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Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Bezos' comments on workers after spaceflight draws rebuke

NEW YORK (AP) — The world's richest man wanted to say thanks to the people who made his brief trip into space Tuesday possible.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

But for some, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' expression of gratitude went over like a lead rocket.

“I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this,” the 57-year-old Bezos said during a news conference Tuesday after becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride in his own spacecraft.

Bezos built Amazon into a shopping and entertainment behemoth but has faced increasing activism within his own workforce and stepped up pressure from critics to improve working conditions.

Labor groups and Amazon workers have claimed that the company offers its hourly employees not enough break times, puts too much reliance on rigid productivity metrics and has unsafe working conditions. An effort to unionize workers at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama failed earlier this year.

Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and a professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley, wrote on Twitter that Bezos has crushed unionizing attempts for decades.

“Amazon workers don’t need Bezos to thank them. They need him to stop union busting — and pay them what they deserve," Reich wrote.

Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July, allowing him more time for side projects including his space exploration company Blue Origin. He has said he finances the rocket company by selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year.

After the spaceflight, Bezos awarded $100 million donations through a new philanthropic initiative to both D.C. chef Jose Andres and CNN contributor Van Jones to put towards any charity or nonprofit of their choice. Jones has founded a number of nonprofit organizations and Andres' nonprofit group World Central Kitchen provides meals to people following natural disasters.

Nevertheless, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who is on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, proposed on Tuesday legislation that would tax space travel for non-scientific research purposes.

“Space exploration isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy," said Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat. “Just as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy airline tickets, billionaires who fly into space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some."

Others tied his spaceflight to reports that Bezos hasn't paid his fair share of taxes. According to the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica, Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011.

“Jeff Bezos forgot to thank all the hardworking Americans who actually paid taxes to keep this country running while he and Amazon paid nothing," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., tweeted.

Allen Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce, says it's challenging for Bezos to say where the money from the space trip is coming from without being offensive. He says he should have left out those comments and focused on thanking the Blue Origin team.

“For people who have an issue with inequality and his compensation versus the average employee compensation, this was rocket fuel," Adamson said.

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Follow Anne D’Innocenzio: http://twitter.com/ADInnocenzio

Anne D'innocenzio, The Associated Press

Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon workers for paying for his space flight. For some, the feeling isn't mutual.
tsonnemaker@insider.com (Tyler Sonnemaker,Aleeya Mayo,Charles Davis,Ben Gilbert)

© Joe Raedle/Getty Images Blue Origin's New Shepard crew (L-R) Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk held a press conference after their suborbital flight into space on July 20, 2021. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Jeff Bezos thanked Amazon's workers and customers for paying for his Blue Origin space flight.
But some Amazon workers said they want better pay and working conditions, not a thank you.
"He should just go to Jupiter and live his best life there," one worker told Insider.
See more stories on Insider's business page.

After Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos flew into suborbital space for around three minutes on Tuesday, he thanked some of the people who helped send him there: Amazon's employees and customers.

"I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this," Bezos said during a post-flight press conference. "Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there, and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. It's very appreciated."

For many workers who heard Bezos' comments, the feeling wasn't exactly mutual.

Multiple Amazon employees told Insider there appeared to be little interest in the launch, and that they wished Bezos would have spent the money on virtually anything else, like paying Amazon workers better.

"I heard he was going to space but to be honest, I didn't really care," an employee at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, told Insider, adding: "Me and my coworkers were joking that he should just go to Jupiter and live his best life there."

"People certainly weren't rushing to the TVs to watch," one Amazon warehouse employee in Indiana told Insider. "I guess it was just a big deal for Jeff. We didn't get anything out of it. Twenty-minute flight to space on us basically since we do the work."

Amazon and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.

Most of Bezos' wealth is tied up in roughly 51.7 million shares of Amazon stock he owns, shares that have risen to more than $3,549 apiece since the company's IPO price of $18 in 1997. And Bezos previously said he liquidates around $1 billion worth of Amazon stock per year to fund Blue Origin's operations, so those who have helped Amazon succeed literally did fund Bezos' space ambitions.

But some workers said they've paid for the success of Amazon, and by extension Blue Origin, in other ways that they're not too happy about.

"I guess he's thanking us for putting the money in his pocket to do so by our hard work, sacrificing our bonuses and stock options to make it possible," the Amazon employee in Indiana said. (Amazon's hourly warehouse employees aren't eligible for stock options or bonuses).

"I feel like he just said that because he had a guilty conscience, he knows he's wrong for making money off treating workers like slaves," the Staten Island employee said, referencing the grueling and potentially dangerous conditions some Amazon workers encounter.

Amazon has aggressively fought any efforts by its workers to unionize, despite evidence showing unions typically increase wages and can help address racial and gender pay gaps.

As other critics of Bezos' space flight - like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - pointed out, American taxpayers have also subsidized Amazon and Blue Origin.

Amazon's reliance on a massive network of contract delivery drivers allows it to avoid paying for their healthcare, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance, and 4,000 of its workers in just nine states rely on food stamps, passing those costs off to taxpayers and other employers whose payments into the social safety net help Amazon workers that have fallen through the cracks.

