Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and renowned investor Warren Buffett are among the most successful business elites today. While their paths to wealth may have been different, Bezos has stated that he has learned important lessons from observing Buffett’s journey. These lessons have shaped the way he leads Amazon.
According to a report from Gobankingrate financial website on September 21, 2025, during an interview with the Washington Economic Club in 2018, Bezos shared two key transformative experiences he learned from Buffett and applied to managing Amazon.
Despite Amazon’s stock price rising by 70% within a year, Bezos emphasized that he does not use the stock market as the sole measure of the company’s success.
“Warren Buffett often quotes Benjamin Graham’s saying: ‘In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine,'” Bezos said. “What you need to do is operate your company in a way that knows it will be weighed someday, and then let it be weighed.” He continued, “Never spend time thinking about daily stock prices. I don’t do that.”
Bezos highlighted the importance of ample rest in making high-impact decisions.
“As an executive, your job is to make a few high-quality decisions,” he said. “Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”
He pointed out that if he gets less than eight hours of sleep each night, he may have more time to make decisions but the quality of those decisions could suffer.
“If I make three good decisions every day, that’s enough,” he said. “And those decisions should be of the highest possible quality.”
“Warren Buffett says if he makes three good decisions in a year, he’s a good person,” Bezos continued. “I truly believe that.”
In an interview, Bezos mentioned that he ensures eight hours of sleep every night, maintains a regular exercise routine, and holds the first meeting with employees at 10 a.m. each morning. By 5 p.m., he is too exhausted to make major decisions. He reads newspapers in the morning and has breakfast with his children before they go to school.
On Bezos, Buffett has said, “Jeff made a profound impression on me early on. I never thought he would achieve this level of success.”
“Jeff’s and others’ extraordinary achievements lie in the fact that he has succeeded in two seemingly unrelated industries (e-commerce and cloud computing) almost simultaneously. I have never seen anyone able to develop two truly significant industries at the same time and truly become a master operator in both,” Buffett said.