ALL BIG INSTITUTIONS of any kind will and should be examined, scrutinized, and inspected. Governments should be inspected. Government institutions, big educational institutions, big nonprofits, big companies—they’re going to get scrutiny. It’s not personal. It’s what we as a society want to have happen, and I remind people internally not to take scrutiny of Amazon personally. That will lead to a lot of wasted energy. This scrutiny is just normal. It’s actually healthy and good. We want to live in a society where people are worried about big institutions.

I think we are so inventive that—whatever regulations are promulgated or however they work—they won’t stop us from serving customers. Under all kinds of regulatory frameworks that I can imagine, customers are still going to want low prices. They’re still going to want fast delivery. They’re still going to want big selection. These are so fundamental and what we do. I would also say that it’s really important that politicians and others understand the value big companies bring in and not demonize or vilify business in general or especially big companies, and for the simple reason that there are certain things that only big companies can do. I’ve seen this throughout Amazon’s journey. I know what Amazon could do when we were ten people, and I know what we could do when we were one thousand people, and I know what we could do when we were ten thousand, and I know what we can do today when we’re over half a million.

Let me give you a more vivid example. I love garage entrepreneurs and invest in a lot of their companies. I know many of them. But nobody in their garage is going to build an all-carbon-fiber, fuel-efficient Boeing 787. It’s not going to happen. You need Boeing to do that. If you like your smartphone, you need Apple to do that; you need Samsung to do that. These are things that well-functioning entrepreneurial capitalism does very well. And there are market failures that no one takes care of, and you look to philanthropy and government to take care of them. So you need different models for different things. But definitely, this world would be worse off without, for example, Boeing, Apple, and Samsung.