Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…Real quick on that. You more than allude to this in the book but there's a real rivalry between Elon and Bezos. Is there any more that didn't make it into the book that you found on that? I talk about it in the book how they met early on a couple of times. Elon tried to tell Jeff that some of his technical decisions were wrong. That they had really different philosophies. Bezos was constraining his investment in Blue Origin, wanted to keep the team small, and wanted to start with suborbital space. Then Elon comes and does it all 10X, gets government contracts and commercial contracts to pay for everything. Bezos is kind of left as a straggler, something that he's really not accustomed to being in second place. I think the rivalry is real. It's super entertaining to see Elon exchange barbs with Jeff over Twitter and sometimes vice versa. It'll be interesting to see whether Bezos commits more of his time to Blue Origin now that he's retiring as CEO and tries to rescue it. I do think that company is a little bit dysfunctional in terms of Bezos owning it, operating it from afar, trying to keep its headcount small. But then really, in pursuit of SpaceX, changing directions abruptly, hiring Aerospace folks from companies like Honeywell, and changing the culture on a dime. Then investing a billion dollars worth of his return from Amazon stock every year and turbocharging it. That kind of change of pace I think has yielded some dysfunctional outcomes. Look, the story there might change in the next couple of weeks. They say New Shepherd’s going to fly paying tourists to suborbital space. Maybe that'll be a big triumph and create some momentum. But right now, they're sort of years behind all their projects and promises on a lot of these new contracts, like the Blue Moon contract, they're losing the SpaceX. Josh Guttman, let's go to you next.…

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