Amazon workers who spoke to Insider also said they felt Bezos should have spent more of his immense wealth addressing these and other issues instead of pursuing his space ambitions.

"I can think of a lot of other things he could do with all that money he spent on it, better wages for starters, the homeless, the poor, mental health," another current Amazon fulfilment center employee told Insider.

"I think it's selfish of him to be so self-consumed to send himself into space when there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world. He could end homelessness and hunger for everybody in the world and he chooses not to because he's selfish," said Vickie Shannon Allen, a former Amazon employee who became homeless after a workplace injury and a long battle with Amazon over medical expenses.

Jeff Bezos' Penis-Shaped Rocket Launches Dr. Evil Comparisons

Andi Ortiz

The New Shepard spacecraft carrying Jeff Bezos and three other passengers successfully completed its space flight Tuesday morning. It was a brief journey, but an exciting one, drawing 600,000 viewers to the live stream on YouTube.

TheWrap rocket jeff bezos dr. evil penis dick jokes

But, watching the launch and getting a clear look at the rocket that would get Bezos and his team there, some people could only think of one thing: Austin Powers. Or rather, one very specific scene from "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me".

For those who don't remember, in the 1999 film, Dr. Evil's plan — which he dubbed "The Alan Parsons Project" — is to take over the world using a giant "laser" on the moon. He intends to fire it at the White House, unless they pay him an obscene amount of money (which doesn't even actually exist at that point, since he's traveled back in time).

Of course, before he can fire the "laser," Dr. Evil has to get to his moon base. Naturally, to get to space, one has to take a rocket. Here's how that went:

Once people saw it, it was all they could see. Throughout the morning, the Dr. Evil comparisons kept landing. You can check out more belo

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

MBS AND THE SAUDI STATE AID TRUMP IN HIS WAR ON THE WASHINGTON POST AND JEFF BEZOS

U.N. officials press Saudi Arabia on hack of Jeff Bezos's phone

WASHINGTON — United Nations officials have asked the government of Saudi Arabia to explain the apparent hack of a cellphone belonging to Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, a source familiar with the matter told Yahoo News.

On Wednesday, special rapporteurs, investigators working for the U.N., will release a statement announcing the findings of a forensic investigation conducted by an outside firm that concludes the hack of Bezos’s phone was likely the result of a Saudi scheme. Naked photos sent by Bezos to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair were likely obtained in the hack. While the findings of the investigation aren’t conclusive, the U.N. officials are concerned that the attack on privacy is part of a broader campaign to intimidate critics of Saudi Arabia.

Shortly after the October 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos skipped a planned appearance at an investment conference that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also referred to as “MBS”) was hosting in Saudi Arabia. A few months later, Bezos announced that the National Enquirer had obtained naked pictures of him. While news reports at the time suggested that Michael Sanchez, the brother of the woman with whom Bezos was having an affair, may have been responsible, last March Bezos’s longtime security consultant, Gavin de Becker, announced he believed the Saudis were responsible for the hack.

U.N. Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and David Kaye have sent an “allegation letter” to the Saudi ambassador in Geneva, the source said, asking questions about the Bezos hack, which U.N. officials believe to be significant in part because “it connects to both the killing [of Khashoggi] and the use of spyware in general,” the source added.

Spyware similar to the type that is believed to have been used to infect Bezos’s phone was previously deployed by the Saudis to hack into the phone of Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, who is suing NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware. Abdulaziz has alleged that the Saudis hacked into his phone using Pegasus weeks before Khashoggi was killed. Abdulaziz had been working with Khashoggi on sensitive projects targeting Saudi disinformation campaigns in the months before the killing.

The Saudi government denies the allegations.

“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a Tuesday tweet. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”

The forensic investigation of the Bezos hack was conducted by FTI Consulting’s Anthony Ferrante, who declined to comment for this article. But the source familiar with the matter said bin Salman and Bezos had dinner in Los Angeles and “exchanged numbers” during the crown prince’s tour of the U.S. in March 2018. A video clip was sent to Bezos’s phone by a WhatsApp number linked to bin Salman, the source said, adding that Ferrante determined with a “medium to high degree of confidence” that the Saudis are behind the Bezos hack. It is unclear who paid Ferrante to investigate.

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP)

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is suing NSO for having “violated both U.S. and California laws as well as the WhatsApp Terms of Service, which prohibit this type of abuse,” according to a statement from WhatsApp. Last May, WhatsApp discovered a security flaw that allowed hackers to infect victims’ phones with Pegasus spyware even when they didn’t click on a link.

The Facebook allegations bolster the claim that the Saudis are behind the hack of Bezos’s phone, the source said. “The allegation is that a video file was sent from an account controlled by, at least partially controlled by, MBS and was received by the intended recipient, Bezos,” the source said. “If you line it up with what Facebook alleged in October and November of this past year there was an exploit that didn’t require ... the target to actually click on the link if it was sent by WhatsApp.”

Analysis Said to Tie Hacking of Bezos’ Phone to Saudi Leader’s Account

Karen Weise, Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel

© Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters Jeff Bezos with Lauren
Sanchez at an Amazon event this month in Mumbai, India.

