Jeff Bezos Reveals Blue Origin's Role In Amazon Exit: Envisions 'Trillion Humans' Across Solar System

Amazon.com Inc AMZN founder Jeff Bezos on Thursday pinned the reason for him stepping down from his position as CEO of Amazon to his interest in space and Blue Origin.

What Happened: “Blue Origin needs to be much faster. And it’s one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now,” Bezos said. He was speaking with Lex Fridman on his podcast. Bezos stepped down from his position of CEO of Amazon mid-2021.

Bezos said that he wanted to spend time on Blue Origin and provide some energy and sense of urgency.

Bezos’ Vision For Space: Bezos envisions about a "trillion humans" living in the solar system in future. This would enable "a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins" and fill the solar system with life, intelligence and energy, he said.

The way to realize this dream is by having people live in giant space stations, he added, given that planetary surfaces are too small.

“We will take materials from the moon and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we’ll build giant O’Neill style colonies and people will live in those,” Bezos said. These stations would be more practical as one can put them where needed and would help people to stay close to Earth enabling relatively quick movement back and forth from space to Earth, he added.

Bezos’ space dream is similar to that of rival billionaire and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk who has been envisioning making human life multiplanetary and enabling human existence on Earth’s neighboring planet Mars with SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle.

Blue Origin And Competition SpaceX: Fridman on the interview posed to the billionaire if he deems the rival billionaire’s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX to be a collaborator or competitor. Bezos responded by drawing a parallel of space with internet.

There are a lot of competitors on the large space that is the internet and there are several players in there who are all winning at different scales, Bezos said, adding that he wants to see something similar on the space front.

“There’s room for a bunch of winners and it’s gonna happen at all skill levels. And so you know, SpaceX is gonna be successful for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful and I hope there are another you know, five companies right behind us,” the founder said.

Musk has previously echoed similar sentiments about Bezos and Blue Origin. Speaking at a New York Times DealBook Summit in November, the SpaceX/Tesla CEO said that he really ‘hopes’ Bezos sends rockets to space. The CEO added that he agreed with many of the rival billionaire's motivations and is glad he chose to invest in rockets.

"Let me put it this way, if there was a button I could press that would delete Blue Origin, I wouldn't press it," Musk said.

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