For most people, retirement means fewer meetings, fewer emails, and maybe finally getting through a morning without checking a calendar. For Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, it apparently means working from nine to seven while splitting his time between rockets and the company he built.
The New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin suggested that Bezos had put “all his eggs in the space basket,” pointing to his massive investment in Blue Origin.
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“What do you mean put all my eggs in the space basket?” Bezos asked. Sorkin explained that he meant Bezos had a huge investment in space.
“Yes, but it’s not all my eggs. Not all of them,” Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024. “I still have a huge investment in Amazon. I still spend a lot of time there too. I’ve actually never worked harder.”
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Retirement Wasn’t Exactly the Plan
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, handing the job to Andy Jassy and becoming executive chair. Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000, has since taken up much of his attention.
But leaving the CEO role clearly didn’t mean walking away from Amazon.
Bezos had a surprisingly self-deprecating description for his attempt at retirement.
“This retirement thing, I’ve turned out to be extremely lame at,” he said. He explained that he wakes up each morning and spends the day in meetings from roughly 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., followed by reading documents.
Most of that time is devoted to Blue Origin, but “quite a bit of it is still Amazon too.”
For someone who stepped away from running one of the world’s biggest companies, that’s a pretty serious schedule.
The Space Bet Is Massive
There’s little question that Blue Origin is a major personal project.
Bezos founded the company more than two decades ago and has committed substantial wealth to its efforts to develop orbital rockets, lunar technology, and other space systems.
Since the 2024 interview, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has reached orbit, successfully landed a booster, and later completed its first booster reuse before suffering a major setback during a May 2026 test.
Still, Bezos’ response made one thing clear—space hasn’t replaced Amazon.
He continues to hold a huge investment in the company and remains involved in its business, even without running its day-to-day operations.
One CEO Job Was Apparently Enough
The more interesting part of Bezos’ comments isn’t simply that he works a lot. It’s that stepping down as CEO seems to have given him the freedom to pursue several enormous projects at once.
Amazon remains a major investment. Blue Origin gets most of his working hours. And retirement, by his own description, hasn’t involved much slowing down.
For someone who has already made enough money to spend the rest of his life doing absolutely nothing, Bezos seems to have chosen the opposite.
He didn’t retire so much as give himself permission to pick which giant problem he wanted to work on next.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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