SEATTLE — A forensic analysis of Jeff Bezos’ cellphone found with “medium to high confidence” that the Amazon chief’s device was hacked after he received a video from a WhatsApp account reportedly belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, according to people familiar with the Bezos-ordered investigation.

After Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, got the video over the WhatsApp messaging platform in 2018, his phone began sending unusually large volumes of data, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The person said the investigators believed Prince Mohammed was used as a conduit because the message would not raise suspicions if it came from him.

The findings of the forensics investigation, completed on behalf of Mr. Bezos by Anthony Ferrante at the business advisory firm FTI Consulting, could not be independently verified by The New York Times.

After the findings were reported by The Guardian and The Financial Times, the Saudi Embassy denied that the Saudi government was involved.

“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy said on Twitter. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”

Mr. Bezos’ security consultant, Gavin de Becker, had previously accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’ phone, saying Saudi authorities targeted him because he owned The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively reported on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, one of its columnists, who was a critic of the Saudi government. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Prince Mohammed ordered the killing.

Two United Nations experts plan to release a public statement Wednesday morning “addressing serious allegations” that Mr. Bezos was hacked by receiving a WhatsApp message “reportedly from an account belonging to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,” one of the experts, Agnes Callamard, said in an email.

Ms. Callamard, a specialist in extrajudicial killings, has been investigating Mr. Khashoggi’s murder, and David Kaye, an expert in human rights law, has been gathering information about violations of freedom of the press.

In its statement, the United Nations plans to say that it is raising concerns over the hacking of Mr. Bezos’s phone directly with the Saudi government, said a person familiar with the statement. The United Nations did not conduct its own investigation into the hack and is basing its statement on the FTI report, the person said.

The United Nations began looking into the situation in June 2019 when someone close to Mr. Bezos shared the forensic analysis with them, the person added.

Amazon and Mr. de Becker declined to comment. William Isaacson, Mr. Bezos’ lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner, declined to comment beyond saying that Mr. Bezos was cooperating with continuing investigations. Mr. Ferrante declined to comment through a FTI spokesman.

“All FTI Consulting client work is confidential,” Matt Bashalany, a spokesman for FTI, said in a statement. “We do not comment on, confirm or deny client engagements or potential engagements.”

The questions about who has had access to Mr. Bezos’ phone erupted a year ago, after The National Enquirer reported that the tech executive was romantically involved with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor. At the time, The Enquirer published photos of the couple together, as well as intimate text messages.

Mr. Bezos later published emails from American Media, the parent company of The National Enquirer, which he said amounted to “extortion and blackmail.” He suggested that the leaks of photos and details of his private life could have been politically motivated to harm him because of his ownership of The Post.

In March, Mr. de Becker accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’s phone. In an opinion article in The Daily Beast, Mr. de Becker wrote that his “investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence” that the Saudis got private information from Mr. Bezos’ phone and that he turned the evidence they had uncovered over to law enforcement authorities.

Mr. de Becker did not detail specific evidence they uncovered, nor did he detail whether the leaked information was published by The Enquirer. American Media denied any Saudi involvement, saying Ms. Sanchez’s brother was the tabloid’s sole source.

Karen Weise reported from Seattle, Matthew Rosenberg from Washington and Sheera Frenkel from San Francisco. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

Saturday, July 24, 2021

Despite Tuesday’s flight, Jeff Bezos is running out of time to save Blue Origin

“What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing."

ERIC BERGER - 7/21/2021, 1:30 PM

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew, Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas.
Joe Raedle/Getty

LAUNCH SITE ONE, Texas—Jeff Bezos burst from his spacecraft with a smile on his face as wide as the brim of the cowboy hat atop his head.

The founder of Amazon fulfilled a lifelong dream of flying into space Tuesday morning aboard a rocket and capsule he personally funded. During a few minutes of weightlessness, Bezos and his brother Mark had floated around the New Shepard capsule alongside aviation pioneer Wally Funk and an 18-year-old customer, Oliver Daemen. They tossed Skittles candy into one another’s mouths and enjoyed the view.

“Best day ever,” said Bezos, 57, after landing safely beneath three parachutes. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”

Not everyone was thrilled by the adventures of the richest person in the world. With his brief 10-minute flight, Bezos provoked sharply divided reactions. Some people even wished Bezos had launched and never come back.

These critics expressed frustration with Bezos for busting unions and not treating Amazon employees well. Environmentalists despaired that as the world burns from climate change and other calamities, Bezos responded by jetting into space. And with all of his wealth, Bezos offered an inviting target for those who loathe ultra-rich billionaires and want them to pay their fair share of taxes. Criticism of Bezos spanned the ideological divide, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to liberal Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Meanwhile, within the space community, people mostly celebrated Bezos’ flight as the dawn of the private spaceflight era, which further opens the high frontier, with both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic starting regular spaceflight service.

Scenes from launch day in Texas. Here, New Shepard rolls out to the launch site in the pre-dawn hours.
Blue Origin

Neither side is necessarily wrong. It is reasonable to both be uncomfortable with Bezos' extreme wealth and what that means for society but also recognize that Blue Origin has advanced spaceflight.

