Jeff can define success however he wants. He can define it in terms of making money, or in terms of successful launches. Making money is hard - there is only so much demand for things in space, and some competition - making it questionable if the investment will pay off. However launching isn't as hard, and he can define metrics in that way and be successful for his purposes.
How is launching things into space any different from paying composers to write much, or painters to paint pictures - two things that rich people regularly did 300 years ago.
* Like delivery of engines to customers.
* Getting to orbit.
* Winning large contracts.
* Putting amazons internet satellites into LEO.
etc...
Space demand will grow incredibly fast very soon as SpaceX leads the incredible prices drops in $ per KG to orbit.
I'd love for them to be successful, and its great to see so many space companies being created, testing, and launching. And it's very important for the future of civilisation. That doesn't mean that you can't ask questions about the health of a particular company.
It might as well be.
It doesn't take a genius to leverage equity ... and Bezos will have effective financial genius working for him.
1) time and time again, particularly in the media, I hear net worth bandied about as though it's the same as cash. Bezos is worth X billion - think what that cash would pay for!
2) billions in equity can't be translated into billions in cash. Millions, for sure. But not billions.
3) any statements that talk about taxing the rich inevitably seem to come down to transferring equity to the state over time based on a current stock market valuation.
All of the above seem misinformed and/or a bad idea, and worth trying to establish fundamental understanding in this area. If you already have that understanding then that's fantastic.
20 years to go from a pile of cash and no experience, to a full production line of safe orbit-capable launch vehicles is a very big ask. SpaceX has achieved that, but at the cost of many of its employees (just look at the press around SpaceX working conditions).
Yes, it's longer than the time between the Mercury missions and Apollo 11, but the 50s-60s era of space travel was significantly higher risk. If corners could be cut in the same way, no doubt 20 years would have been fairly reasonable. Add in an existing presence in space R&D and the shorter time frames of the space shuttle program seem even more reasonable. But that just isn't possible in today's safety first world.
New Glenn should be that vehicle, if they ever finish it.
Regardless, no one is wealthy enough to keep a business of this scale going just as a hobby project.
The development costs for the Falcon 1 were ~100 million, for Falcon 9 about 300 million.
So a billion/year seems adequate.
Elon Musk is "all in" on making mankind an interplanetary species. He is not cruising around the world on a yacht but holing up in a cheap house in Texas.
He went at an "impossible" goal by finding specific markets for launch services and satisfying them with Dragon. Starship is a bit ahead of the market, but the success with Dragon bodes well.
Looking at the big picture I wonder if Amazon succeeded (post-2005 or so) despite Jeff Bezos instead of because of him... That is, the systems he created at the beginning might have outgrown him.
There is nothing in our history or present day evolution that would suggest people can or should live on other planets. Absolutely nothing. We are not even remotely close to such a "goal" when today people live barely below the threshold of space (LEO) and not in space at all.
Religious goals and magical thinking have driven human society for hundreds of thousands of years (see the fascinating and recent post here on HN about The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind). Jeff and Elon's fantasies about human habitation in space (or somehow improving life on this planet by leaving it) are more of the same.
I think Mars is for the birds, cutting up a carbonaceous or wet asteroid to construct a solar-sail factory that can deliver sunshades to earth-sun L1 is a more interesting project. Something halfway to Niven's ringworld seems like a possible endpoint. (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.07487)
As I see it the problems are half chemical engineering, half "building a ship outside a bottle from the inside of the bottle" and half "what do you do with the gas before you take the asteroid apart?"
You might wind up with a structure that can hold a few trillion people, but you start with maybe 40 hardcore Zeons and a few million eggs because I don't see how you build and operate the factory or the factory factory with a 20 minute time delay.