| Hi folks, it's Brad. Jeff Bezos's sprawling ranch in West Texas, about 40 miles northeast of the town of Van Horn, is more than just the launch site for his audacious trip into space, planned for July 20. Since Bezos and his lawyers started secretively buying parcels of ranch land there about 20 years ago, it's also been a private retreat—a place where he can pursue his personal interests and most expensive hobbies largely out of sight. For example, there's a domed high-powered telescope on the property, where Bezos and his family can peer at the stars on cloudless Texas nights. He's got a collection of dune buggies, flat-bed trucks and Rivian electric vehicles that he often drives, presumably over the objections of advisers who want to keep Amazon.com Inc.'s valuable founder safely in the back seat. Inside one of the mountains in the nearby Sierra Diablo range, Bezos is spending tens of millions of dollars to build the 10,000 Year Clock—a mechanical monument that will never play the same musical chime twice and whose cuckoo will emerge once a millennium. The ranch is also a private resort. There's a pool, a firepit and an outdoor saloon that the family calls Parpie's Bar, after the nickname all the grandkids call Bezos's father, Mike Bezos. Naturally, the bar is stocked with expensive and rare bottles of whisky and tequila. When I was reporting my new book, Amazon Unbound, engineers at Blue Origin, Bezos's private space company, said that when Bezos raises a glass with colleagues and friends, he often toasts, "to adventure and fellowship." I thought about those words last week, when Bezos announced, via a meticulously produced video on his Instagram account, that he would be aboard the first crewed launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, along with his younger brother Mark. "I wanted to go on this flight because it's a thing I've wanted to do all my life," Bezos intones in the video. "It's an adventure. It's a big deal for me." The word "adventure" also appears in the caption to the video. And Mark, a longtime adviser to Blue Origin, added, "What a remarkable opportunity, not only to have this adventure, but to do it with my best friend." When Bezos announced in February that he was leaving the CEO job at Amazon but remaining executive chairman, observers wondered how significant his break would be with the iconic and controversial tech giant that he founded. The conventional wisdom was that Bezos wasn't going to go that far. He promised he would remain involved with the company, focusing "his energies and attention on new products and early initiatives." At first, I presumed that he simply wanted to hand over the unglamourous public aspects of the top job—such as testifying in front of Congress—to his longtime deputy, Andy Jassy. But the recent news of his space trip and all this talk of adventure has me rethinking Bezos's ongoing relationship with Amazon. Adventure has always been on the docket; in 2013, he and his family spent three weeks aboard a salvage ship on the Atlantic Ocean to recover an F-1 rocket engine that powered one of NASA's historic Apollo missions to the moon. In 2018, he posted a video to Twitter of himself dogsledding above the Arctic Circle. The requirements of being Amazon CEO—and the optics of enjoying himself too much, considering the plight of Amazon's low-wage workforce—probably limited how many escapades Bezos could have in plain sight. In Amazon Unbound, for example, I reported that Bezos has been taking helicopter flying lessons and recently bought a brand-new Bell 49 helicopter. I also reported that he has commissioned a grand 417-feet-long three-mast schooner from the Dutch luxury shipbuilder OceanCo, which will soon be one of the largest sailing yachts in existence. All that had to be done in secret. Bezos was minimizing both the public relations risks, and the real ones to his safety and well-being—which might have spooked Amazon's investors. Now that he's about to hand over the reins as CEO, he's clearly ready to embrace some more visible pleasures and dangers. The New Shepard has been meticulously tested, of course, and there's an abort system that will pop the crew capsule off the rocket engine if anything goes wrong. But still: Bezos is about to strap himself atop a rocket powered by a combustible mixture of liquid oxygen and hydrogen. If he was still CEO, investors would be fretting about that. Now they have something else to worry about—that Bezos is moving on. After making shareholders extremely rich, Bezos's suborbital voyage could inaugurate a new phase for the world's richest man, where running one of the largest tech companies in the world takes a backseat to outsized adventure. —Brad Stone | 
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