The real question is whether Bezos will make good on his stated intent to use his immense wealth for the good of humanity. What the legion critics of Bezos and Blue Origin miss is that the company legitimately has the goal of ultimately saving planet Earth. While Tuesday’s flight was clearly self-serving for Bezos, Blue Origin has follow-on projects in the works to support moving heavy industry from the surface of our planet into space.

To set humanity on this environmentally sustainable path, Bezos has lavished funding on Blue Origin, investing about $10 billion in the spaceflight company so far, with more coming every year. However, what Bezos has not invested into Blue Origin is his personal time, nor the driven leadership that propelled Amazon to the top of the heap of retail.Advertisement

So after he returned from his spaceflight on Tuesday, what I most wanted to know is whether Jeff Bezos is all-in on space. He has the vision. He has the money. But at the age of 57, does he have enough years or willingness to ensure Blue Origin’s success? Or will he leave Blue Origin to flounder and instead mostly retire to his half-billion-dollar yacht after a suborbital joyride?

The jury is very much out.

The vision

Bezos has a compelling vision for space, and it is entirely genuine. From way back before his Amazon days, Bezos has been a true believer in the power of using space to improve life on Earth. Our planet, he says, is a garden to be preserved.

“This is the only good planet in the Solar System,” he said on Tuesday, repeating a line he has often used. “We’ve sent robotic probes to all of them, and this is the only good one. We have to take care of it. And when you go to space and see how fragile Earth is, you’ll want to take care of it even more.”

To accomplish this, Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to build a “road to space.” This simply means bringing down the cost of launching rockets by reusing them over and over again. By lowering the cost of reaching space, Bezos seeks to move heavy industry off Earth. Instead of strip-mining our planet, he says, we should glean those resources from lifeless asteroids.

Our insatiable energy needs, too, might be met by space-based solar power farms. And finally, expanding into space will allow humanity to grow as a species, eventually populating orbital settlements near Earth and then other worlds. This unlimited opportunity for expansion would save humans from entering a stasis and from fighting for increasingly scarce resources on Earth.

Bezos is theoretically right about all of this. Today, roughly half the world’s population lacks access to reliable electricity and reasonably high living conditions. The only long-term means to bring this half of the world’s population up to a standard of living enjoyed by the developed world, without destroying the Earth, is probably accessing the bounty of resources in space.

FURTHER READING Jeff Bezos unveils his sweeping vision for humanity’s future in space

Building such a space economy and a spacefaring civilization will not happen overnight, though, and that's why Bezos views Blue Origin as a multi-generational effort. “Big things start small, and this is how it starts,” Bezos said Tuesday.

The company has a plan. It started small with the New Shepard system and learned how to reuse rockets. It is currently developing the much larger New Glenn rocket, which will essentially use the New Shepard design as its second stage. There are plans for even bigger rockets down the line, all to move more mass to and from planet Earth much more cheaply.

Yet this plan has unfolded very slowly, and Bezos has not pushed forward with the same determination displayed by his leadership of Amazon. Blue Origin remains very far from self-sufficiency. Bezos still must pump more than $1 billion into Blue Origin annually to keep the lights on. Even for the world’s richest person, this kind of financial backing does not seem sustainable.Advertisement

Making matters even worse for Bezos? He must compete with Elon Musk and SpaceX.

A rivalry that wasn’t

During the middle of the 2010s, after more than a decade of near silence, Blue Origin emerged from stealth mode with all appearances of becoming a formidable space company. It seemed probable that two titans of the tech industry, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, would now battle for supremacy in the space arena.

In late 2014, Blue Origin stunned the space industry by announcing that it had reached a deal to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, then the premiere launch company in the United States. United Launch Alliance selected Blue’s BE-4 engine for its new Vulcan rocket over an offering from Aerojet Rocketdyne, the blueblood propulsion company behind the majority of large rocket engines in US history.

About a year later, Blue Origin pulled off another feat by safely launching and landing the New Shepard rocket and capsule on its up-and-down suborbital mission. This marked the first time in history that anyone—country or company—had vertically launched a first-stage rocket into space and then landed it back on the ground.

The next month, in December 2015, SpaceX repeated this launch-and-landing feat with its orbital Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. From a technical standpoint, the Falcon 9 landing was much more significant, as it requires about 30 times more energy to boost a payload into orbit and complicated engineering to slow such a booster down and return it to the landing site. No matter: After the Falcon 9 flight, Jeff Bezos cheekily tweeted, “Welcome to the club” to Musk and SpaceX.

Musk was decidedly not amused, but this banter underscored the emerging rivalry—Bezos and Musk, billionaire versus billionaire, on a quest to build reusable rockets and remake the space industry. Back then, it all seemed so clear: The 21st-century space race would be run by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and it was going to be a hell of a thing to watch.

Only it hasn’t been. There has been no race. Since the end of 2015, Blue Origin has launched its suborbital New Shepard system just 15 more times, an average of fewer than three missions per year. Only this week did humans finally get on board for a launch. As for the BE-4 engine, after promising it would be ready for spaceflight in 2017, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a flight-ready version to United Launch Alliance more than four years later.

