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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."
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?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"Owning" a business that you do not actually manage is called an investment. In this case, it's an investment into protecting Amazon when the federal government finally decides to separate Amazon and Amazon Web Services (or some other carving of Amazon). Bezos runs Amazon quite well, although clearly by making some pretty one-sided deals while the company also seemingly legally cheats on its taxes.
And turning a mansion into a single-family home for a billionaire is not exactly a project versus something that his assistants likely ping him about from time to time while someone paid to make it the best place based on his input does the work.
Finally, $1 billion is an unimaginable amount of money to most of us, but it's a drop in the bucket for a company that is looking to build rockets that launch reusable spacecraft into space, built by top engineers based in the US with US citizenship and just outside of Seattle, Washington. To put this into perspective:
To be fair, $1 billion is still almost 1% of his wealth every year (not that he feels it) and for a few years it was actually a little more than 1%. It is a lot of money, but I would love to see a lot more of that wealth shared within his company rather than shitting on everyone beneath himself as he leapt toward becoming the richest person in the world. Amazon is known for its terrible work environment (in the software groups as well) and it's also known for not giving great raises once you are able to become a part of the company. Yet it has single-handedly propelled him to become the richest person alive.
Maybe instead of spreading this puff piece around, we can perhaps try to influence him to use his wealth for Blue Origin and his existing companies. He could use Amazon to do amazing things for the world, including his employees, rather than drowning out competitors while paying no taxes.
Newegg is dead to me. They refuse to collect sales tax and turn over sales info to the state on purchases. Amazon does collect the sales tax. Newegg is a last resort now.