Blue Origin to seek private funding beyond Jeff Bezos
For the first time Blue Origin now intends to raise additional outside private funding, $10 billion total, beyond the billions Jeff Bezos has been investing in company for the past decade.
In a memo sent to employees on Wednesday and seen by Business Insider, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the company would raise [$10 billion in] funds at a $130 billion valuation.
…The New York Times’ DealBook earlier reported on the raise and said it is being led by asset management firm Coatue Management with a $2 billion contribution from Bezos.
By my count in 2020, Bezos had pumped somewhere between $2 to $6 billion into Blue Origin, the funds coming from sales of his Amazon stock beginning in 2017. With this new investment round, he will have committed another $2 billion.
Unlike the earlier funding from Bezos, however, this new investment is occurring with Limp as the company’s CEO. When the previous funding occurred the company’s CEO was Bob Smith, who essentially wasted mor than five years from 2017 to 2023 accomplishing nothing. No rockets got built, engine development was delayed endlessly, and good engineers were seen fleeing the company. Since Limp took over in 2024 he has aggressively worked to change the moribund culture he inherited from Smith. Under his leadership this funding could really make a difference.
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“from 2017 to 2023 accomplishing nothing. No rockets got built, engine development was delayed endlessly, and good engineers were seen fleeing the company. ”
$50 bucks says this is the management style still taught in most MBA programs. Think Boeing.
SpaceX could start an MBA program teaching their processes and it would revolutionize American industry.
It does appear to me that Limp is trying very hard, with some success, to bring the right kind of thinking to Blue Origin that we see at SpaceX.
Note too that what SpaceX does is actually the traditional way American companies functioned until the 1970s. About then they were captured by the government and the “military-industrial complex”, which dictated from Washington how things would be done. The result was Boeing and all the big space companies and their inability to compete and innovate.
Competition and freedom is bringing old Yankee ingeniuty back. I think by the end of 2027 we shall be see it flying in space in very bright colors.
Limp is rather like Bruno….doing the best he can under a stingy leadership.