After selling billions of dollars worth of Amazon stock, company founder Jeff Bezos says his sights are now set far beyond Earth and that the future for humanity lies in the heavens.

The Amazon and Blue Origin founder, who is currently worth around A$368 billion, told audiences at Italian Tech Week 2025 that the next 20 years will mark a “golden age” for civilisation — one where humans will be happier, wealthier, and living beyond Earth while working far fewer hours.

Bezos brushed aside growing fears that artificial intelligence could end civilisation, arguing that every major technological leap in history has ultimately improved human life.

“Civilizational abundance comes from our inventions,” he said. “I don’t see how anybody can be discouraged who is alive right now. Technology is about to rocket humanity into an era of abundance.”

According to Bezos, AI and robotics will take over most forms of manual labour, leaving humans free to focus on creativity and exploration. He predicts that by 2045, millions of people could be living and working in space.

“In the next couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space,” he said. “That’s how fast this is going to accelerate.”

However, the billionaire did not address a key question — what will happen to the hundreds of millions of workers on Earth once robots take over their jobs, or where people will earn their income if machines are doing the work.

Bezos said future lunar and interplanetary work will largely be performed by autonomous machines.

“If you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we’ll send robots to do that. It will be much more cost-effective than sending humans,” he said.

He likened the rise of AI to the invention of the plough, saying both are tools that expand human potential rather than replace it.

“Ten thousand years ago, somebody invented the plough, and we all got richer. These tools increase our abundance — and that pattern will continue.”

While Bezos paints a picture of optimism, many scientists and technology leaders continue to warn that AI could bring mass unemployment, social disruption, or even pose existential risks — concerns fuelled by dystopian films and outspoken figures in Silicon Valley.

Among those sceptics is Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Bezos’s rival in the race to space. Musk’s company, SpaceX, plans to send unmanned rockets to Mars as early as next year, with the goal of landing humans on the red planet by 2028.

Bezos’s futuristic vision comes just days after he and his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott reduced their stakes in Amazon, the company that made them both billionaires.

New regulatory filings show Bezos’s ownership has fallen below 10% for the first time since founding the e-commerce giant in his Seattle garage nearly three decades ago.

Scott, who received a quarter of the couple’s Amazon shares in their 2019 divorce, has also been actively selling. Over the past year, she’s offloaded around 42% of her holdings — worth roughly US$12.6 billion — leaving her with 81.1 million shares, down 58 million from the same period last year, according to filings obtained by Bloomberg.