Jeff Bezos Once Told Employees, 'I Predict One Day Amazon Will Fail. Amazon Will Go Bankrupt' — But His Goal Was To 'Try And Delay' The Inevitable - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

At most companies, predicting failure would get you fired. At Amazon AMZN, it came straight from the founder.

In 2018, Jeff Bezos stood before employees during an all-hands meeting and delivered the kind of statement you don't expect from a CEO whose company was making billions: "Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt."

The comment, first reported by CNBC from a recorded video of the meeting, wasn't offhand. It was Bezos responding directly to a question about what Amazon had learned from the collapse of legacy retailers like Sears. His answer was blunt: big companies don't live forever—and the clock's always ticking.

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He told employees the real danger isn't outside competition. It's losing focus. "If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end," he said. "We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible."

At the time, Amazon was doing anything but failing. It was growing faster than ever. Alexa was in millions of homes. Amazon Web Services was dominating cloud. Retail was scaling globally. Bezos, still CEO then, had no financial reason to sound the alarm—just a long memory and a clear view of what happens when companies start believing they're bulletproof.

He stepped down as CEO in July 2021, handing the reins to Andy Jassy, but the message hasn't aged. In fact, it's only become more relevant. Amazon pulled in $638 billion in net sales in 2024 and generated nearly $60 billion in profit. From the outside, it looks unstoppable. Internally, Bezos knew better.

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And he wasn't wrong to bring it up.

A 2023 McKinsey study found that the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it's under 18. The firm predicted that by 2027, 75% of the companies on the list will be gone—acquired, merged, or bankrupt. Size doesn't guarantee survival. In fact, it can make you slower, more bloated, more fragile.

Bezos didn't suggest Amazon was collapsing. He reminded everyone it could. The only way to push back the clock, in his view, was to keep the company focused on customers and paranoid about irrelevance.

It's a rare kind of leadership that warns of failure at the peak of success. But maybe that's the only reason Amazon's still beating the odds.

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