You're welcome.
From GeekWire:
Jeff Bezos was drawn to focus a large portion of his new $2 billion philanthropic foundation on preschool education because of the “powerful compounding effect” that comes from getting kids started with with the right education, the Amazon founder and CEO told an audience in Washington, D.C., on Thursday night.
“There’s no doubt, we know for a fact, that if a kid falls behind, it’s really, really hard to catch up, and if you can give somebody a leg up when they are 2, 3, or 4 years old, by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they’re much less likely to fall behind,” Bezos said at The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. “The money spent there is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades.”
The new Day One Fund, announced by Bezos via Twitter on Thursday morning, is starting with an initial $2 billion endowment, but he confirmed on stage that he expects to ultimately provide additional funding to the organization. The initiative will also fund existing programs to help homeless families, but Bezos made it clear that he will be more directly involved in the preschool initiative.
“I’m very excited about that because I’m going to operate that,” he said. “That’s going to be an operating nonprofit. I’m going to hire an executive team. There’s going to be leadership team. We’re going to operate these schools and we’re going to put them in low-income neighborhoods.”
Bezos was less forthcoming about where Amazon will put its second headquarters, despite efforts by interviewer David Rubenstein to pin him down on the location of the $5 billion project known as HQ2. “We will announce a decision before the end of this year. We’ve made tremendous progress. The team is working their butts off on it and we will get there,” he said.
As the crowd jokingly jeered, Bezos responded with a grin, “No, no. Hey, be nice. Come on.”
He also talked about the turnaround of the Washington Post, which he purchased for $250 million in 2013. Without calling out President Trump by name, Bezos addressed his frequent criticism of the press.
“If you’re the President of the United States or a governor of a state or whatever, you don’t take that job thinking you’re not going to get scrutinized,” he said. “You’re going to get scrutinized and it’s healthy. What the president should say is, this is right, this is good. I’m glad I’m being scrutinized. And that would be so secure and confident. But it’s really dangerous to demonize the media.”
Bezos continued, “It’s dangerous to call the media low-lifes. It’s dangerous to say that they’re the enemy of the people. We live in a society where it’s not just the laws of the land that protect us. We do have freedom of press. It’s in the Constitution. But it’s also the social norms that protect us. It works because we believe those words on that piece of paper, and every time you attack that, you’re it eroding a little bit around the edges.”
The conversation started with a discussion of Amazon’s market value, and Bezos’ status as the world’s wealthiest person, a title he claimed from his neighbor, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Watch the full video below, via the archived CNBC live stream, and continue reading for extended excerpts....MORE
