CNBC Exclusive: Jeff Bezos Speaks with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin on "Squawk Box" Part II
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- Category: Business/Financial News
- Published on Thursday, 21 May 2026 11:43
- 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.
SORKIN: Completely, When I last interviewed you, about two years ago, President Trump had just won. He was not the president yet. And I'd asked you what you thought of him at the time. And you said that you thought that he had mellowed, that he was calmer.
CNBC Exclusive: Jeff Bezos Speaks with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin on "Squawk Box" Part I
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: And I'm curious now. Here we are.
BEZOS: Yes. I still think that. Yeah.
SORKIN: Two years later, we've had lots of wars and tariffs and all sorts of things that have happened since then. What do you think?
BEZOS: I think he has, I mean, I'm comparing him to his first term. And I think he is a more mature, more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term. And, you know, so he is again, I've worked with all the presidents. I will work with all the presidents, you know, and I hope to do that going forward if they'll have me. But we need our business leaders to provide input into the administration, regardless of who the president is.
SORKIN: I want to—
BEZOS: I'm not on the side. You know what? This is, I'm on the side of America. And I and that is so important. Like and that's where business leaders should be.
SORKIN: And do you think they're not?
BEZOS: No, I think, no, I think we are. But we get perceived as being like, you know, partisan or whatever. Like I was helping Obama every chance I could. I was helping Biden every chance I could. I still call Obama for advice. He's a very smart guy. And you know, and by the way, people that are Trump has lots of good ideas and he has done a lot of, he's been right about a lot of things. You have to give him credit where credit is due.
SORKIN: So let me pivot the whole conversation we could to space, because we haven't really gotten there. And here we are in this, it's a mecca of sorts, and it's really remarkable to behold.
BEZOS: Thank you. It's amazing. You know, this is what you're looking at here is billions of dollars of investment. And it's also, you know, employing 14,000 people. And it has an unbelievable future. It's very exciting.
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SORKIN: So, you've talked about this—
BEZOS: By the way, I want to make one more point before we move to Blue that I just thought of, which is one of these things that I think you asked me at the very beginning, like, where does this, you know, kind of this anger come from? And I said, it's kind of, you know, a tale of two economies. And I think that really is what's going on. But there are also some deep misconceptions that are worth people thinking about. And there are a lot of people who don't understand that this kind of zero-sum fallacy. So, you know, they think that if there's some a bunch of wealth over here, that there's a fixed pie. You know, we've got one pizza and there are seven people and there are eight slices. Who's going to get two slices? That is not how economies work. So, it isn't a fixed pie. It grows. And people get, their mental model is that wealth is like water in a drought or food in a famine. It's you know, you could, you could hoard food in a famine. You could hoard gasoline in an energy crisis. You could hoard water in a drought. You can hoard toilet paper in a pandemic, as people did. But you can't hoard investment, right? So, if you're like if you have stock in a company that's not hoarding, that's investing and investing is more like farming. And you would definitely want to farm in a famine. Do you see what I'm saying? And so, this, by the way, this the billions of dollars of investment that have come here have come from that Amazon stock.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: By the way, when I sold that Amazon stock, I paid capital gains on it.
SORKIN: You were early when you talked, I remember talking to you maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and you were talking about putting infrastructure in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: And I think you were even talking a couple of years ago about putting data centers potentially in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Even before Elon was talking about data centers in space.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: How realistic is that really?
BEZOS: It's very realistic.
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SORKIN: And what is the timeline of that? Because right now there's a lot of excitement, by the way, around the SpaceX IPO in particular, because of this view that we're all going to be moving stuff to space.
BEZOS: Yes. The question, are data centers in space realistic? The answer is yes. The timeline is harder to answer. So, you know, some of the timelines you hear are very short. They're probably not right. You know, people would talk about two or three years. That's probably a little—
SORKIN: Elon's talking about two or three years.
BEZOS: It's probably a little ambitious.
SORKIN: Right, OK.
BEZOS: You know, but I think what Elon would tell you is if you don't set an ambitious timetable, you know, if you want it to be six years, say it's three. So exactly how long it will take, I don't think anyone knows, but it is real. It will happen. And a couple of things need to happen for that to happen. Energy needs to become a bigger percentage of the cost of terrestrial data centers. So today, terrestrial data centers typically spend less than 15 percent of their kind of total cost of ownership on energy. And the biggest advantage to being in space is that the energy is free, right? You're getting solar energy 24/7, no clouds, no weather. And so that's a big energy, but 15 percent is not a huge number. So, I predict over time, the energy budget of a data center will go up. So, the chips will get a little cheaper. Right now, the chips are so expensive that the energy is not a big chunk. So that will probably change. And so, and then the second thing is that launch cost has to come down very significantly by a factor of 10. That's what we're working on right here. That's what Blue Origin is doing. And this team's on fire doing that. You know, we have a CEO named Dave Limp, and he's doing a great job. This whole leadership team is doing a great job. I'm very proud of them.
