Looking for more stocks for your radar? Get 50% off our Stock Advisor service just by going to . Plus, Bloomberg senior editor Brad Stone shares how Amazon secretly developed the Echo, which cities were the real finalists to be the home of HQ2, and other insights from his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. Jason Moser and Ron Gross analyze those stories and share two stocks on their radar: Home Depot and Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical. Krispy Kreme plots a return to the public markets. Bill Ackman orders up a 6% stake in Domino’s Pizza.
AMAZON UNBOUND SOFTWARE
The Trade Desk and Unity Software both fall despite encouraging 1st-quarter reports. DoorDash shares rev 20% on upbeat guidance. Marriott International and Airbnb find room for improvement.
And last month, a Blue Origin-led bid to land humans on the Moon for NASA lost out to SpaceX for a high-profile and lucrative contract.Disney+ subscriber growth falls short of Wall Street’s expectations. When it came to the latest round of national security launch contracts, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won the business, with Blue left on the sidelines.
(A first crewed flight is likely to finally occur in July.)Īnd what about those government contracts? Blue Origin has been largely shut out. But whereas SpaceX has launched 100 rockets to orbit since then, more than 1,500 of its own satellites, and several crews of NASA astronauts, Blue Origin has only flown New Shepard about a dozen times, without any people on board. At the time, both companies, led by billionaires, seemed on the cusp of a great space race. Partly because of this slow development pace, Blue Origin has in some ways become even less competitive with SpaceX since Bezos' meetings in fall 2016. These leaders, alongside Smith, built a culture of caution rather than deliberate risk-taking in order to move more quickly. Many of his senior hires came from Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce, and other legacy companies. From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time. In filling out his leadership team, Smith brought in people from companies not known for disruption but rather traditional space practices. AdvertisementĪs the book makes clear, in seeking to compete with SpaceX, Bezos made a mistake with the hiring of Smith as CEO. was that Bezos was frustrated that the government was funding Elon Musk’s space dreams and wanted to get in on the action."Īt the time, Bezos was telling colleagues that he wanted to "get paid to practice" with launching and landing the New Glenn rocket. Nevertheless, the story ULA execs eventually heard from employees at Blue. "Blue later disputed the notion that its execs stopped talking to counterparts at ULA. "Executives from the two companies stopped talking tensions were so high that they walked past one another in the halls of the annual Space Symposium that year without acknowledging one another," Stone writes. Significant fallout ensued a few years later when Blue Origin announced its plans to build the large New Glenn rocket that would compete with Vulcan. The book also delves into the 2014 decision by United Launch Alliance to purchase BE-4 rocket engines from Blue Origin for its Vulcan rocket. Most of all, Bezos wanted to start winning government contracts like SpaceX. Smith was hired to lead Blue Origin through a transition from its startup phase, with just a few hundred employees, to become a major player in the space business. (A source confirmed this to Ars.)įollowing a yearlong search, Bezos selected Bob Smith, a senior manager at Honeywell Aerospace. Shotwell, who had worked for SpaceX almost from the beginning of its founding in 2002, quickly turned down the opportunity.
According to Stone's book, this process included an inquiry to SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell. But there is a chapter devoted to Blue Origin that reveals a business in distress.Īfter the fall 2016 meetings, Bezos informed company President Rob Meyerson that he would hire a chief executive officer for Blue Origin for the first time. Authored by Brad Stone, the book is being published today, and much of the narrative deals with Bezos' much more valuable retail business. This anecdote is recounted in Amazon Unbound, a new book about the rise of Bezos and Amazon over the last decade. Further Reading Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket is delayed for years.