Jeff Bezos serves as executive chairman of Amazon, runs the space company Blue Origin, owns The Washington Post, and directs billions of dollars toward philanthropy and private investments. Since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021, he has shifted from running day-to-day operations of the company he founded to a broader portfolio of ventures spanning space exploration, climate funding, and technology investing.
Executive Chairman of Amazon
When Bezos handed the CEO role to Andy Jassy in 2021, he described his new position as one focused on “new products and early initiatives.” He remains Amazon’s largest individual shareholder, owning more than 10% of the company, and sits on its board of directors. The role keeps him involved in Amazon’s strategic direction without managing the operational details of running one of the world’s largest companies.
Amazon’s CFO, Brian Olsavsky, told investors at the time that Bezos would remain “super active in the Amazon success story.” In practice, the executive chairman role lets Bezos weigh in on big-picture decisions and emerging projects while freeing up significant time for his other interests.
Building Blue Origin
Blue Origin, the rocket company Bezos founded in 2000, is arguably where he invests the most personal energy. Even before leaving the Amazon CEO job, he was spending roughly one day a week, typically Wednesdays, focused on Blue Origin. With the CEO transition behind him, he has more bandwidth for the company’s growing ambitions.
Blue Origin goes well beyond space tourism. The company competes for NASA contracts, including building a lunar lander for astronauts, and launches satellites for the Department of Defense on large reusable rockets. Former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver has described Bezos’s vision as “multigenerational,” aimed at building the infrastructure for humanity to live and work in space. Bezos has funded the venture in part by selling roughly $1 billion in Amazon stock per year, a commitment he announced in 2017.
Philanthropy Through the Bezos Earth Fund
Bezos committed $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund, a philanthropic initiative focused on combating climate change and protecting nature. The fund directs grants toward scientific research with practical applications. One recent example: $34 million to universities developing next-generation textile materials, including a bacterial-grown fiber at Columbia University ($11.5 million), a biodegradable spider-silk-inspired material at UC Berkeley ($10 million), and gene-edited cotton varieties at Clemson University ($11 million). These grants target the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, which accounts for roughly 80% of the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and landfill waste.
Separately, the Bezos Day One Fund focuses on homelessness and early childhood education. The Bezos Family Foundation, a related but distinct entity, also supports education initiatives.
Personal Investments Across Tech and AI
Through his personal venture firm, Bezos Expeditions, Bezos holds stakes in a wide range of companies. His investment portfolio leans heavily into artificial intelligence and robotics, with positions in Perplexity (an AI search engine), Figure and Physical Intelligence (robotics), Contextual AI, Generalist AI, and Skild AI. He also holds or has held investments in well-known companies like Airbnb, Uber, Stack Overflow, and Workday.
Beyond tech, the portfolio includes Arrived (real estate investing), Anduril (defense technology), Wildtype (cultivated seafood), and HistoSonics (medical devices). Bezos also owns The Washington Post, which he purchased in 2013.
How He Structures His Days
Bezos has spoken publicly about prioritizing slow, deliberate mornings. In a 2018 speech at the Economic Club of Washington, he described a routine of reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and having breakfast with his family before diving into work. Phones are off-limits during this time. His fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, confirmed in an interview with People that the no-phone rule remains in place.
Bezos has said this unhurried start improves his energy and decision-making for the rest of the day. He has also talked about scheduling his most important meetings before lunch, when his focus is sharpest, and avoiding meetings that require high-quality thinking late in the afternoon. His approach reflects a broader philosophy: rather than packing every hour, he tries to make a small number of high-quality decisions each day.
Other Passion Projects
Bezos funds a handful of unusual ventures that reflect his long-term thinking. The 10,000 Year Clock is a massive mechanical timepiece being built inside a mountain, designed to tick for ten millennia as a symbol of long-term planning. He also funded the recovery of F-1 rocket engines from the ocean floor. These were the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets during the Apollo missions.
Taken together, Bezos splits his time across roles that range from corporate governance to rocket science to climate philanthropy, all connected by a preference for projects with long time horizons and outsized potential impact.