Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Bezos (born 1964) founded Amazon in 1994 and built it into one of the world’s most valuable companies, stepping back as CEO in 2021 to focus on Blue Origin and his investments. The AI boom pulled him back in: after seeding startups across the field, he returned to day-to-day operations for the first time in years — as co-chief executive of an AI company.

Investor, then operator

Bezos personally backed AI search startup Perplexity — run by Aravind Srinivas — and robotics-foundation-model lab Physical Intelligence, among other AI bets, while Amazon poured billions into Anthropic. Then in November 2025 came Project Prometheus: an AI startup for engineering and manufacturing launched with $6.2 billion, with Bezos as co-CEO alongside scientist Vik Bajaj. By June 2026 Prometheus had raised a further $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation, describing its goal as an “artificial general engineer” for designing and building physical products. Bezos called returning to the CEO chair a “Type 2 fun” job — hard while it’s happening, worth it after.

A good kind of bubble

At Italian Tech Week in Turin in October 2025, Bezos gave the boom its most quoted framing: AI is in “a kind of industrial bubble,” one where investors fund good and bad ideas alike — but unlike financial bubbles, industrial ones leave society with the infrastructure and inventions of the winners. AI is real, he insisted, and its benefits to society will be “gigantic.” In 2026 he went further, telling audiences not to worry about the bubble at all. Critics enjoyed the spectacle of a man declaring a bubble and then investing $6.2 billion into it; Bezos would say that is precisely the point.