Jeff Bezos.
Cooper Neill via Getty Images
Jeff Bezos says he gave up his post as Amazon CEO because he wanted to focus on Blue Origin.Bezos founded the rocket company back in 2000.He told podcaster Lex Fridman that most of his time is now spent on Blue Origin.
It’s been two years since Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon’s CEO. In that time, it appears he’s kept himself busy with real estate acquisitions and getting swole.
But the billionaire says his departure from the tech company was because he wanted to focus on his rocket company, Blue Origin.
“I’ve turned the CEO role over, and the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin, adding some energy, some sense of urgency,” Bezos said on the latest episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” which went live on Thursday.
Bezos founded Amazon back in 1994. He stepped down as CEO in July 2021 but retained his position as the company’s executive chairman.
The move, according to Bezos, had to be made because the rocket company needed to move faster. Bezos told Fridman that he wouldn’t have the bandwidth to manage Blue Origin if he was still running Amazon.
“When I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is, ‘If I’m the CEO of a publicly traded company, it’s going to get my full attention.’ And it’s just how I think about things,” Bezos said earlier in the podcast.
“It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that,” he continued,
Bezos now says he’s spending most of his time at Blue Origin and has “never worked harder.”
“I am working so hard, and I’m mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days,” Bezos told Fridman about his current workdays after stepping down as Amazon’s CEO.
“Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I’m so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years,” Bezos told Fridman. “And in the big, I love it, and the small, there’s all the frustrations that come along with everything.”
Blue Origin, which was founded by Bezos in 2000, has been competing against rivals such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. The company has developed three space vehicles thus far — the New Shepard, New Glenn, and Blue Moon.
On Tuesday, Blue Origin said it was looking to launch the New Shepard rocket into Space next week. The rocket had been grounded since September 2022 after a mid-flight failure occurred during a mission.
Representatives for Blue Origin and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.