A new book, Amazon Unbound, reveals Jeff Bezos’ envy of SpaceX
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I hear the name "Blue Origin" maybe 1-2x a year, and it's usually in the context of something SpaceX'ey - not some new revolutionary new thing they did. I hear "SpaceX" at least several times a week. That's a problem. The average person on the street has likely never even heard of Blue Origin, or know what they do, while they most likely have some idea of what SpaceX is and does. There is a tangible excitement about SpaceX.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/amazons-kuiper-responds-to-e...
I mean, they blew up some rockets while trying to make them land vertically, and was such a mind boggling achievement that people were - and still are - rooting for them.
They have a pretty solid brand that was forged by their perseverance and boldness. Their story is not even of being the underdog in a competitive environment, because the endeavor itself was enough to make them stand out.
Not to mention that there are 3 known brands in this industry, that don't overlap: NASA (the OG), Space X (the crazy guys that land rockets) and Blue Origin (which has no clear positioning).
Even if Blue Origin won NASA contracts, it wouldn't matter the'd still be the last ones in people's minds. They could be doing backflips, for style points ofc, before landing a standing rocket that still wouldn't matter.
I don't even know if the average person on the street could tell you what Blue Origin is, or name it if asked if they heard Jeff Bezos has a rocket company...
Why is this a problem? There is only one reason in business why you'd want to grab the attention of the average person...and that is advertising .
Will SpaceX start advertising during launches? Maybe...up until then being known to the average person is not an advantage.
Some people claim going public would enable SpaceX to cash in on its fame by offloading loads of stock to the aforementioned normies...but that practice scares away smart/value money so again...until SpaceX starts advertising during launches the only person benefiting from the social media fanfare is Musk who gets to be invited on SNL to show how socially akward he is.
> Will SpaceX start advertising during launches? Maybe...up until then being known to the average person is not an advantage.
Each time SpaceX is talked about, it's effectively a free advertisement for SpaceX. Look at all the talk about StarLink. Have you seen any paid ads? They don't need to, because they have been building their brand recognition for free with every launch for several years and people are excited about it and talk about it. Bezos company just does not have the same caché.
That can change when they start selling their internet services, but again up to now all the promotional energies to build a brand have not been monetized.
The Free Advertisement and brand rising that you mentioned is only valuable if you monetize upon it. As of NOW the only way they have to monetize is selling advertising space during launches and I suppose they get the ads on Youtube as well.
> "Despite the fact that SpaceX has yet to formally advertise this system's services, nearly 700,000 individuals represented in all 50 states signed up over a matter of just days to register their interest in said services at www.starlink.com. To ensure that SpaceX is able to accommodate the apparent demand for its broadband Internet access service, SpaceX Services requests a substantial increase in the number of authorized units."[1]
700k signups is pretty good for no advertising.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/space...
Linus Tech Tips review on Starlink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh1a2K9ZgNA
This is the worst kind of investor to have. Not having them is a good thing. Look at Tesla
It's a hard business and many companies have failed. What makes Blue Origin relatively unique is that Bezos has billions more dollars and can keep trying. I hope he does, I think we would be better off in a world where SpaceX has an innovative competitor who vigorously competes with them. The legacy companies like ULA, I don't know if they can reorient themselves to actually compete with SpaceX.
This is obnoxiously wealthy people handling the situations like you'd expect (and yet, in a very unhealthy way). My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [2] [3], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success). Being "relentless" (Bezos) is what you do, being obsessed (Musk) is who you are. Bezos is going to chill on his mega yacht with the new lady friend while Musk is overseeing construction of Starship SNs in the Texas desert.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/behind-amazon-hq2-fiasco-jeff... (Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk)
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/20/elon-musks-ex-wife-on-secret... (Elon Musk’s ex-wife on secret to getting rich: ‘Be obsessed’)
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-St... (Answer at top of page by Justine Musk)
My perspective, having watched multiple interviews of Elon and Bezos, is that Musk is just really passionate about tech. He's an engineer at heart, that's why he's directly involved in the development of the tech, which is central to all of his businesses. He's also a risk taker and a pioneer, he's not afraid of taking big risky bets on unproven technologies, he seems to actually enjoy doing that, and proving people wrong.
