It seems to me that Bezos could solve this problem on his own, but maybe he’s tired of financing it all himself if he can find Other Peoples’ Money.
It seems to me that Bezos could solve this problem on his own, but maybe he’s tired of financing it all himself if he can find Other Peoples’ Money.
OPM is the best kind of M.
Branson is a hobbyist
Bezos a dilettante
Musk an entrepreneur and businessman
and NASA is a RICO case waiting to happen
In line with other recent comments on these pages re Musk I would tweak your Musk description slightly:
“Musk an engineer, entrepreneur and businessman”
All of them have been entrepreneurs and businessmen, but two of them got into the space domain in ways other than that.
Where space is concerned, Branson was a hobbyist. Now, he’s just a guy with an airline and a private island and who came within a trice of losing all of that. I think he’s going to keep all of his appendages completely inside the ride from here on out.
Where space is concerned, Bezos started as a hobbyist, graduated to being a dilettante and is only now beginning to act like an actual entrepreneur and businessman. The tell is that he seems to be looking for investors.
Where space is concerned, Musk has always been as serious as a heart attack. The last time Musk did anything hobby-like was learning to code as a schoolboy. After he discovered that code can be sold, he switched to entrepreneur and businessman mode and has never deviated from that.
As potential government-origin RICO cases go, NASA stands well back in a very long line.
By 2010 standards, Blue Origin progress has been breathtaking. By 2026 standards, it is like watching grass grow. Bezos seems focused somewhere else. To become fiscally viable, they have to increase their cadence greatly and urgently. The $64 question is whether more money is sufficient to do that. The SpaceX IPO is going to soak up a lot of money, some that might have seen Blue Origin as an opportunity.
SpaceX has ninja-ed Blue Origin so many times in so many ways I doubt Musk bothers to keep track anymore.
MCS “Bezos seems focused somewhere else.”
More like his wife has many other uses for his money.
She also has “somewhere else” for him to focus. I always had that problem too,
Bezos had to pay a reported $35 billion to divorce his first wife in favor of his new wife. Sorry, but I have a very hard time believing she (wife #2) was worth it. Eddie Murphy has some relevant things to say about this back in the day. Bezos should’ve listened to Eddie. So should’ve Bill Gates and a lot of other men.
https://youtu.be/XzvIl6jCbJs?si=FGui18TXp9DBjffo
Some women have what can reasonably be described as a Magic Pussy. According to Marc Antony, this was Cleopatra’s superpower.
It’s just a very different org culture than SpaceX, and frankly, a much less effective one. And from what Blue Origin employees say, it has not improved much under Dave Limp.
Despite all that, I think we must still hope that they can find a way to get their architectures into successful operation. For now, they are the only other American (indeed, Western) player at this level.
If you own 100% of a company you can’t have “somepeople” benefit financially when the company is allocated public monies by “somepeople”
They want “their fair share of the pork”
Oh. There’s that trigger phrase again: “fair share”.
Should always be spelt “fare share”….
To be a serious competitor in the ODC space you need a lot more cash than Bezos can safely remove from Amazon each year without crashing the stock. Am I right?
Most likely so. The markets already see orbital AI data centers (OAIDCs) as a very big deal and the net worths of major announced and potential players have ascended as a result. Musk, of course, is in a class by himself. But Larry Page and Sergei Brin of Google/Alphabet have just become the second and third men to ever have personal net worths of over $300 billion. A lot of the recent runup in both of their fortunes has to be due to news that Musk and Google are working out a deal about OAIDCs in particular. But Google also owns about 6% of SpaceX so some of that rise is also SpaceX IPO anticipation. Musk remains a half-trillion dollars richer than anyone else on the planet. Bezos is now in fourth place on the Forbes Billionaires List, though his fortune has also appreciated recently too, just not as fast or as much as those of Musk, Page and Brin. I think this reflects Bezos’s capability to also be a player in OAIDCs if he gets seriously cracking and soon.
I think his ex-wife’s divorce-mediated share of Amazon probably determines the limit of what he can withdraw and not cede control of the company to her.
You could well be right about that.
Bezos could probably have benefitted from being Musk’s under-study.
I think it would be fair to say that Bezos is Musk’s understudy. Not officially, of course, but as a practical matter.