Even the richest man in the world can have trouble winning support for his ideas at work.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, said Thursday that not all of his big visions are automatically a hit at work. If he has a new idea he’s “in love with,” he still needs to build support for it like anyone else.
And if he feels strongly about something but can’t get support from his team, he has a strategy: he’ll say, “I want you to gamble with me on this.” That way, he says, people who disagree may commit to his vision anyway.
Bezos shared his tips for success and vision of the future Thursday morning at Amazon’s re:MARS artificial intelligence conference in Las Vegas. The four-day conference, aimed at businesses that want to use artificial intelligence, featured talks by Amazon executives and AI industry leaders, as well as appearances by numerous robots.
Bezos was interviewed on stage by Jenny Freshwater, Amazon’s director of forecasting and capacity planning. In the midst of the interview, a female protester rushed onto the stage to shout about the welfare of chickens used by an Amazon chicken supplier. She was quickly intercepted and escorted off the stage.
Animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere later said she is a member — that’s the same group that disrupted California senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris at a Democratic forum in San Francisco less than a week earlier.
Bezos also talked about his plans for Blue Origin — the company he founded in 2000 that aims to send humans into space, and to the moon in particular. A replica of Blue Origin’s six-seater space capsule was on display at the conference; it looks like a giant white gumdrop that glows blue from within.
Bezos said one reason he’s so interested in sending people to earth’s closest neighbor is because of its abundance of resources. Ice in moon craters is especially valuable, he noted, as it could be used to make rocket propellant, and it takes a fraction of the energy to lift a pound off of the moon as it does off of the earth.
“To do big things in space we need to use in-space resources,” he said. “So the moon is great.”
Might the moon also serve as a home for one of Amazon’s many fulfillment centers, which are used to pick and pack items sent out to customers, Freshwater asked?
“I hadn’t really contemplated that,” Bezos said. “We’ll start out delivering liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. It’s going to be a small selection. But a very important one.”