SpaceX, by contrast, has ascended. Since December 2015, the company has successfully flown more than 100 orbital missions. It has developed and flown the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, and may soon debut its still more titanic Starship launch system. With the Starlink Internet constellation, SpaceX now operates more satellites than any nation or company in the world. And in 2020, thanks to SpaceX, NASA broke its dependency on Russia for human spaceflight. NASA astronauts now ride to space in style inside the sleek Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Blue Origin has also lost out when it comes to large government contracts worth billions of dollars, something Bezos craves as he seeks to find some return on his massive investment in Blue Origin. In 2020, the Department of Defense said it would only allow United Launch Alliance and SpaceX to bid on national security launch contracts in the mid-2020s. Blue Origin protested and lost. Then, in April, NASA chose SpaceX alone for a prestigious Human Landing System. This came after Bezos showily unveiled his company’s “Blue Moon” lander in 2019. Blue Origin protested this, too, and a decision is expected in early August. It would come as a surprise if Blue Origin succeeds.

In short, a once-promising space race has become something of a damp squib. In late 2019, while reporting for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff, I asked Musk why he thought Blue Origin had fallen behind. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," Musk replied.

King of buildings

The road to Launch Site One travels north out of the dusty, time-worn town of Van Horn in West Texas. The two-lane road slaloms back and forth, twisting between weathered mountains like the rattlesnakes slithering through the nearby desert.

The mountains are green here, and Bezos owns a large chunk of them, with more than 300,000 acres under his control, including the Sierra Diablo range to the west of US Route 54. Where the mountains don’t climb hundreds of meters above the desert, a vast sea of scrubby flatlands spread into the distance, broken only by gullies. These are mostly dry, but they can fill quickly during nocturnal thunderstorms that brighten the night sky with brilliant lightning.

FURTHER READING Behind the curtain: Ars goes inside Blue Origin’s secretive rocket factory

Here, on about 80,000 acres, Blue Origin has built a launch and landing site for New Shepard, as well as test facilities for its rocket engines. A drive around Launch Site One, with its crisp white buildings rising above the desert, underscores the fact that Bezos is unquestionably good at building space infrastructure. The company has always been impressive in this way.

Bezos founded Blue Origin near his Amazon headquarters in Seattle, and for the first few years, it served mostly as a think tank exploring different ways to get into space. But soon, Bezos and a small team of engineers settled on the New Shepard plan to demonstrate reuse. During the first half of the 2010s, Blue Origin looked to be moving rapidly, as it built BE-3 rocket engines and New Shepard boosters. Visitors remarked that the burgeoning factory in Kent, Washington, had the feel of SpaceX’s frenetic headquarters in California.

In recent years, Blue Origin has kept on building things. In 2017, Blue Origin said it would invest $200 million to build a BE-4 rocket engine factory in Northern Alabama. Later that year, the company said it had nearly completed construction of a massive manufacturing factory in Florida for its New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin has also expanded its factory in Washington.

All told, Blue Origin now has millions of square feet of facilities. Currently, it just has precious little rocket hardware. For all of its construction efforts, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a BE-4 engine to United Launch Alliance. And the massive New Glenn rocket, about which Bezos has been talking for a decade, remains at least a couple of years away from its first flight.

FURTHER READING Increasingly, the ULA-Blue Origin marriage is an unhappy one

The industry has taken notice, with popular memes such as United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno repeatedly asking, “Jeff, where are my engines?” Others show the huge New Glenn factory in Florida, which appears to be mostly empty.

As Blue Origin has fallen behind SpaceX in recent years, morale has declined, according to multiple sources. Bezos pushed the company further from its roots in late 2017 by sidelining long-time president Rob Meyerson and hiring a traditional aerospace veteran, Bob Smith, to become chief executive. Coming from Honeywell, Smith instituted a more bureaucratic management style, and Blue Origin’s progress seemed to slow significantly. Whereas Bezos' debut flight on New Shepard could have occurred as early as 2019, it slipped by months and eventually years. Critics of Smith’s plodding management style started referring to the company as “Blue Honeywell.”Advertisement

The decline in morale at Blue Origin coincided with a period when Bezos was increasingly distracted by making visits to Hollywood for Amazon Prime video, the assassination of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for the Washington Post), a divorce from his wife MacKenzie, and more. He spent less time at the rocket company, and it suffered as a result.

The question is, now that Bezos has tasted spaceflight, will he become reinvigorated and pursue his ambitions with abandon?

“Losing to SpaceX cannot please him,” said Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound, a new book about Bezos and his retail empire. “What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing.”

However, Stone is not sure Bezos will take a strong hand at Blue Origin. Although Bezos seeded the company with principles, he also seeded dysfunction by installing a very different leader in Smith. Since 2017, Bezos has more or less let Smith run Blue Origin with freedom, and he may continue to do so. “It’s hard for me to see Bezos taking on a more prominent executive role at Blue Origin,” Stone said.