SORKIN: If you're right about the data center piece, though, getting to space. Does that change the equation for all the investment that's going on in data centers terrestrially on the ground right now?
BEZOS: No, I don't think so. Because again, the timeline is very different. And you're going to need as much terrestrial data center capacity, I think, as you can arrange in the near term. This is, this technology is real. And I mentioned my optimism a minute ago, and we should definitely talk about that. Because I think there's so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job. I think that there's going to be a labor shortage as a result.
SORKIN: Let's go there, then. I wanted to stay in space, but let's go to that.
BEZOS: We can come back, we can be in space, too, or whatever you want, Andrew.
SORKIN: No, but that's fascinating, because I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend. And the students were booing because every time he mentioned AI, they were booing because I think they're deeply fearful and worried about whether they're going to have a job.
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BEZOS: Yes, well, and the reason they're afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that. So, there are so many smart people, and they are smart. And they are saying, oh my God, there's going to be no more radiologists, because AI can read X-rays better than a radiologist can. And there are going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So, what's really going to happen is that it's going to elevate all of these people. And it's like you've been digging, let's say you're a software engineer, the analogy I can give you is you've been digging out a basement for your house with a shovel, and somebody is about to hand you a bulldozer. You should be so happy. If you're digging the basement to your house, and somebody says, hey, how about this? I have a tool here that's going to, what's really going to happen is we're going to have so much productivity in our economy that, for example, this is just one effect. A lot of people who have two earner income households, one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce. That's why we're going to have a labor shortage. Because of the productivity gains, you're going to be able to afford things.
I predict we'll actually have deflation of certain core, assuming we let this technology play out and don't hamstring it with regulation too early, we will actually have, you know, everything will be, you know, food will get cheaper, and housing construction will get cheaper, and so on and so on.
SORKIN: But is there a transition cost? I mean—
BEZOS: We could even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing. It should take, when you are, if you are a builder, why does it take you six months, nine months, two years, five years, depending on what municipality you live in, to get a building permit?
SORKIN: Right. AI should be able to do it.
BEZOS: AI should do that in 10 seconds, and it should give you a yes or no in 10 seconds, and then you should have your authority to build, and by the way, if it says no, it should give you the six reasons why and then you go change those things and resubmit, and you start building tomorrow instead of two years from now.
SORKIN: But how do you answer, I mean, Amazon's laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard Mark Zuckerberg.
BEZOS: Not because of AI.
SORKIN: But Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off.
BEZOS: Is that because of AI?
SORKIN: Jack Dorsey has.
BEZOS: I very much—
SORKIN: Jack Dorsey ascribes it directly to AI.
BEZOS: Well, you'd have to talk to Jack about that. We've had a lot of people. We're not seeing those same kinds of things at Amazon.
SORKIN: But the reason that people are talking about this is in the context of coding right now, and also in the context that for these companies to have the extraordinary valuation I think that we're talking about, they have to create extraordinary productivity gains.
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BEZOS: Look, can I give you a different lens to view this? So if I'm a software engineer, I need to up-level and think to myself, what am I really doing? What does a software, a good computer scientist software do? What we really do is we identify problems and we help solve them. And the code is almost just a, it's a piece of execution that helps with that. But the real job is going to be identifying problems and helping to solve them. Does that make sense?
SORKIN: Totally.
BEZOS: And that's not going to go away. Because that's going to, that's the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at is figuring out, oh, okay, we want this.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And they're going to work with that tool to build the system. But we humans are never going to run out of problems, and we're never going to run out of the need for solutions, and it's just that the work is going to be done at a higher level. It's going to be done with a bulldozer instead of a shovel, and that's going to be a good thing.
SORKIN: There's an argument, or there's a concern about, there's the white-collar workers on one end, and then I was going to mention, you have a new company called Prometheus?
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: That is really about A.I. robotics?
BEZOS: No, this is, just so you know, it's not surprising, but, you know, because we haven't said much about it, and I can't say much about it today either. It's a little premature for me to talk about it, but we have nothing to do with robotics. What we are doing is we're building an artificial general engineer. So, when you go to design something, we want, we're building tools that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects. So, you've heard of CAD—
SORKIN: Yup.
