“What? Did you really think I was going to sit back and enjoy retirement while all the other billionaire supervillains replace the need for humankind by themselves?” -Bezos, grinning at reporters.

Apparently one more viral TMZ clip of him dancing in Venice was all it took, because Jeffrey Preston Bezos (yes, I checked… that’s really his middle name) has decided he’s done spectating. The man is stepping back into the ring for his first real operating role since leaving Amazon… and he’s coming in hot as the new co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus. The company’s launching with a light and breezy $6.2 billion in funding (because if there’s one thing we know Bezos has got, it’s unlimited funding).

Bezos hasn’t taken a real operating role since leaving Amazon in 2021, but apparently the gym selfies and space joyrides finally got old. So now Jeffrey (returning to the grind, minus the whole “world’s richest man” asterisk) has decided it’s time to dive back into the trenches and build an AI company from scratch.

(Source: Forbes)

And obviously, this time, he’s not sitting in a garage with a cardboard sign by himself. Tagging in beside him as co-chief executive is Vik Bajaj, a physicist-chemist hybrid who used to help Sergey Brin cook up actual revolutionary projects at Google X. This man helped build self-driving cars, drone fleets, and biomedical labs… so pairing him with Bezos feels only fitting.

Project Prometheus is Bezos’ attempt to finally build the do-everything AI lab he’s been sketching in his notebook for years. Instead of training chatbots to ace the LSAT, this thing is aiming at AI that engineers real hardware… rockets, chips, spacecraft, robots, the big-boy toys.

And get this… Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers stolen from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and probably Anthropic too, though they’re too polite to say it. These people left cushy FAANG labs for Bezos’ new rocket-powered skunkworks project. Either Bezos is paying stupid money… or he promised them they could design AI that builds alien megastructures. Honestly, both feel plausible.

Now is Bezos’ moment because AI is finally colliding with the industries he’s obsessed with… rockets, machines, real engineering. Altman is constructing the world’s biggest AI power grid, Meta is reinventing open-source in real time, and Google is watching its PhDs slip out the side door. Bezos obviously spotted the inflection point. Prometheus is his move to sit at the center of the breakthroughs that actually build things.

A lot of AI companies talk about “AI for science.” Prometheus is hiring the people who actually wrote those papers and giving them $6.2 billion to go nuts. This is Bezos’ version of “fine, I’ll do it myself.” And if you squint, you can already see the endgame forming: Blue Origin rockets built by Prometheus-designed AI, assembled by Prometheus-designed robots, controlled by Prometheus-designed systems. It’s Bezos’ master plan to out-Musk Elon without ever tweeting about it.

Needless to say, Project Prometheus is the largest stealth startup funding drop since OpenAI went full Hydra. And with Bezos actually stepping into the operator role again… things are about to get really interesting.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon, Google, and Meta as mentioned in the article.