- Bezos Expeditions, home to the expansive world of Bezos investments.
- Bezos Expeditions
“Old-media printed daily newspaper” might register as the most stuffy business taking up residence in Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos‘s home of high-tech, high-concept investments.
The Journal’s Stu Woo in June 2012 cleverly took stock of Bezos as the latest businessman — in the company of Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Oracle founder Larry Ellison — to use his wealth to fund ambitious ideas. Some of these ideas are real businesses (Twitter) and some are the stuff of science fiction (Blue Origin).
It’s been more than a year since that trip through Bezos’s portfolio. So why not take another look? No better place to start than Bezos Expeditions.
The website is a trove. For starters, it’s named Bezos Expeditions, which literally tells you that you are embarking on a journey of many paths. (The backsplash for the home page is … a river of many paths.) It is a who’s who of Bezos’s investments, with many of the links carting readers off to those companies’ websites.
The first item in the navigation is Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 year clock, whose “vision was, and still is, to build a Clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years.” A 200-foot clock carved into a mountain that keeps time for a small slice of eternity is flat-out tough to beat in terms of ambition. Sliding down the navigation to something more pedestrian, there is the project to scan the ocean floor and recover the F-1 engine that carried the Apollo 11 capsule to outer space.
Another of Bezos’s headline-making investments is his space-travel startup Blue Origin, a SpaceX competitor that is working on a vehicle that will transport astronauts to the international space station.
Alongside the fantastical, there are some well-known tech startups. There’s Twitter, the aforementioned microblogging service, as well as Airbnb, the online accommodations-rental website. Bezos also invests in Uber, the app that connects people with transportation, and that human-resources-in-the-cloud company Workday.
The Washington Post isn’t even Bezos’s first investment in the media business. Earlier this year he led a $5 million investment in Henry Blodget’s Business Insider website.
Bezos loves platforms that connect people. There are platforms for education (TeachStreet,which was eventually acquired by Amazon), platforms for the medical field (ZocDoc), for neighborhoods (Nextdoor) and for paperless billing (Doxo).
(Doxo is not to be confused with Domo, a business platform for executive management.)
Some of Bezos’s investments make something out of nothing. There is Linden Lab, the maker of the Second Life virtual world, and Makerbot, the maker of desktop 3-D printers. But it’s not all tech: Bezos has also invested in a company called Glassybaby, which blows handmade glass cups to hold votive candles, and Sapphire Energy, which aims to replace petroleum with a renewable “green crude” fuel made out of algae.
Sometimes Bezos just gives his money away to a charitable investment (no, we are notsuggesting the Post). In 2011, he donated $15 million to his alma mater Princeton University (where he got a computer science degree) to create a neuroscience institute. (He gave the Princeton commencement in 2010.) He also gave $10 million to the Museum of History & Industry in Amazon’s hometown of Seattle in 2011.
Today, the Washington Post announced that it joins this diverse ecosystem. For Bezos, that’s only the edge of the rainforest.