BEZOS: And so, computer-aided design, and so on. This is kind of like a very, very modern version of that. I'm really oversimplifying here, and it's premature for me to give much detail about Prometheus. Prometheus is something I got so excited about that I became the co-CEO of the company, putting a lot of time into it, a lot of energy into it, and it's, it's going to be amazing. And this is, this is that, you know, as I say, 10,000 years ago, somebody invented the plow, and the whole world got wealthier. So, this, the root of civilizational wealth is invention. So, somebody invented the plow, we all got wealthier. Much later, somebody invented the steam engine, we all got wealthier. That's how this works.
SORKIN: And you don't think this is, at this time, is different?
BEZOS: No, it's not different, it's even better. And so, and by the way, not only is this, people should not be depressed, they should be energized, because this is a moment when the possibilities are so large. Just keep your eyes open to those possibilities.
SORKIN: You've heard Sam Altman talk about the need for universal, potentially universal basic income. There's a question, by the way, this gets maybe to the wealth, about the concentration of wealth.
BEZOS: Instead of universal basic income, how about we stop taxing nurses who make $75,000 a year? We don't need to give her universal income yet—
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: Let's just stop taking money away from her.
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SORKIN: Right. Let me go back to space for a second, because I'm so curious. Well, let me ask you one question about Prometheus. I know you can't go too far in it. I'm curious how you decide, I mean, you're now the CEO of that company, co-CEO of that company, you oversee this.
BEZOS: Yeah.
SORKIN: Dave Limp is running it day to day, you're the executive chair at Amazon. How do you decide, for example, with Prometheus, I'm going to go, I don't know how much time you spend on that, versus all these other things, like, how do you do it? And also, did you ever say to yourself, well, I'll put Prometheus inside of an Amazon, or I'll put Prometheus inside of a Blue Origin?
BEZOS: What I do, my through line for the last few years has been A.I. And so, you know, I've been on the machine learning track for, you know, 15 years, and Amazon has made incredible use of machine learning. But a few years ago, we had a real breakthrough in machine learning, and we called that A.I. And it has so much potential, so my time at Amazon is spent on A.I, my time at Prometheus is spent on A.I., Prometheus is really an A.I. company.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And my time at Blue is largely spent on A.I. And so, and so, and Prometheus, by the way, the tools that we're building are going to help companies like Blue immensely.
SORKIN: And you, but rather than do it inside Blue, or rather than do it inside one of the others?
BEZOS: It deserves its own special focus, it's its own big idea, and Prometheus, you get a lot of focus by having a separate company.
SORKIN: SpaceX is going public, potentially at a $1.75 or $2 trillion valuation, by the way, there's a lot of people here who I think have stock in Blue, they're very excited about that.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: I heard a little bit about that as I was walking through. What do you think about that valuation, does that make sense to you?
BEZOS: I, you know, I don't know enough about their financials to have, I think maybe their, maybe their S1 is going to come out tomorrow or something, and maybe we'll have a better view of the company at that point, so it's hard to know how much of it is, you know, based on the financials and how much of it is a bet on the future.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: One thing I can tell you for sure is that space is going to be a gigantic industry. So, in terms of particulars, should it be $1.75 or $2 or $1.5 or $2.25, I don't know the answer to that question, but I know that space is going to be a gigantic industry. There is no doubt about this.
SORKIN: Jeff, we're almost, we're running out of time, we're going to take a quick break,
BEZOS: OK.
SORKIN: If we could, and then we're going to come back on the other side, we'll be back in just a moment. Jeff Bezos, in a moment
PART II
SORKIN: We are back on the factory floor here of Blue with our exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos, and Jeff, what are you holding? What is it that was, you had on the side there before?
BEZOS: This is a solar cell that we at Blue Origin made out of lunar regolith. Lunar regolith is the dust on the surface of the moon. This is, this is lunar, this is a lunar regolith simulant.
SORKIN: Okay.
BEZOS: It has exactly the same composition as as lunar regolith does, and we're working on building, making solar cells out of lunar regolith, and so the lunar regolith, fortunately, has a lot of silicon in it.
SORKIN: Right.
BEZOS: And so, this is, this is actually, this is an actual solar cell that we produced with lunar regolith simulant.
SORKIN: And will this be on things that are ultimately on the moon or just in space?
BEZOS: It could be both, so ultimately you may build data centers on the moon and power them with solar cells that you make on the moon. Alternatively, you can make the solar cells on the moon and then fling them into space in various ways and build data centers in space, but with materials from the moon. And if you use materials from the moon, you're accomplishing a couple of things. One, it's much more efficient to lift things off of the moon because the moon's gravity is very low. It takes 28 times less energy to lift a kilogram off the moon than it does to lift it off the earth, and secondarily, it's the beginning of the process of moving heavy industry off earth, you know, because this is the garden planet, and we want to keep nature here the way it is.
