the engine. You want to make sure everybody is sharing in that engine. But don't hurt the engine. Does that make sense?
Part II of this Interview can be read here:
Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-the-bottom-half-works-pay-3-percent-of-all-taxes--it-should-be-zero.html,
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-on-u-s-tax-code-this-is-crony-capitalism.html,
