Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Founder Jeff Bezos has always been unusually candid about his company’s potential decline and eventual demise. This sentiment is a recurring theme in his communications, where he clearly expresses that even the most powerful companies have a limited lifespan.
Bezos has often used this perspective as a rallying cry to drive innovation at Amazon, keeping the company ahead of potential decline through constant evolution and reinvention.
Under Bezos’ leadership, Amazon has grown into a colossal technology and retail giant, yet he has consistently reminded stakeholders of the company’s mortality. Between 2013 and 2018, he repeatedly openly discussed Amazon’s “inevitable” death, even predicting at a 2018 meeting that “Amazon will go bankrupt one day.”
“If you look at large companies, their lifespan is typically more than 30 years, not more than 100 years,” he said, emphasizing that many large companies do not last more than decades.
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This view was also evident in his final letter to shareholders in 2021, when Bezos quoted biologist Richard Dawkins and said, “Averting death is something you have to work on.”
Here Bezos compared the effort required to maintain the vitality of a living organism to the effort required to keep a business thriving. He warned that the company would become too typical and lose its distinctive character, equating business stagnation with death.
Bezos often reinforced this point with his Day One philosophy, claiming that it should always be Day One for Amazon. This mindset focuses on maintaining the agility, curiosity and urgency of a startup. He articulated that the transition to day two implies stasis, irrelevance, and slow decline, which he saw as the beginning of the end.
These acknowledgments of Amazon’s possible future serve not only as a warning, but also as motivation. Bezos has strived to cultivate an organizational culture that pursues innovation and operational excellence to avoid the decline he sees as inevitable without such efforts. His leadership philosophy suggests that recognizing and confronting the prospect of failure can propel a company to maintain its competitive advantage and vitality.
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Bezos stepped down as CEO but took on the role of executive chairman to continue influencing Amazon’s direction, albeit in a different capacity.
Earlier this year, Bezos sold 50 million Amazon shares, raising about $8.5 billion. The financial move was part of a broader strategy that included his move from Seattle to Miami, a decision influenced by personal and business considerations. His move to Florida was particularly beneficial because of the state’s favorable tax laws, which allowed him to save approximately $600 million in taxes he would have paid under Washington’s capital gains tax, which was implemented in 2021.
He has made significant real estate investments in Florida, spending hundreds of millions on properties in the ultra-exclusive Billionaire Bunker. He bought one estate for $90 million and two others for a total of $149 million.
Bezos’ move to Florida also marked a shift in focus to his aerospace company Blue Origin, which benefits from its proximity to Cape Canaveral – a key location for launching and manufacturing rockets and spacecraft. This strategic move supports his vision for space exploration and Blue Origin’s expansion, which is expected to drive local investment and employment.
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This article Jeff Bezos has been predicting Amazon’s ‘inevitable death’ for years, saying the lifespan of big companies ‘tends to be 30+ years’ not 100, originally appeared on Benzinga.com
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