I used to be about halfway through Lex Fridman’s interview with Jeff Bezos, which is longer than , when I noticed what Bezos was as much as: this can be a warning shot across SpaceX’s bow. “Blue Origin must be much faster,” Bezos said. “It’s one in all the explanations I left my role because the CEO of Amazon a few years ago. I desired to are available — Blue Origin needs me right away.” The goal, he said, was to make it clear that Blue Origin, his rocket company, needed to hurry things up.
Bezos also demonstrated that he understands how shade works: “Once I was the CEO of Amazon, my standpoint on that is, ‘If I’m the CEO of a publicly traded company, it’s going to get my full attention.’” He didn’t say “Tesla” and didn’t should. Anyone who watches Fridman goes to know which billionaire he’s talking about.
Look, I like my little jokes about Bezos, but I take him seriously. He is concentrated and determined; he does little or no and not using a specific reason. So when he and his gun show appear on a podcast, I assume he has a purpose and listen accordingly. Fridman’s podcast is right since it has a following among the many tech elite, and since Fridman is a softball interviewer. (He couldn’t even get Bezos to disclose how much he curls!) But that’s not the one thing it’s got going for it. Fridman has a detailed association with Elon Musk — he rocketed to fame on the back of a controversial study of Tesla, followed by an interview with Musk himself.
“We’d like to maneuver much faster and we’re going to.”
So so far as I’m concerned, Bezos coming on the Musk fanboy podcast to discuss Blue Origin’s ambitions is essentially Lyndon B. Johnson unzipping his pants.
Jeff has been busy! Besides posing for some genuinely incredible photos along with his fianceé, he’s also reconfigured leadership at Blue Origin: the CEO, the top of R&D, and the SVP of operations have all departed. The brand new CEO, Dave Limp, comes just about directly from Amazon, where he oversaw Alexa development. Recent Shepard, the suborbital rocket, is scheduled for its next launch as soon as December 18th; it’ll be the rocket’s first flight since an engine failure last yr.
Blue Origin has projected that its much-delayed Recent Glenn, the large boy rocket for shooting shit into space, will launch next yr with a NASA smallsat mission. All the things moves more slowly in space, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the launch slips to 2025, but this might be why Bezos is out here saying stuff like, “We’d like to maneuver much faster and we’re going to.”
Recent Glenn is the rocket that really poses a challenge to SpaceX; Recent Shepard is principally for space tourism. In comparison with SpaceX, Blue Origin has mostly been an also-ran. It’s been around for greater than 20 years and hasn’t yet left Earth orbit. Sure, yeah, there’s been quite a lot of big discuss an area station and a lunar lander contract, nevertheless it’s vaporware til it ships, babe. And a few of Amazon’s Kuiper satellites — meant to do internet-from-space as a challenge to SpaceX’s Starlink — will probably be counting on Recent Glenn, in addition to another as-yet-unproven rockets. Half of those satellites must go up by 2026. Heat’s on.
Space is big, but US government contracts are a contest
On the Fridman show, Bezos was careful to say that space was large enough for each him and Musk: “There’s room for a bunch of winners and it’s going to occur in any respect scale levels. And so SpaceX goes to achieve success obviously. I need Blue Origin to achieve success, and I hope there are one other five corporations right behind us.” That is a stunning PR answer — I hope Bezos gives a raise to whoever coached him into it. Space is big, but US government contracts are a contest, as he surely knows. In any case, Blue Origin sued the US government over a contract NASA awarded to SpaceX. It lost.
Coming in behind SpaceX must be galling to Bezos, who has desired to go to space since a minimum of highschool, based on Brad Stone’s In that book, Bezos’ highschool girlfriend tells Stone that the one reason Bezos earned all that cash with Amazon was to finance his space ambitions. Yeah, that’s right:
So why is Bezos out here pounding his chest now? Well, two things. Initially, the shake-up at Blue Origin is something he desires to publicize — the corporate’s going to maneuver fast now that Bezos is on the town. But second, the CEO of SpaceX spent 2023 having a really public meltdown after taking Twitter private in 2022, a process itself that resembled nothing a lot as a temper tantrum.
Musk’s ongoing involvement along with his social media platform has proved a really high-profile distraction for a person who’s already busy running a automobile company in addition to a rocket company — and that is to say nothing of his involvement with The Boring Company and Neuralink. So beyond what Bezos was saying, a part of the purpose of the podcast was he was saying it. He wasn’t twitchy, confused about his interviewer’s name, or distracted. He was calm, relaxed, and touting the advantages of getting an extended attention span. Oh, and did he mention he’s already flown on his own rocket? (Unlike some billionaires.) That’s how much he trusts Blue Origin — there was never a sliver of doubt in his mind that he and his brother wouldn’t come back.
I couldn’t help but notice how much of the interview that focused on Bezos’ leadership style provided an implicit contrast to Musk
I even have an extended attention span. And I couldn’t help but notice how much of the interview that focused on Bezos’ leadership style provided an implicit contrast to Musk. As we learned from Walter Isaacson’s recent hagiography, Musk’s leadership style is “my way or the highway.” In contrast, Bezos told Fridman that “you would like to arrange your culture in order that probably the most junior person can overrule probably the most senior person in the event that they have data.” He emphasized that he had often made decisions he personally disagreed with because his subordinate who advocated for that call was “closer to the bottom truth than I’m.”
It is a fun spin! Bezos is well often known as a spectacularly abrasive leader. And while Bezos told Fridman that he often spoke last in meetings in order to not taint his subordinates’ decisions, he didn’t mention that sometimes he said things like, “If I hear that concept again, I’m gonna should kill myself” or “Are you lazy or simply incompetent?” Individuals with long attention spans are sometimes unpleasant, since we even have long memories.
Still, if you happen to’re an American government bureaucrat who’s beginning to get twitchy about Musk doing things like, I dunno, replatforming Alex Jones, or retweeting antisemitic conspiracy theories, or scaring away the advertisers that make up 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, Blue Origin starts to look more appealing. Bezos is a minimum of behaving in public like a grownup, though as he points out, tactfully, about Musk, “you’ll be able to’t know anyone by their public persona.” But on this case, public perception matters. If Musk is radioactive to wide swaths of the general public and government — not an impossibility! — that advantages Bezos. Sure, SpaceX is definitely Gwynne Shotwell’s show, but so long as Musk stays its public face, he can damage it.
So if Bezos can get Blue Origin moving with some manner of urgency, the corporate probably has a greater opportunity than it has in years to eat SpaceX’s lunch. Lots has to go right for that, starting with the Recent Glenn launch, nevertheless it’s not inconceivable. Why was Jeff Bezos on Lex Fridman’s podcast? To inform the world: daddy’s home.