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SORKIN: What's the timeline for you? You talk about lunar permanence, this idea of, yeah, it's creating permanent, you know, working environments on the moon.
BEZOS: Well, you know, with NASA, we will be building lunar base on the moon. Blue Origin has a big contract with NASA to build a lunar lander, and NASA is in the process of letting additional contracts now. NASA is really focused on the moon now. This has been, I've been, I've been focused on the moon for a really long time, and have been saying, let's do the moon, and then we'll do Mars. It's kind of step by step but do the moon first. The moon is a gift. It has all these resources, it has water, has eternal peaks of light. We can build a whole bunch of things on the moon.
SORKIN: The economics, though, for this business, at least in the short term, are about satellites, right?
BEZOS: I mean, it can be about satellites and data centers. We have, you know, Amazon has Leo.
SORKIN: Right and Kuiper.
BEZOS: That's right and we have two constellations in work. One is called TeraWave. It's a communications constellation with very high bandwidth, it serves a limited number of customers with very high bandwidth, so it's focused on like government customers and big enterprises, hyperscalers. And then we have another constellation called Sunrise, and Sunrise is our data centers and space constellation. So, these, it's, for now, I would say yes, most of these things are focused on low earth orbit constellations, and then there's a third thing, which is national defense, so you know the US has always enjoyed strong superiority in space. That's something that you really do want to continue for the purposes of US national security, and so we also focus a lot on that too.
SORKIN: There are all sorts of wild things we hear about things that could happen in spaces. The idea that you can put mirrors in space that would project the sun down 24 hours a day to power solar, for example. I mean, I don't know if it's 10 years, 20, what do you think the timeline is where all of a sudden our kids are going to either be in space or be impacted in a meaningful way by all of this?
BEZOS: Well, I would argue you're already impacted meaningfully by space, and you have been ever since we had weather satellites. So, you know, the hurricanes don't sneak up on you anymore. You know, we have, ever since we have had weather satellites, we've been in a way better position. Same thing with communications satellites, which we've also had for many decades now. So space has been a factor. It's also been a factor in national security for many decades, but that's accelerating. And you see it with Starlink, the constellation that SpaceX has launched. You're going to see it with Leo, and you, but it's your timeline question. Look, it's going to be a gradual thing, but it 100 years from now you won't believe what has happened. And remember, the best way to think about 100 years is to think about Kitty Hawk and what happened, you know, for that little right flyer that you know, only few flew a few 100 feet. It wasn't very many decades before you had a 747 and so I would caution people who think it's all science fiction to be a little cautious with their judgment, because it is real, it is happening, it's probably going to happen faster than most people think.
SORKIN: Dave Limp, who runs Blue for you—
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: There was a memo that leaked to the Financial Times. You think you're taking outside money for the first time?
BEZOS: Yes. Yeah.
SORKIN: So, when's that going to happen? What does that look like?
BEZOS: Well, we're, we finally have enough visibility into our future and our financial success that you know I've funded Blue out of my own by selling Amazon stock to fund to fund Blue, but it's a good time actually to start thinking about the future and bring on some other outside investors, so we're considering that—
SORKIN: So, it's not, it's not happened yet.
BEZOS: It has not happened yet.
SORKIN: And finally, because we're going to run out of time, you've lived through a whole bunch of economic cycles, including 1999.
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: When people called, you know, there were a lot of questions about whether Amazon was going to continue—
BEZOS: Yes.
SORKIN: Even, and so I'm curious, where you think we are now in this economy because there is a lot of excitement around AI, around space, but there's almost an exuberance about it too, and I'm curious, if you think we're—
BEZOS: We're in a phase where every experiment is getting funded, so what that means is the good ideas are getting funded and the bad ideas are getting funded. It's because investors in this, at this moment, haven't learned yet how to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas, and that's okay, because the good ideas will pay for all of the losers. So, from a point of view of civilization of society, these kind of industrial, you know, cycles, you know, are can actually be very healthy because they drive the technology forward.
SORKIN: And so we shouldn't worry about being in a bubble.
BEZOS: No, even if it does turn out to be a bubble, you shouldn't worry about it because the bubble is driving investment, and a lot of the investment is going to turn out to be very healthy. It's like the biotech bubble, when it burst in the 1990s, a lot of investors lost money on certain things, but we've still got to keep all the life-saving drugs that they had invented.
SORKIN: Jeff Bezos, thank you for a great conversation.
BEZOS: My pleasure, Andrew. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Following are links to video on CNBC.com:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-on-u-s-tax-code-this-is-crony-capitalism.html,
