Expert Predicts What Jeff Bezos Would Invest In If He Started Over Today
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J. Arky
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Amber Barkley
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You might not know Jeff Bezos personally, but you know him as one of the key figures in the worlds of business, enterprise and tech. That’s because Bezos is the founder, executive chairman and former president and CEO of Amazon — not to mention one of the wealthiest people in the world. At the start of 2025, it was estimated that Bezos had a net worth in the range of $237 billion, according to Forbes, mostly due to Amazon’s rise to the top as the largest e-commerce company on the planet.
But Amazon and Bezos were not always in the upper tiers. It took decades for Bezos to build his empire and amass his wealth through a variety of strategies, innovations, partnerships and money moves. Were he to start from scratch in the present day, things might turn out the same way for Bezos, but how he gets there could look entirely different.
GOBankingRates asked Phil de la Motte, a financial advisor at Prospero Wealth, LLC, to predict what Jeff Bezos would invest in today if he had to start all over. Also, learn about the strategies Bezos uses to build wealth.
Focus on Consumers
When Bezos started Amazon, his focus was consumers, de la Motte said.
“It wasn’t until later that AWS began serving corporate customers,” he added. “He would do the same today: Focus on the consumer market. It’s massive.”
Applied Innovation
According to de la Motte, Bezos applied an innovation that was brilliant but had unclear value — the internet — to a useful and practical outcome for consumers: online shopping.
“Today, the closest thing we have to the invention of the internet is AI, so I suspect he would use AI to address consumer challenges,” de la Motte added.
Long Tail Problems
“The magic of the internet was its ability to allow people to shop online and communicate with a single global vendor with a massive inventory, rather than going to their local bookshop with limited inventory,” de la Motte explained.
He said the ability to ship products like books at low cost was “merely the grease on the skids for that to happen, but it was never the end goal. Right from the beginning, Bezos was already thinking much bigger.
“This is often called ‘The Long Tail,’ and it describes how the internet transformed retail by making it economically viable to offer an infinite selection of items, including niche products that would never justify shelf space in a physical store,” continued de la Motte.
He also posed the question that Bezos might be asking: What is the long tail problem that AI can solve for consumers?
Real-World Problems
“The magic of Bezos was that he took new technology but relentlessly applied it to solve real-world problems the average person experienced,” de la Motte said. “So, he likely would be focusing on using AI to solve real-world practical solutions but in a very narrow, practical sense to cross the chasm.”
Then, de la Motte said, Bezos would likely expand that to address “larger and larger sets of needs, building on what came before. … ‘If I can use AI to fix problem A, then I can use that same organizational expertise to fix problems B, C and D…’
“AI holds great power but hasn’t yet become an evident, easy-to-use solution for the average low-tech consumer. I sense that there are consumer needs Bezos would target, where there is great complexity that hampers the average consumer’s success.”
Conclusion
From de la Motte’s point of view, Bezos is a builder, not an investor. “Like Musk or Gates, I think he would want to build something new and be an integral, hands-on part of it. He’s not an ‘investor’ like [Warren] Buffett, per se.”
Of course, Bezos at 30 years old and Bezos today might approach things differently, de la Motte pointed out. “I’m not sure he would be interested in the hard work and risk it took to do another startup like Amazon. He has the funds to start much bigger projects now.”
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