Jeff Bezos has come up with a surefire business tactic to secure his legacy for generations to come: break it, then buy it.
According to new reporting by the Financial Times, the Amazon founder’s AI lab, Project Prometheus, is raising tens of billions of dollars to snatch up companies reeling from market disruption due to AI.
Prior to a $6.2 billion fundraising round in late 2025, Prometheus was valued at about $30 billion. Investors, the FT reports, were drawn to the project by the prospect of using AI to “transform manufacturing and industry” — an effort that includes the creation of a new holding company to serve as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle” for the purpose of buying up manufacturers of everything from jet engines to computer chips.
Per sources cited by the FT, Prometheus is in talks with world-eaters ranging from banking exec Jamie Dimon to sovereign wealth funds like the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. It also has a significant boost from Robert Nelsen, founder of Arch Venture Partners, who foresees Prometheus becoming “one of the most important companies in the world.”
“Figuring out how to reinvent the physical world is a big challenge,” Nelsen said. “[But] the pace of innovation in AI right now is truly hard to understate.”
Bezos currently serves as co-chief executive in the venture, but he’s surrounded by a stable of fellow industry magnates like former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, as well as Microsoft and Google research lead researchers Cristian Bodnar and Nal Kalchbrenner.
If you wanted to build a monopoly out of the scraps from the AI bubble, now is certainly a promising moment. As private equity firm founder Orlando Bravo observed at the World Economic Forum earlier this year, recent AI-related software setups have set up a “huge buying opportunity” for investors throughout the market, in what could become a wave of hefty corporate takeovers.
While AI is new, Bezos has a historical analogue in John Pierpont Morgan. Though most of us today know the JPMorgan Chase as the largest investment bank in the US, it didn’t become the giant it is today by happenstance.
Starting in the 1890s, the bank tycoon went on a process of “morganization” by buying failing or distressed railroad firms, steel companies, and industrial manufacturers which couldn’t compete in an environment increasingly dominated by industrial monopolies. Using new professional management and corporate integration techniques to take advantage of the circular death-spiral, Morgan and his lackeys consolidated 67 percent of the country’s steel production under the umbrella of the largest company the world had ever seen, US Steel.
Morgan and Bezos are pursuing what sounds like a similar strategy: where the former exploited small panics and depressions to consolidate industrial firms under his control, Bezos is leveraging market volatility in the uncertain age of AI, a technology which Amazon is heavily invested in. A century later, the technology may have changed, but the playbook remains the same.
Like Morgan, of course, Morgan will have public sentiment to reckon with — a battle that could get ugly, since history cooked up the disparaging term “robber baron” to describe him and his ilk.
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