Jeff Bezos Claims Amazon Will Eventually Die, May Be Within 5 Years

Amazon is one of the oldest companies still existing since the early days of the Internet. It’s just recently celebrated its 25-year birthday, originally founded all the way back to 5th July 1994. In that span of time, the company has grown dramatically from a simple online bookstore to one of the largest companies on the planet and a global e-commercial giant.

The Inevitability

In 25 years of operation, Amazon began from quite a modest start to one of the most valuable companies in the world. And Jeff Bezos benefitted greatly from the phenomenal growth, becoming the richest man alive even after the complex and expensive settlements of his recent divorce.

But unlike most CEOs who would stop at nothing to keep their company alive for perpetuity, Bezos seems to be quite certain that it would eventually die out. Though it will definitely not happen any time soon, it will. This morbid idea has been something that Bezos toyed over for the last few years.

The Three Times He Heralded Amazon's Fall

To be specific, on three occasions he had stressed the inevitable doom of the company. In 2013, during an interview on ’60 Minutes’, he contemplated how companies often have a short life-span and Amazon “will be disrupted one day.” Although this idea can scare quite a lot of executives, Bezos seems to be at peace with it.

Indeed, there are no companies that could actually survive the test of time forever. There are companies that are “the shiniest and most important” of its time, however, its time will soon fade and that company will eventually have to give its place to another. Maybe not in a couple of years, but decades.

The second time he mentioned the death of Amazon was not in a semi-informal event, instead, it was directly to stakeholders in a letter. In it, he wrote about the decline and eventual ‘death’ of the company: 

He followed up by musing how the company might harvest the fruits of Day 2 for decades, but its death will still come eventually.

And the third time, to all Amazon staffs. In his speech, he addressed the common misconception that Amazon is “too big to fail”. Rebuking the idea, he directly said: “I predict one day Amazon will fail.”

Using historical examples, he cited how most companies’ lifespan in history lasts about 30 or so years, rarely do they exceed the hundred or further mark. That is why he thought Amazon will eventually go bankrupt.

Delay the End

But for those who think that he’s a defeatist, far from it, actually. Unlike others who should be depressed about such prospect, Bezos seems to be motivated by the inevitable downfall of probably his life’s greatest work. His job, according to him, is to delay the end from happening for as long as possible.

But now that Amazon has turned 25, it is approaching rapidly the 30-year average mark that he had given an atypical company’s lifespan. Yet fortunate enough, Amazon is still growing with no signs of degradation just yet.

His greatest hope, according to him, is that he would die before he could witness the company falls for the last time.