What About Bezos?

Blue Origin, the other space-obsessed billionaire’s rocket company, isn’t that far behind SpaceX

- Brad Stone

On July 18, outside the West Texas town of Van Horn, hundreds of Blue Origin employees and their families and friends gathered to watch the New Shepard rocket blast offtoward the edge of space. The rocket performed the kind of feat that was once the province of sci-fistories and discarded NASA white papers. It took off vertically like a conventional rocket, rose 66 miles above Earth to jettison a parachute- equipped crew capsule carrying a test dummy, then returned to the same tract of land and gracefully landed upright, drag brakes deployed, retro booster flaming. The capsule touched down nearby, raising a cloud of dust. Thousands watched this precise interplay of physics and chemistry online, and for those listening closely, 39 minutes and 15 seconds into the broadcast, a familiar, staccato laugh could be heard emanating from the control room: It sounded as if Blue Origin’s founder, JeffBezos, was having a very good day.

He’s been having a lot of those lately. With a fortune of about $150 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he’s the wealthiest person in the world. By a lot. He’s worth approximately one Bill Gates and two and a half Elon Musks. One of his other companies, Amazon.com Inc., is now the world’s second-most valuable corporation and has turned an other wise dreary summer day in retail into Prime Day, one of the busiest shopping events of the year. President Trump is attacking Bezos again on Twitter for, as Trump tweets it, using the Washington Post as a lobbying arm; cities are courting him to secure Amazon’s second headquarters; and investors have bid its stock up almost 150 percent over the past two years.