Thursday September 13th 2018 – the world’s richest man with a $150 billion fortune Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos participates in the Milestone Celebration Dinner at the Economic Club of Washington in Washington, D.C.
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Jeff Bezos At The Economic Club Of Washington
Transcript
You know I have been lecturing you have all hands meetings that AM has done for 20 years ever since we've been for 21 years now in 1997 almost every all hands meeting. I said look when the stock is up 30 percent in a month don't feel 30 percent smarter.
Because when the stock is down 30 percent in a month it's not going to feel so good to be 30 percent dumber. And that's what happened.
You know the great quote that Warren Buffet brings up all the time but Benjamin Graham said which is that in the short run the stock market is a voting machine. In the long run it's a weighing machine and what you need to do is operate your company in such a way knowing that it will be weighed one day and just let it be weighed never spent any time thinking about the daily stock price. I don't.
OK. So as a result of going up 70 percent this year you have become. The wealthiest man in the world. It is a title that you really want or not.
Is in I can assure you I have never sought that title. And it was fine being the second wealthiest person in the world that actually worked fine. It's not it is a day. I would say it's something people naturally are curious about. You know it's kind of an interesting curiosity but it's not. The thing I would much rather if they said like you know inventor Jeff Bezos or entrepreneur Jeff Bezos or you know.
Father Jeff are those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me and the you know the it's an output measure. If you look at the financial success of Amazon and the stock I own 16 percent of Amazon. Amazon is worth roughly a trillion dollars. That means that what we have built over 20 years we have built 840 billion dollars of wealth for other people. And that's really what we. That's from a financial point of view that's what we've done. We've built 840 billion dollars of wealth for other people and that's great. That's how it should be there. I believe so powerfully in the ability of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets to solve so many of the world's problems not all of them but so many of them.
So you live in Washington State near Seattle where outside of Seattle now the man who was the richest man for about 20 years has named Bill Gates. Yeah. And what is the likelihood that the two richest men in the world live not only in the same country not owning the same state along the same city but in the same neighborhood. I mean is there something in that neighborhood that we should know about and. Are there are there any more houses for sale there Akright.
After I saw Bill. Not too long ago. We were joking about the world's richest man thing and I basically said thank you. I said You're welcome. And he immediately turned to me and said thank you but no. Medina is a great little. It's a suburb of Seattle. And you know I don't think there's anything special in the water there and you know I didn't locate Amazon in Seattle because of Microsoft I thought that that big pool of technical talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people from. And that did turn out to be true. So it's not a complete coincidence there is some correlation there.
When you are the richest man in the world you go into a store when you want to buy something you have to put a credit card down you to say I'm Jeff Bezos and they said you know how do you buy that and you have to carry you carry cash around you.
I do carry cash and I have.
I have credit cards. Yeah. And have your credit. I have to show my driver's license.
