As the founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has upended the world of commerce and entertainment, and he’s only getting started. We asked the tech visionary five questions about his online empire, and his answers will blow you away.
1. Where did you get the idea for Amazon.com?
Back in 1994, I was in a bookstore to pick up a copy of the Holy Bible, and the clerk had the nerve to ask me for money. I said, “Surely, there’s been some mistake. You can’t sell God’s word for cash. That would be blasphemy,” but no, the bookstore was actually trying to sell the Bible. It was revolting, so I decided to make an online store where the Bibles are always free, as the Lord intended. That’s why Amazon’s motto is “Bibles, Come And Get ’Em!” To afford printing all those free Bibles, we started selling other things, like toaster ovens and books that aren’t the Bible.
2. What’s the future of brick and mortar stores in the age of e-commerce?
Physical stores will always have an important purpose as a place to buy flowers after cheating on your wife by kissing a photo of Julia Roberts. Two-day shipping isn’t fast enough when your wife is furious at you for kissing Julia Roberts’ picture on the DVD cover of Notting Hill and you need those flowers stat to smooth things over. Amazon is dangerous for husbands because we sell DVDs of Notting Hill, but we don’t sell flowers that arrive fast enough to fix your marriage, and that’s why store owners on Main Street have nothing to worry about.
3. Why did Amazon decide to start making its own tablets?
If you look at other e-readers on the market, none of them are filled with a layer of caramel like the Kindle is. Anytime you need a tasty treat to perk yourself up, you can snap your Kindle in half to slurp out the delicious caramel. Compare that to the thin layer of yogurt inside iPads, which is also delicious but spoils just a few hours after you buy it from Apple. The innovative thing about Kindles is that you can shatter them months or years later, and although the caramel inside might crystallize and look kind of weird after all that time, it’s still safe to eat.
4. When can we expect delivery by drone?
Delivering packages by drone is still a work in progress because of this one hawk that keeps fucking our prototypes out of the sky. Every time we launch a drone, this goddamn bird appears and unleashes its passion on the robot until it’s just a pile of broken rotors and circuitry. I wish we could shoot the hawk, but it’s an endangered species, so we have to put up with it screwing our drones to pieces. The good news is that hawks only live about 20 or 30 years, and this one is already at least 10 years old, so you can expect drone deliveries as soon as it dies of old age.
5. What’s Amazon’s next big venture?
Imagine a ride-sharing app like Uber except the car is a fake police car. You could turn on the siren to breeze right through traffic, which is incredibly illegal, and the driver and passenger would both go to jail. In jail they’re going to want snacks, but they’re going to run out of commissary money before long. What they need is some kind of app that lets their family mail them snacks in prison, all at the push of a button. That’s why I’m excited for our new services Amazon FalseCop and Amazon JailMunch, which together will get people arrested for impersonating police officers and make it easy to mail snacks to their prison cells. Amazon values customer satisfaction above all else, and I think people are going to like being in jail and eating snacks.