Space needs both

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are about 20 years old now. Both companies were founded by brilliant men capable of being ruthless in their business practices. Both founders see humanity’s future among the stars. But so far, one company has prospered while another has dithered. The difference, I think, is that from the beginning, Elon Musk has been all-in on SpaceX. Even today, while Bezos is enjoying the billionaire life and planning voyages on his mega-yacht, Musk is living in a $50,000 house in rural South Texas to keep his Starship project on track.

What we cannot know is whether this spaceflight experience will change Bezos. Certainly, he seems to have come back from his space trip more concerned about climate change. Shortly after the flight, Bezos said of his priorities moving forward, “I’m going to split my time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund.” He has already committed $10 billion to his climate charity.

Much of the spaceflight community would appreciate a renewed focus on space by Bezos. There is a hunger for an alternative to Musk, for a true competitor that everyone envisioned Blue Origin would become back in 2015. Quite simply, Musk rubs some people the wrong way. He does not always play well with others. Often, SpaceX looks to grind its competitors into dust rather than find partnerships. Where the industry would like to see soufflés, Musk is happy to break eggs on the way to space—anything to get the job done. Which, to be fair, SpaceX does more than any other company in spaceflight

.
Enlarge / Elon Musk exits federal court on April 4, 2019 in New York City. He might be laughing at a Jeff Bezos meme.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

NASA, the US military, and other industry companies would welcome Blue Origin with open arms if the company could only execute on its programs. Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA who has known both Musk and Bezos for more than a decade, says such a competition would be tremendously helpful.

"Throughout history, great rivalries in business, science, and technology have led to great advancements,” she told Ars. “Having two extremely wealthy individuals who have an interest and long-term commitment to developing a spacefaring civilization is likely to benefit us all.”

Garver cited Leonardo and Michelangelo, Edison and Tesla, and Gates and Jobs as historical examples of this dynamic at work, by which the power of two improved each other and the state of progress.

“Neither Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic appear to be much of a rival to SpaceX today, but the winner in the competition to expand the railroads and aviation weren't always obvious, either,” she said.
The verdict

If Bezos thinks about this or reflects on how Blue Origin has so far fallen short of SpaceX, he does not talk about it publicly. Two moments on Tuesday, after his historic spaceflight, suggest he may not do a whole lot about it regardless.

Two hours after Bezos and his fellow passengers landed, they climbed onto a stage near the launch pad to receive their “astronaut” wings. The event, billed as a “press conference,” instead saw Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell ask softball questions about the flight. The answers were interesting, and Bezos obviously took deep satisfaction from the event. At one point, he removed a necklace he had worn during the flight, got down from the stage, and put it around his mother’s neck. It seemed to be his way of telling his mom he had fulfilled his childhood dreams.

After all of that, Bezos allowed for just three actual press questions to be asked. Two came from TV networks and the other from Reuters. Only one of the questions got near the troubles at Blue Origin, asking about timelines for future rocket development. Bezos simply didn’t answer the question. He welcomes no public scrutiny of Blue Origin, and in doing so, he only invites more.

After the sham “press conference,” the four newly minted astronauts drove over to the landing site where the New Shepard rocket landed. It looked sooty and slightly worn in the midday sunshine, but it was no less brilliant for the wear-and-tear. New Shepard is a fine piece of engineering and a reasonable place for a launch company to start learning about spaceflight. The problem is that by beginning his company with a focus on space tourism and flying on the very first mission himself, Bezos only plays into the hands of critics. They might easily say Blue Origin is all about Bezos gratifying his spaceflight ambitions or about allowing a handful of wealthy tourists to reach a high-altitude vantage point for looking down on commoners.

Enlarge / Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (black hat) walks with Jeff Bezos after his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images

With New Shepard in the background, Bezos and the blue flight suit-clad astronauts posed for photographs. Near the end of the photo session, Bezos called out, “Hey Bob, come here. You should be in the photo, too.” At this invitation, a smiling Bob Smith emerged from a small group of onlookers and stood in the middle of the four people who had just gone into space. Cameras clicked.

This gesture by Bezos hardly seemed to be that of someone dissatisfied with the CEO of his rocket company.

After the photo opportunity, Bezos climbed behind the wheel of his Rivian truck and drove right onto the landing site, making a circle around the rocket, before roaring off into the hazy desert, bound for points unknown. Kind of like his rocket company.

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Jeff Bezos says humans will live in massive space stations before settling on other planets, once again veering away from Elon Musk's Mars ambitions

Lloyd Lee
Thu, December 14, 2023

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both have ambitions of space colonization.

But the billionaires disagree on how exactly that future will play out.

Bezos said in an interview that "planetary surfaces" are too small for mass human colonization.

Jeff Bezos said in a recent interview that he hopes for a distant future in which "a trillion" humans will inhabit the solar system, but the only way to get there is with massive space stations.

The Amazon and Blue Origin founder said on the Lex Fridman podcast published Thursday that a trillion humans would mean there could be a "thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins" at any given point — a vision he previously shared in a 2018 interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer.

Our solar system has enough resources to support a civilization that large, Bezos said, but people won't be inhabiting other planets.