Bezos, on the other hand, is passionate about business and making money. He would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. Once he sees that something is going to be financially successful, he tries to copy it. Amazon is successful because it has good execution, economies of scale and competitive pricing, but it wasn't the first online retailer, or the first cloud provider, etc.
I don't know if I would invest in Blue Origin. Personally, I think Rocket Lab is a much more interesting company (that is already trading on public markets). It's being led by someone who is genuinely passionate about space and has a proven orbital launch vehicle. I wish I could invest in SpaceX, but IMO Rocket Lab is the next best thing to invest in, a mini SpaceX.
You can say a lot of bad things about Jeff Bezos, but confidently claiming that he lacks vision and interest in tech and blindly copies whatever works is...bold.
Who was this "first cloud provider" if it wasn't Amazon?
The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.
In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...
2) 99% of this story is fake.
Tons of people also say Musk is a massive fraud who takes credit for others' work and is simply a cutthroat businessman like Edison without any technical expertise. Your posts sound the same. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
Bezos and Musk are, in my opinion, clearly very good at both technology and business.
The main claim made in there seems to be that Bezos wanted Amazon employees to switch to a more dogfooded API/service-oriented approach, with clear interfaces between different teams and areas of concern rather than internal private channels, to enable future renting out of hardware and services to customers, and that after he issued that edict people scrambled to implement it. Maybe Bezos originally came to that decision in part or wholly due to suggestions from others, but, either way, I've seen several people say he indeed did do something like that.
He used to program. He has a degree in "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" from Princeton. Amazon had a ton of spare resources they could rent out. He's a pretty smart guy and is known for thinking about the long-term. It's not a massive stretch to say it's possible he could've made a decision like that back in 2002, when he had less on his plate than he does now.
However, Bezos would not start a rocket company if he wasn't passionate about space. As the saying goes, the best way to make a million dollars in aerospace is to start with a billion.
This is just as uncharitable to Amazon as all those trashing Musk for his extracurricular Twitter activities are in dismissing his technical credibility.
AWS was absolutely revolutionary with EC2 and S3 and Amazon was the first in every meaningful way here.
I only know this because he graduated from the same high school as me (20 years before me), and I did some googling one day. He was the class valedictorian, and while his entire speech isn't transcribed anywhere I know of, The Miami Herald quoted sentences from various high school valedictorian speeches as part of a graduation article, and Jeff Bezos has a few sentences in there.
The Miami Herald archives for 1982 don't seem to be loading for me, but a CNBC article [0] has it quoted.
> ″[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Herald’s article says.
> ″‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’” he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”
It's interesting to me how he was saying this in 1982 but instead went down the path of banking and then eventually Amazon. Yeah Blue Origin was founded in 2000, but like everyone else here is quipping, what has it actually accomplished? I have no basis for this, but I feel like his goals were: 1) Become the richest person in the world. 2) Use my money to lead humanity to space. He doesn't seem to be as good at goal 2 as goal 1.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-c...
I think the main difference is that spacex had a do or die mentality I. the beginning. Elon had money, but not endless amounts like besos or like he has currently. they literally were going to close up shop due to money, and got a last minute one last attempt to make falcon 1 lunch work. blue origin has never had the need to test things, it's just a bunch of engineers gooing over cad files and no need to go to orbit because they will never go bust.
This is not a weirdly slow pace.
The reason Blue Origin is behind SpaceX is that SpaceX built their first serious rocket in 2006, 9 years before New Shepard. Blue Origin was founded a long time ago but they spent most of that as a low-budget think-tank style operation.
Timeline: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueOrigin/comments/n6a1dd/sn15_nai...
Of New Shepard development, wikipedia tells me "Prototype engine and vehicle flights began in 2006, while full-scale engine development started in the early 2010s and was complete by 2015.[5] Uncrewed flight testing of the complete New Shepard vehicle (propulsion module and space capsule) began in 2015."
