Billionaires don't just accumulate wealth; they build systems designed for long-term dominance.
For Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, his playbook for creating the world's first trillion-dollar company — and tackling ventures like The Washington Post and Blue Origin — comes down to two strategic principles, one borrowed from Warren Buffett and the other that he developed.
Speaking at the Economic Club's Milestone Celebration in 2018, Bezos detailed the core tenets that inform his approach to business, finance and philosophy.
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Bezos said that a company's success shouldn't be judged by short-term stock performance, echoing a famous quote by Buffett mentor Benjamin Graham.
"In the short run, the stock market is a voting machine, in the long run, it's a weighing machine," he said. "And what you need to do is operate your company in such a way knowing that it will be weighed one day and just let it be weighed, never spend any time thinking about the stock price."
Even when Amazon's stock price had surged by 70% in 2018, Bezos said that he preferred to focus on building intrinsic long-term value rather than worrying about daily fluctuations and sentiment.
Bezos believes a senior executive's job is to make a small number of high-quality, high-impact decisions, not thousands of low-level ones.
"Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes three good decisions a year," Bezos said. "And so, you know, so I really believe that."
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To ensure those key decisions are the best they can be, Bezos stressed the importance of being well-rested. He noted that even though he could gain more time by sleeping less than eight hours, the resulting drop in decision quality would immediately harm the business.
"I need eight hours of sleep," he said. "I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better, all these things."
Of course, the admiration goes both ways. Although Buffett didn't invest in Amazon early on, he's never underestimated Bezos' business acumen.
"There are certainly people you do not want to try to beat at their own game, and certainly Jeff Bezos would be No. 1," Buffett said during a 2016 CNBC interview.
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Bezos said all of his ventures, including Amazon, Blue Origin and now the Day One Foundation, started small. He instills a Day One mentality in his large enterprises, treating them with the "heart and spirit of a small one."
The Day One Foundation is Bezos' $2 billion charitable fund focused on fighting homelessness and providing quality education.
"All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart," he said. "And that's what we'll do with the Day One Foundation, too. It's part of that Day One mentality."
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