Ever since Jeff Bezos and his wife founded Amazon in his garage back in 1994, turning it from a simple online bookseller into one of the world’s biggest businesses, people have been looking to the entrepreneur and wondering what he might take on next.
They got one answer to that question in the form of Blue Origin, a spaceflight startup that Bezos founded in Sept. 2000. Bezos wouldn’t step down from his role as Amazon CEO until 2021, but he has remained involved in Blue Origin since its founding. While Blue Origin is not currently profitable, it is hard at work on some big goals, and it did reach orbit for the first time with its New Glenn rocket in January 2025.
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Bezos also co-founded Altos Labs, a biotechnology company, in 2021 with Yuri Milner, the founder of Mail.ru. The company focuses on improving human longevity, as it says in its mission statement on its website: “Our mission is to restore cell health and resilience through cell rejuvenation to reverse disease, injury, and the disabilities that can occur throughout life.”
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Bezos’ latest interest falls within the automotive sphere, and he is doing some new things one journalist has already called “unlike any new vehicle I’ve ever seen, not just in my decade as a car journalist, but in my entire lifetime.”
Jeff Bezos shows off a sunny smile — and his latest investment might explain why.
Image source: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Innovative auto company wants to reinvent the electric vehicle
What if you could walk into your driveway, snap your fingers, and convert your vehicle to fit your needs? For moving day, you could reassemble it into a pickup truck, or for a hot date, make it into a sleek convertible.
This sounds like the plot of an episode of “Transformers,” but it’s actually a concept the folks at Michigan-based startup Slate Auto want to bring to life in the form of an affordable EV.
To promote its upcoming vehicles, Slate recently pulled a stunt where it wrapped one of its EVs in an ad for a fake company called Rockabye Rides. The sides of the vehicle are emblazoned with the word “CryShare,” and the top rack holds six baby carriers. The slogan, “When the baby drives you crazy, we drive them to sleep,” indicated a service that likely sounds like heaven to the exhausted parents of a newborn.
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Going to the website shown on the car, RockabyeRides, leads to a countdown page for Slate’s April 24 launch event at Long Beach Airport and a quote that says “Slate is a truck that changes everything.”
Images of Slate’s truck have popped up in various places on social media, and the amazing thing is that every one looks like a different vehicle. Some look like pickup trucks, while others look like crossovers.
Bezos is not the only big backer on Slate. CEO of Guggenheim Partners and controlling owner of the LA Dodgers Mark Walter is also on board, as is Thomas Tull, lead investor of Re:Build Manufacturing. A public filing from 2023 shows that Slate raised at least $111 million in a Series A funding round that year.
The EV market needs more affordable options
Slate is seizing the market at a key time, when many potential EV buyers feel sour about Tesla and want more affordable options. The Nissan Leaf is currently the least expensive EV on the market at $29,280 base price, according to Car & Driver.
While Elon Musk has made big promises about Tesla’s own budget EV, Tesla announced a few days ago that E41 (as it’s currently codenamed) would be pushed back again, with production starting anywhere from the third quarter of 2025 to as far out as 2026.
Tesla was also on track to release a $25,000 EV in 2025, but Musk chose to scrap those plans and work on his Cybercab project instead, despite internal reports at Tesla that the ambitious self-driving vehicle “would never be profitable.”
Related: Tesla Cybertruck owners are going to hate Tesla’s latest move
