Most people struggle to plan next year’s vacation. Amazon an d Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos helped build a clock designed to outlive entire civilizations.
During an appearance on the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in 2023, Bezos explained why he spent roughly $42 million helping fund the 10,000-Year Clock, a massive mechanical timepiece hidden inside a mountain in West Texas.
“The 10,000-year clock is an idea conceived by brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the ’80s,” Bezos said. “The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking.”
Unlike an ordinary clock, this one moves at a pace almost impossible to imagine.
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Bezos described the project as “a physical clock of monumental scale,” standing about 500 feet tall inside a mountain.
Conceptually, he said, “it ticks once a year, it chimes once every a hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out once every a thousand years.”
The clock is entirely mechanical and designed to operate for 10,000 years without human intervention, using carefully selected materials built to withstand the passage of time.
Its remote location is intentional.
“It’s in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage,” Bezos said on the podcast.
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Thinking Beyond the Next Quarter
For Bezos, the clock isn’t really about keeping time.
It’s about changing how people think about it.
He hopes the project eventually becomes something larger than a monument—a reminder that meaningful ideas often unfold over generations rather than news cycles or quarterly earnings reports.
Over hundreds of years, Bezos said, he hopes the clock develops “the patina of age” and encourages humanity to extend its thinking far beyond a single lifetime.
That philosophy has shaped much of his career, from Amazon’s emphasis on long-term investment to Blue Origin’s decades-long mission of lowering the cost of space travel.
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Playing the Long Game
That same long-term mindset is increasingly shaping the next wave of technology.
Immersed built a full-stack remote productivity platform — combining AR/VR software, an AI assistant, and its own headset — with partners including Meta, Samsung and Qualcomm, and investors can currently buy in at $0.79 per share.
The 10,000-Year Clock won’t finish its first millennium for generations. But that’s exactly the point.
Bezos didn’t help build it to tell people what time it is today. He built it to ask a much harder question: What decisions would people make differently if they were thinking 10,000 years ahead instead of 10?
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