"Blue Origin Needs Me": Jeff Bezos On Stepping Down As Amazon CEO

Jeff Bezos, the founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, has shared the reason behind his decision to step down as the CEO of the company two years ago. The drastic step came as a surprise to the world, and now Mr Bezos has cited his motivations for the same in a recent episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast. 

Mr Bezos said it is his commitment to his space exploration venture Blue Origin that served as the primary contributor to his retirement decision. Explaining the decision to move away from the CEO role of the company he founded in 1994, the billionaire said that his space venture needed to grow at a faster pace and this would not be possible if it had to manage both Blue Origin and Amazon at the same time.

 “Blue Origin needs to be much faster. And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago, ‘I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now'," he said.

 Not providing full attention to Amazon would then be unfair to its stakeholders, Mr Bezos said.

“And so, I had always … 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. It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that. And so having turned the CEO, I'm still the executive chair there, but I turned the CEO role over, and the primary reason I did that is that I could spend time on Blue Origin, adding some energy, some sense of urgency, “We need to move much faster and we're going to.”

Talking about the work he is doing at Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000, Jeff Bezos told Mr Fridman: “I am working so hard, and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days. Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years. And in the big, I love it, and the small, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything," he explained.

Blue Origin is best known for the development of three space vehicles, New Shepard, New Glenn, and Blue Moon.