"The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations, he said. "The planetary surfaces are just way too small unless you turn them into giant space stations."

Bezos said that humans will take resources from planets or the moon to support life on space colonies that resemble cylindrical space stations envisioned by the late physicist Gerard Kitchen O'Neill.

"They have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spin them to get normal earth gravity. You can put them where you want them," he said of O'Neill-style colonies, adding that most people are going to want to live near Earth anyway.

Bezos's space colony agenda is notable in that it differs from his main competitor, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Bezos doesn't explicitly mention Musk in his answer to Fridman, but the two billionaires have butted heads in the past over what the future of space colonization will look like.

Musk has repeatedly spoken about his ambitions to colonize Mars, claiming that he wants to start building human settlements as soon as 2050.

SpaceX also has plans to help NASA send humans to the moon for the first time in 1972, but its colonization goals are mostly focused on Mars.

Bezos on the other hand has set his target on the moon, unveiling the giant Blue Moon lunar lander concept in 2019 that will help humans get there. He also has previously spoken about O'Neill-style space cylinders that can maintain a good climate all year long.

As the two battle over colonization, Musk apparently longs for a competitive space race, saying that he wished Bezos "would get out of his hot tub and yacht" and focus more on Blue Origin, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson.

Spokespersons for Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment sent outside of working hours.

Experts previously told Business Insider about the scientific and ethical dilemmas that lie in both billionaires' grandiose plans of space colonization, including the problems with gravity and space's impact on the human immune system. But that doesn't mean their efforts are worthless.

"As a species, we've got to do this. We're going to crucify this planet sooner or later. So you might as well die going to Mars," Kevin Moffat, an associate professor at the University of Warwick who specializes in human physiology, told BI.

Bezos told Fridman that, in the future, humans will be able to choose to go back and forth between space stations and Earth, and that space colonization is ultimately a means to preserve the planet.

"We've sent robotic probes to all the planets," he said. "We know that this is the good one."

Jeff Bezos says the main reason he left Amazon was to focus on Blue Origin

Kwan Wei Kevin Tan
Thu, December 14, 2023

Jeff Bezos says he gave up his post as Amazon CEO because he wanted to focus on Blue Origin.
Bezos founded the rocket company back in 2000.
He told podcaster Lex Fridman that most of his time is now spent on Blue Origin.

It's been two years since Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon's CEO. In that time, it appears he's kept himself busy with real estate acquisitions and getting swole.

But the billionaire says his departure from the tech company was because he wanted to focus on his rocket company, Blue Origin.

"I've turned the CEO role over, and the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin, adding some energy, some sense of urgency," Bezos said on the latest episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which went live on Thursday.

Bezos founded Amazon back in 1994. He stepped down as CEO in July 2021 but retained his position as the company's executive chairman.

The move, according to Bezos, had to be made because the rocket company needed to move faster. Bezos told Fridman that he wouldn't have the bandwidth to manage Blue Origin if he was still running Amazon.

"When I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is, 'If I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company, it's going to get my full attention.' And it's just how I think about things," Bezos said earlier in the podcast.

"It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that," he continued,

Bezos now says he's spending most of his time at Blue Origin and has "never worked harder."

"I am working so hard, and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days," Bezos told Fridman about his current workdays after stepping down as Amazon's CEO.

"Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years," Bezos told Fridman. "And in the big, I love it, and the small, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything."

Blue Origin, which was founded by Bezos in 2000, has been competing against rivals such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. The company has developed three space vehicles thus far — the New Shepard, New Glenn, and Blue Moon.

On Tuesday, Blue Origin said it was looking to launch the New Shepard rocket into Space next week. The rocket had been grounded since September 2022 after a mid-flight failure occurred during a mission.

Representatives for Blue Origin and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

Jeff Bezos is using his Amazon lessons to boost Blue Origin as it chases Elon Musk’s SpaceX—and courting controversy along the way
Steve Mollman
Fri, December 15, 2023

Jeff Bezos wants his space cargo and tourism venture Blue Origin to move faster—much faster—as Elon Musk’s SpaceX notches one win after another.

The space rivalry between the two billionaires has been well documented. But in a long interview with the Lex Fridman Podcast posted Thursday, the Amazon founder struck a diplomatic note, acknowledging that if Musk were not a “capable leader,” building SpaceX and Tesla would be “impossible.”

Instead, Bezos spoke more about his own leadership approach at Blue Origin, saying that the “primary reason” he resigned a few years ago as CEO at Amazon—where he’s now executive chairman—was to add “some sense of urgency” to the space business he founded 23 years ago.

One way Bezos intends to accelerate Blue Origin is to speed up decision making. Whereas Amazon’s goal is to be “the world's most customer-obsessed company," he said, Blue Origin is “going to become the world’s most decisive company.”
Amazon lessons for Blue Origin

To get there, he’ll apply lessons he learned while leading Amazon for decades. Bezos described for instance the difference between two-way-door decisions and one-way-door decisions. The latter are “irreversible” and “should be elevated up to the senior executives, who should slow them down and make sure the right thing is being done.”

