SpaceX founder Elon Musk (left) and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
AFP via Getty Images
When Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, the billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are expected to be among the select crowd of dignitaries who will watch in the Capitol Rotunda.
But when it comes to their space rivalry, Bezos’ Blue Origin isn’t in the same room as Musk’s SpaceX.
Blue Origin launched its first rocket into space on Thursday, 25 years after Bezos founded the company with the fortune he made from his e-commerce giant Amazon. SpaceX, which Musk started two years later, only took six years to reach space. Last year it successfully launched 133 rockets, accounting for over 85% of the payload mass put into orbit worldwide through the third quarter.
It’s the result of sharply contrasting approaches based partly on how they financed their companies. Bezos, who funded Blue Origin solely out of his fortune until recently, took a deliberate pace to developing his rocket technology. Musk, with a more limited bankroll to start that made failure an ever-present danger, adopted more of a classic Silicon Valley “fail fast and learn” approach.
“Engineers work really hard at SpaceX and then they burn out. Blue Origin offers a lot more stability,” said Caleb Quilty, an analyst at Quilty Space. “Over the years it became clear that it was a little bit too stable.”
Bezos has sunk $14.6 billion into Blue Origin, estimates Chad Anderson, managing partner of the investment firm Space Capital. Musk reportedly put $100 million into SpaceX to develop its first rocket, the Falcon 1, using the proceeds from the $307 million sale of Zip2, the first company he cofounded, and the $1.5 billion sale of his second, PayPal.
But Musk also got a powerful boost from Pentagon launch contracts and NASA–the latter in 2006 gave the company $278 million to develop a more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, that has become the company’s workhorse. Then in 2008, NASA gave SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to haul cargo to the International Space Station as part of a push to foster private space companies on the bet they could provide services at a lower cost. (Blue Origin has won substantial NASA contracts too, but only in the last few years.)
The credibility of big government contracts helped attract private customers and outside investors: All-told, SpaceX has raised at least $9.5 billion. That’s left Musk with only a 42% stake, but with investors bidding SpaceX’s value up to an eye-popping $350 billion as of the latest private share sale in December, his shares are worth $147 billion. (His overall net worth: $434 billion, by Forbes’ estimation, making him the world’s richest person. Bezos ranks second with $239 billion.)
Musk and Bezos were motivated by the same goal: to enable humanity to move into the stars by lowering the cost of reaching space with reusable rockets.
But where SpaceX is famously fast-paced, Blue Origin has taken a more methodical approach to developing its technology, epitomized by its motto, gradatim ferociter, Latin for “step by step, ferociously.”
While SpaceX ramped up its tempo, going from 18 Falcon 9 launches in 2017 to 60 in 2022, Blue Origin’s competing New Glenn rocket, which was initially planned to fly in 2020, remained mired in delays. In 2021, Blue Origin pulled off its first crewed suborbital flight on its New Shepard rocket, launching a service to take tourists to the edge of space. However, SpaceX had already done it one better the year before, carrying NASA astronauts well beyond, to the International Space Station. (Bezos can at least boast he’s topped Musk in one way–he was on the first New Shepard flight while Musk has yet to fly on one of his rockets.)
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, seen here during a hotfire test at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Dec. 27, stands 32 stories tall and is designed to launch 45 tons of payload into orbit— twice as much as SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Blue Origin
After stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Bezos started to spend more time at Blue Origin and grew increasingly unhappy over the slow pace, a former employee told Forbes.
“He tried to institute a bunch of metrics,” he said on condition of anonymity. “Got frustrated when that didn’t work and ultimately fired the CEO.”
Under new CEO Dave Limp, who joined the company last year from Amazon, Blue Origin doubled down on preparing New Glenn for its first flight and ramping up production of its powerful Be-4 engines, which are also being used by the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.
While it’s taken a quarter century for Blue Origin to take its first shot at space, it’s built infrastructure for mass rocket launches that SpaceX only put together gradually after reaching orbit.
Blue Origin has developed manufacturing facilities expected to produce over 100 Be-4 engines in 2025, and multiple boosters to support a pace of 12 launches a year.
The space industry is eager for Blue Origin to succeed and provide an alternative to the near-monopoly that SpaceX has seized on launching cargo into space. New Glenn has roughly double the carrying capacity of Falcon 9, and Blue Origin is selling launches at a significantly lower price per satellite, the former employee told Forbes–around $110 million, versus $70 million for Falcon 9.
But SpaceX is deep into testing an even larger rocket, Starship (its second stage blew up in flight late Thursday). The 400-foot-tall spacecraft will enable it to ramp up the buildout of its satellite communications business, Starlink. Investors are more excited about Starlink’s prospects than SpaceX’s launch operations, where generally profits are tough to come by.
“Musk realized pretty early on that he would make more money in the internet business than he was going to in the rocket business,” said Henry.
Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that SpaceX reaped $14.2 billion in revenue last year, with 65% coming from Starlink. They predict Starlink alone will bring in $48 billion in revenue in 2030 and account for 83% of a fat total net income of $16 billion.
The business prospects for Blue Origin are less clear. It has a healthy book of launch contracts for companies building competing satellite constellations to Starlink, including Amazon’s Kuiper network. The U.S. government wants to use Blue Origin to launch national security satellites, and in the last three years it’s won funding from NASA: $3.4 billion to build a lunar lander and $172 million to develop a commercial space station.
Bezos’ ultimate goal is to use Blue Origin to create a space economy where manufacturing moves off planet and the Earth can be environmentally restored.
“I’m sure as a businessman, he has a vision for how to also do that profitably,” said Henry. “But what that is, I don’t know.”
With reporting from Phoebe Liu, Matt Durot and Alex Knapp.
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