Jeff Bezos Quotes

We’re building what’s called a private cloud for them [the C.I.A.], … because they don’t want to be on the public cloud.

You gotta earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it’s disruptive to the old way.

In 1999, after we’d been in business for nearly five years, Barron’s headlined a story about our impending demise “Amazon.bomb.” My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.” At the pinnacle of the internet bubble our stock price peaked at $116, and then after the bubble burst our stock went down to $6.

When we think our critics are right, we change. When we make mistakes, we apologize. But when you look in the mirror, assess the criticism, and still believe you’re doing the right thing, no force in the world should be able to move you.

That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

If you have a really good idea, stick to it, but be flexible on how you get there. Be stubborn on your vision but flexible on the details... People who are right a lot change their mind... They have the same data set that they had at the beginning, but they wake up, and they re-analyze things all the time, and they come to a new conclusion, and then they change their mind.

When I'm 80 and reflecting back, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn't try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us.

Because customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to constantly invent on their behalf.

Your margin is my opportunity.

The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery...It's interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions. They're discoveries.

Customers are always wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and a constant desire to delight customers drives us to invent on their behalf.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year horizon, you’re competing against a lot of people.

But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because few companies are willing to do that.

We were right about AWS, but we’ve also taken plenty of risks that didn’t pan out. In fact, Amazon has made billions of dollars of failures. Failure comes with invention and risk-taking, which is why we try to make Amazon the best place in the world to fail.

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.