By way of example, he said, Blue Origin changing its mind about which propellants to use in a space vehicle’s different stages “would be a very big setback, so that’s the kind of decision you scrutinize very, very carefully.”

But mostly companies encounter two-way-door decisions, Bezos said, where if it turns out to be the wrong choice, “you can come back in and pick another door.” These decisions should be made quickly by individuals or “very small teams deep in the organization…in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.”

He’s also applying lessons learned about two “really bad” ways to reach an agreement at a company. One is compromise, where disagreeing parties settle on something that isn’t true in order to move on. For example, if they disagree on how high the ceiling is, he said, with one saying it’s 12 feet high and the other saying it’s 11, they might compromise with 11.5 feet—instead of using a tape measure to determine the actual truth.

The other mistake, which happens all the time, Bezos said, is to resolve the disagreement by “just who’s more stubborn.”

“They just have a war of attrition,” he said, “and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing.”

At Blue Origin, Bezos tells his team to “never get to a point where you are resolving something by who gets exhausted first. Escalate that. I'll help you make the decision.”
Launching controversy

But Bezos’s proximity to both Amazon and Blue Origin has led to controversy. A notable example is with Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which intends to challenge SpaceX’s well-established Starlink by also offering broadband internet access around the globe via satellites in low Earth orbit.

Last year, Amazon announced the launch partners for getting its planned 3,000-plus Kuiper satellites into orbit. While it contracted Bezos’s own Blue Origin—along with Europe’s Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin—for up to 83 launches, it notably snubbed Musk’s SpaceX.

That prompted Amazon investors to sue the company’s leadership, alleging they “excluded the most obvious and affordable launch provider, SpaceX, from its procurement process because of Bezos’s personal rivalry with Musk.” The investors also said there was a “glaring conflict of interest,” with Amazon funneling money to Blue Origin when Bezos owned the latter and was executive chairman of the former. This week, Amazon sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, 10 days after announcing an agreement with SpaceX for three launches of its Kuiper satellites.

“The claims in the shareholder lawsuit had no impact on our procurement plans for Project Kuiper, including our recently disclosed launch agreement with SpaceX,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune. “The claims in that suit are completely without merit, and we look forward to showing that through the legal process.”
SpaceX success

Either way, Amazon and Blue Origin have watched Musk’s space company race ahead in important areas.

In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a sole contact worth $2.9 billion for its lunar landing system. Blue Origin, which had competed for what it thought would be two contracts, sued the space agency over the decision, but it lost the case later that year.

Meanwhile Amazon’s Project Kuiper is trying to catch up with Starlink but has a long way to go.

Starlink, which offers broadband service globally, including in remote areas, already has more than 5,000 satellites in operation. Its satellites can beam data to one another using more than 8,000 lasers across the constellation, making for a faster, more reliable service.

In contrast to this flurry of progress, Amazon launched two prototype satellites only in October, announcing this week that they had successfully used lasers to beam data between them.

In the meantime Starlink is racing ahead, with more than 2 million active users. Costco recently began selling Starlink receivers, and this week SpaceX received U.S. approval to test direct-to-cell calls via Starlink in partnership with T-Mobile.

This year, SpaceX has notched more than 90 successful launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and it's become a juggernaut in the industry. It hit a near $180 billion valuation this week based on an ongoing secondary share sale, making it one of the world’s most valuable private companies.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Jeff Bezos says floating at zero gravity felt like a 'return to the womb'

AMAZING HE REMEMBERS FLOATING IN THE WOMB

Polly Thompson
Fri, December 15, 2023

Jeff Bezos has spoken to podcaster Lex Fridman about what going to space feels like.

He said that reaching zero gravity felt like a "return to the womb."

Bezos first journeyed to space on one of his Blue Origin rockets in July 2021.

The sensation of floating in space at zero gravity felt like returning to the womb for Jeff Bezos.

The billionaire Amazon founder traveled to space in July 2021 as part of Blue Origin's first passenger spaceflight.

Alongside his brother Mark and two other passengers, Bezos floated in a weightless capsule at zero gravity for about three minutes before gravity began pulling it back to Earth.

He shared his feelings about the experience in the latest episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which went live on Thursday.

"I'll tell you something very interesting: zero gravity feels very natural. I don't know if it's because it's like a return to the womb," he said.

"You just confirmed you're an alien," joked Fridman.

Bezos said that he wasn't at all nervous about the experience and that the whole crew was struck with the overview effect — the overwhelming feelings people experience when seeing Earth from space — while looking down at Earth.

"It was an incredible experience and we were laughing inside the capsule, and were not nervous," Bezos told Fridman.

"You see how fragile the Earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one," he added.

During their two-hour interview, Bezos also discussed his vision for the future of humanity and told Fridman that he'd stepped down as Amazon CEO so that he could concentrate more on Blue Origin.

"Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years," Bezos told Fridman.

The rocket company, which Bezos founded in 2000, has so far developed three space vehicles: the New Shepard, the New Glenn, and Blue Moon.

Blue Origin may try to launch the New Shepard again next week after more than 15 months of delays because of a mid-flight failure.