Jeff Bezos Says He Liquidates a $1 Billion of Amazon Stock Every Year To Pay For His Rocket Company Blue Origin (businessinsider.com)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spends a tiny fraction of his net worth to fund Blue Origin, the aerospace company he started in 2000. From a report: For a man worth $127 billion, that tiny fraction amounts to $1 billion a year, which he gets by liquidating Amazon stock, Bezos said at an Axel Springer awards event in Berlin, Germany, hosted by Business Insider's US editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell. "The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," he said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. "Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune." Bezos said he planned to continue funding the company through that annual tradition long into the future. Bezos famously has numerous projects. He runs Amazon, owns The Washington Post, and is working on turning a mansion in Washington, DC, into a single-family home, to name a few. None of these, he said, are as relevant or as worthy of his money as Blue Origin, which he called "the most important work I'm doing."

Comments

Meanwhile

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Meanwhile, Amazon employees in warehouses are scraping together money to buy their kids a model rocket kit for Christmas.

Man, I wish I could afford just one of his toys from the summary.

Re:Meanwhile

[alvinrod]

The problem is that Amazon would have no problem replacing any of those employees, so why should they pay any more than they currently do? People who purchase any good or service purchase at the least expensive price available to them when all else is equal or they don't possess sufficient information to discriminate otherwise, so is it any great leap to assume Amazon would behave otherwise?

If you think that's some morally repugnant statement or line of reasoning, ask yourself how you feel about illegal immigration. It generally turns out that same people who complain about poor wages for low skill workers are often the same ones that have no problem with illegal immigration. What do they expect to happen to price of unskilled labor when the available supply is increased?

Re:Meanwhile

[Cajun Hell]

When I buy stuff, I tend to usually go with the cheapest supplier. If Newegg has something for $10 less than Amazon, then I'm more likely to order from Newegg. If Amazon is cheaper, then I'm more likely to order from Amazon. (Batching issues (e.g. shipping cost) complicate things a little, of course, but it basically works like that.)

I tend to treat local stores like that too. If one grocery store is cheaper than another (for the exact same items -- the catch is that not everything is quite the same), it'll get more attention. (But distance from home or daily commute is a factor.)

As a shopper, I will definitely replace shops, and though I don't put lots of effort into competitive research (depending on what we're talking about, of course), I will use whatever info comes to my attention. If you raise or lower your prices, I'll probably notice. If I'm at a competing store and I see they're better at something, they might replace my current store.

Gosh, I wonder. Maybe everybody does that. Even .. Amazon does it? And my local grocery stores, and Costco and Wal-Mart too?

Everything involves paying somebody. But I guess there's one special type of paying somebody, where you're not supposed to shop around -- where being a cheapskate changes from a virtue to a vice.

Or maybe shopping around is just a vice in the eyes of some people. I bet those people wouldn't ever buy a disk from Newegg instead of Amazon (or vice versa, depending on which company they're supposed to be "loyal" to) just to save $10, abstaining from shopping-by-price on general principles. Now those people are rich! Probably even richer than Bezos.

Re:Spendy

[TechyImmigrant]

Wow, that's a LOT, SpaceX has said that the total cost for Falcon Heavy development was $500M, he's spending 2x that every year with zero ROI at this point. How can ULA hope to compete with a competitor taking most of the commercial launch market on one hand, and a rocket company with a sugar daddy with that deep of pockets on the other?

ULA has a much bigger sugar daddy in the form of the federal government.