For nearly a quarter of a century, Elon Musk and his essential partner at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, viewed the United States government as El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.
Like machete-wielding treasure hunters, Musk and Shotwell hacked through a tangled jungle filled with lurking carnivores such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as bean counters and regulators. Over time, against long odds, the pair cleared a path for SpaceX to contracts at NASA and the US military. They sued when things did not go their way. They hollered about unfair playing fields. Most importantly, they delivered quality space products to the US government for less.
And so, after a while, SpaceX found El Dorado and a city of contracts.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is interviewed by Bret Baier of Fox News in Florida. (Screen grab via Fox News)
When Jeff Bezos sat down on Blue Origin’s Cape Canaveral factory floor for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this week, he laid out an unapologetic defense of free enterprise and wealth creation.
“Success is not villainy,” Bezos said.
The Amazon founder’s point was simple: building a massively successful enterprise isn’t something society should apologize for or view with suspicion, it’s the natural result of creating something people actually want.
“There’s nothing wrong with making unbelievably good chicken that people love,” Bezos said, referencing the growth of Raising Cane’s and why restaurant entrepreneurs deserve their wealth. “And it doesn’t make him a bad person.”
Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 and left Seattle for Miami in 2023, is currently the second richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $380 billion, according to Forbes.
Bezos and Amazon transformed the Seattle region. The company now employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in the Puget Sound region, divided between its primary headquarters in Seattle and its growing operational footprint in Bellevue.
And his recent comments come at a key moment for Washington state, where voters will decide on Initiative 645 — a high-profile ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s recently enacted high-earner tax and prohibiting future income taxes.
Bezos, along with other business leaders like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, have claimed that scapegoating wealthy entrepreneurs risks driving away innovation. Bezos argued that politicians targeting business leaders are misdiagnosing the problem, noting that while affordability and social challenges are real, heavy-handed government interventions often fail to solve them.
“If there’s a politician who’s picking villains and pointing fingers, that probably means they don’t have a solution,” Bezos said. He noted that executives who relied on blame-shifting inside his own companies “wouldn’t be in our company for long.”
Watch the full interview below where Bezos also discusses the impact of AI on jobs, the need to beat China in the race to the moon and orbital data centers in space. The portion of the interview where Bezos notes that “success is not villainy” starts in minute 16.
Amazon’s latest job cuts are mainly in its Stores business, which runs its main e-commerce site. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
Amazon laid off hundreds of employees this week in its Stores business, which runs the company’s main e-commerce site — the latest in a series of smaller job cuts in recent months.
Customer service, selling partner support and retail engineering teams were among those hit, according to internal Slack posts viewed by Business Insider and Reuters. Both outlets reported that fewer than 1,000 employees were impacted, citing people familiar with the matter.
The cuts came during Prime Big Deal Days, which ran Tuesday and Wednesday. The fall shopping event is one of the key annual milestones for Amazon’s retail team.
“We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday night. “We’ve adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities.”
Amazon didn’t provide further details on the changes. The statement continued, “As part of these changes, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees through their transition.”
The internal Slack posts suggested that affected employees were in the U.S., India and the UK, according to Business Insider. Amazon hasn’t yet filed a notice with Washington’s Employment Security Department, which is required when a company lays off 50 or more workers in the state.
Amazon’s online store sales rose 15% to $70.4 billion in the second quarter, and revenue from third-party seller services grew 16% to $46.8 billion. Together, they accounted for 58% of the company’s $200.6 billion in total revenue for the quarter.
The cuts follow Amazon’s elimination of about 30,000 corporate jobs in October 2025 and January 2026, the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. Amazon has made smaller cuts since then, including in its robotics and artificial general intelligence groups.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, addressed the earlier cuts in a Fox News interview that aired Wednesday. Bezos has predicted that AI will make the economy so productive that many people won’t need to work as much, making it hard for companies to hire.
Asked by Bret Baier how Amazon’s 30,000 job cuts fit with that view, he said the company was “in a very special position” after hiring so many people during the pandemic. “The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our headcount,” he said.
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