Well SpaceX was founded in 2002, giving them what, a 4 year head start on New Shepard? That 4 year gap has grown much wider since then.. SpaceX got to orbit 6 years after they were founded, while Blue Origin is at 21 years and counting.
Falcon 1 has a low payload (small satellite) with medium energy (LEO).
New Shepard has a medium payload (crew capsule) with low energy (suborbital).
As far as "similar to a large orbital launch vehicle", you can rank them as:
New Shepard < Falcon 1 < Falcon 9 < New Glenn
BO is definitely trying to "skip steps", but I think that the US space industry as a whole is certainly better off for Blue Origin existing.
As far as the BE-4, the single largest technical risk for a launch vehicle is the engine, and using an engine which will already be in use (for Vulcan) looks smart to me. Yes there are delays, but aren't there always?
If nothing else, "New Shepard" is appropriately named.
For anyone unaware: getting to orbit is 25 times harder than just getting to space.
These are important qualifiers. Realistically if you tightened up the mass fraction on New Shepard, abandoned reuse, and added a second stage, the technology could probably put a small payload into orbit just fine. I'm not sure what the point would be, since it would ruin all the useful things New Shepard is doing as a pathfinder.
Where does Falcon Heavy fit in that progression?
It's true that Blue Origin started early stage work around the time you say, but you should keep in mind the sort of projects they were. Charon was a few Rolls-Royce engines connected by a metal lattice. Goddard was a conical capsule that flew to 85m. This was not anything close to the levels of effort that SpaceX was putting in with Falcon 1 and Falcon 9.
I do like Space-X's test and manufacturing iteration process though, and think it gives them an edge. Not to mention the shear amount of experience they've gained with so many actual launches.
When New Glenn actually does exist though, it won’t be competing with F9 and SLS; it’ll be competing with Starship.
But the thing is that BlueOrigin has spend a gigantic amount of money compared to Falcon 9. Its not close.
They are not spending SLS money, but their budget is huge and they made very aggressive public targets and stuck to them for a long time. Then they blamed the military on them missing their target.
It's a popular saying but a lot of people don't seem to recall the parable. A slow and steady tortoise only wins the race if the rabbit sprints a little bit but then gets too cocky and decides to take a nap and rest for a while (or gets stuck for some other reason.) If the fast rabbit keeps moving forward unrelentingly, then the slow tortoise doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell.
So far, SpaceX has been a rabbit that doesn't stop to take breaks. In scenarios like this, "slow and steady" becomes little more than a lame excuse for moving slow, not a legitimate plan to get ahead.
https://mobile.twitter.com/jeffbezos/status/6791166363103600...
If you want to be part of some off-planet future, it would be fun to spend significant money on new propulsion technologies and assume that it's all money down the drain. Admittedly, running a large lab has it's own set of problems to keep them on the straight and narrow.
No doubt, at the heart of it, a part of what drives any Bezos jealousy is simply that Musk has a lot more stage presence and star power.
If it's boring but scales, he is going to be in the winner pool. If it takes imagination, he's shown that his imagination is less focused than Musk's, and much more of a blowoff valve for when life gets too samey. So the big risk is that the creativity is impressive but totally inappropriate.
That said, I agree it'd be nice to chase after new propulsion tech.
Bezos could spend the money on a cannon/rail gun to get raw materials into orbit.
I’ve seen both of them present (though only Jeff in person) and if anything I think Elon is more awkward and less smooth as a presenter. Elon is definitely more cool, but it’s not really what I’d call “stage presence”.
Founding a new company that builds rockets on the other hand is something billionaires can do.
Plenty of relatively poor people have devoted their entire lives to working to help the environment, despite knowing their impact will be much smaller than what even a mere millionaire could accomplish.
Billionaires don't need to fix all environmental problems to make a very significant difference.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
And what if we cannot acheive it, because of political and economical system at play i.e. local maxima holding us back and prevents us from breaking away from current order of things?
