Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021 but remains the company’s Executive Chair and one of its largest individual shareholders, told Fortune in a recent interview that Amazon’s custom AI chip business is “lining up to be our next pillar” — placing it alongside Marketplace, Prime, and AWS as one of the core, durable businesses underpinning the company’s future growth, rather than a side project. The comment lines up with figures Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has separately disclosed this year: the company’s custom Trainium and Inferentia AI chip lines now carry an annual revenue run rate exceeding $25 billion, growing at triple-digit percentage rates.
Bezos’s comments came alongside a new SEC filing disclosing his intent to sell approximately 15 million Amazon shares, a stake worth roughly $4.07 billion. The planned sale falls under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan Bezos adopted on November 14, 2025 — a pre-scheduled selling arrangement executives commonly use specifically to avoid any appearance of trading on non-public information, since the sale terms are locked in well in advance rather than decided in response to any particular news event. Amazon’s stock rally cooled somewhat in after-hours trading following news of the planned sale, a common short-term market reaction to any large insider stock sale regardless of the underlying reason behind it.
A 2018 Warning Resurfaces at an Unlikely Moment
The stock-sale news broke in the same stretch as a 2018 quote from Bezos resurfacing widely online: “Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt.” The quote recirculated specifically because of the contrast it now presents — Amazon, as of this year, ranks as the largest company by revenue on the Fortune Global 500, a striking gap between Bezos’s own stated humility about the company’s long-term durability in 2018 and its actual current scale nearly a decade later.
A New, Unrelated Interest: English Soccer
Separately from his Amazon-related activity, Bezos has reportedly been in discussions to join a bid, led by a group connected to the son-in-law of Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, to acquire a minority stake in Premier League club Liverpool FC — part of a broader, ongoing wave of American billionaires investing in English soccer clubs in recent years.
Blue Origin, Bezos’s Other Company, Has Its Own Real Setbacks to Manage
Away from Amazon, Bezos’s space company Blue Origin has spent 2026 working through a genuine technical setback of its own. New Glenn, Blue Origin’s orbital rocket, reached orbit successfully on its very first launch in January, but its booster stage exploded while attempting to land on a drone ship at sea. An FAA-mandated investigation identified seven corrective actions Blue Origin needed to take before flying again, and the rocket’s second launch — originally targeted for “late spring” — has since slipped to at least mid-August 2026. The stakes for getting New Glenn right are real and immediate: Amazon itself plans to use the rocket for 12 confirmed Project Kuiper satellite launches (with options for 15 more), and NASA has separately contracted Blue Origin to build a second lunar lander for its Artemis program, meaning New Glenn’s reliability affects both of Bezos’s own major ventures at once, not just Blue Origin in isolation.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Bezos’s “next pillar” framing for Amazon’s chip business is a useful signal for Philippine AI startups evaluating cloud infrastructure providers: Amazon’s own leadership is treating custom silicon as core, long-term strategic infrastructure rather than an experimental side bet, which suggests continued heavy investment and improving availability of Trainium and Inferentia-based compute as a genuine lower-cost alternative to Nvidia GPUs over time. His scheduled stock sale is also a useful, low-drama example of sound personal-finance discipline for any Philippine founder who eventually holds significant equity in their own company: a pre-committed, publicly disclosed selling plan set well in advance is a notably cleaner way to diversify personal wealth out of a concentrated position than ad hoc selling decisions made in reaction to short-term stock price movements or news cycles. Blue Origin’s New Glenn setback is a parallel reminder for Philippine hardware and deep-tech founders specifically: even a company backed by one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, with a successful first orbital launch already behind it, can still face a real multi-month delay and a formal regulatory investigation after a single failed landing attempt — hardware timelines slip for genuinely well-resourced teams too, not just under-capitalized ones. Founders building anything in aerospace, robotics, or other hardware categories with a real physical failure mode should budget schedule and investor-communication buffers accordingly, treating a public, credible setback disclosed honestly — as Blue Origin has done here, publishing its own corrective-action findings rather than staying silent — as the standard to aim for rather than something to hide.
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