Jeff Bezos is totally cool with governments investigating Amazon

The world's richest man is spending a billion dollars a year helping to launch the human race into space. Next to that goal, the threat of an antitrust investigation into its trillion-dollar company is no big deal.

That was the impression Jeff Bezos gave at the Wired 25 summit in San Francisco Monday. In an unscheduled interview, Bezos enthused about his space startup Blue Origin – Amazon also said that he is in favor of the government turning up the heat on Amazon, which some observers say it is a monopoly that needs to be broken up.

"All broad institutions should be polled," said Bezos in an unusually subdued tone. "It makes sense to me." He added that he had been preparing his managers for an investigation.

"I preach this inside Amazon: 'This is going to happen, it's normal, do not take it personally,'" Bezos revealed. As to what should his executives do about it? "Conduct yourself in such a way that you are polled, you pass with flying colors."

This open-book approach is markedly different 20 years ago by Bezos' fellow Seattleite, Bill Gates, when Hey was the world's richest man facing down to a federal investigation.

After Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser helped drive Netscape's rival out of business, Gates continued to insist that his company needs no oversight. After a three-year antitrust case, a federal judge imposed a number of business restrictions on Microsoft that allowed competitors to flourish.

Last month, the European Union began its antitrust commissioner called an "initial investigation" into the Amazon's unrestrained third-party merchant data to inform its own e-commerce decisions.

There are antitrust rumblings in the U.S., too – and not just because Donald Trump has a beef with Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post. This summer, the Federal Trade Commission is one of the world's strongest proponents of the Amazon as a monopoly retailer and breaking it up, the way the U.S. government did with Standard Oil.

In the meantime, Bezos appears to be striking a conciliatory note. Earlier this month, Amazon announced it would pay all its U.S. employees a minimum wage of $ 15 – something activists such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had been calling for.

On the Wired Summit, Bezos insisted he did not like "winner-takes-all industries." That was in the context of Blue Origin, which he hopes will enable "thousands of companies" in the space business, including a new generation of entrepreneurs that he called "the [Mark] Zuckerbergs of space. "

But in retail, with its aggressively small profit margins, Amazon is becoming the winner that took all. Whether the future Zuckerbergs of e-commerce can still innovate may depend on whether or not they are able to find a way to break their stranglehold – and just how cool Bezos really is with those moves.