Bezos hasn't been that focused on climate but in 2020 he did donate $10 billion to his Earth Fund.
Arbiter Bezos: "were it so easy"
Not sure if this is what you're saying but SpaceX is funded privately with investing rounds and isn't traded on a public stock market.
This is all there is to it.
Bezos stepping down and distancing himself from Amazon should provide new lift (no pun intended) and much more risk taking to Blue Origin.
We should all remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not like the frentic months of the software wars where Apple put together the iPhone and its app ecosystem in 48 months and others never caught it.
This is a terrible business (like everything Musk is involved in except Neuralink).
Bezos should learn from Google and understand that there is no shame in killing a project....but I suspect the ego wars against Musk are too big now.
Bezos should have known better. When Musk insults you, you just do what Bill Gates does: You smile, compliment him, stroke his ego a bit and then go back having de-facto veto power in institutions such as the WHO and UN, operating way above Musk head.
Tesla and Amazon have nothing to do with it.
BlueOrigin has the money to do what SpaceX does, in fact they are spending just as much or more. Go look at the launch pad BlueOrigin build in Florida and compare it to the one SpaceX build in Texas.
> This is a terrible business (like everything Musk is involved in except Neuralink).
Based on all objective measures they are not.
> Bezos should have known better. When Musk insults you, you just do what Bill Gates does: You smile, compliment him, stroke his ego a bit and then go back having de-facto veto power in institutions such as the WHO and UN, operating way above Musk head.
Gates was commenting on Musk and his companies before Musk ever said anything.
And the believe that Gates has a veto at the WHO and the UN is nonsense.
No amount of money can give BlueOrigin the freedom which SpaceX has to blow up rockets and telecast failure globally every week like it has happened for the last 5 years.
The CEO of Amazon just can't be associated with such public failures.
For Musk Tesla and SpaceX were parallel efforts, they were never such thing for Bezos, in 2015 when he got serious about Blue Origin , Amazon was already a bigger company than Tesla is now and will ever be.
He simply didn't have that freedom.
> Based on all objective measures they are not.
Q: "How can you become a millionaire mr. Branson?"
A: "Be a billionaire and start and aerospace comapany"
These are not software margins we are talking about, to channel my inner Ricky Bobby: If you ain't software, you are last.
> And the believe that Gates has a veto at the WHO and the UN is nonsense.
Gates can pick up the phone and occupy a week long of Biden time if he wants, same goes for Xi Jin Ping, the WHO director and the climate workgroups at the UN.
This is what happens when you do what others would never do: donate money to philantropic efforts way beyond the marginal PR utility returns of such donations. You get politicians lining up because they know they'd be able to take credit and do vitcory laps after a job well done which Gates would never claim ownership of, that is beyond the occasional Bloomberg conference which only policy nerds attend.
Stark difference with Musk who doesn't do philantropy and frankly scans for causes to inject himself in the loudest possible manner such as the Thai soccer team trapped in the caves.
Musk should thank that Gates is magnanimous enough not bring up the mess which Tesla is when he talks with Biden and John Kerry about climate policy. And Musk attacked him first, because he committed the sin of buying a Porsche so that he'd be able to lap Laguna Seca without the car overheating and exploding such as Teslas.
I see no reason for this. I think the opposite is true, having high profile test would actually improve the image of the public figure.
Maybe if it was Amazon himself you would have a point, but a totally separate company? Sorry, not buying it.
It seems to me you are just making up excuses to explain away Bezos failure.
> These are not software margins we are talking about, to channel my inner Ricky Bobby: If you ain't software, you are last.
So first of all Branson is a terrible source.
Second of all, of course they don't get software margin. They are capital intensive business. But that is just terrible analysis, based on this logic no company before 1960 could ever be a good business because its not software?
So I guess anybody not selling software should just go home and start drinking because apparently its not worth it. If the market is large and you compare favorably in terms of competition they are good business by literally any objective measure.
That is other then haters who clearly have personal dislike for the CEO.