Jeff Bezos has invested $30 billion in Blue Origin since its founding in 2000, an extraordinary commitment from the Amazon.com founder into a company that aims to rival SpaceX.
Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal discuss that investment, which has helped Blue Origin become a large space company with sites around the country, around 15,000 employees and an ambitious growth plan.
The total investment includes $2 billion that Bezos is putting into Blue Origin as part of the company's first-ever capital raise that includes outside investors. The company has already raised $10 billion for the oversubscribed round, which values the company at $140 billion, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter.
Blue Origin may close the funding round with more than the $10 billion it initially targeted, the people said.
Bezos is one of the wealthiest people in the world, with his fortune based on his transformation of Amazon into an e-commerce and cloud-computing giant. His net worth stood at $275 billion in late September, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and he has sold Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin.
The company has also been sharpening its operations, conducting a major layoff last year and stopping suborbital tourism flights. Blue Origin Chief Executive Dave Limp has emphasized accelerating missions and technical developments inside the company since taking the job almost three years ago, and it is hungry to deliver for customers like NASA.
In 2025, the closely held company generated $800 million in revenue, according to the documents. But it said in the documents it expects to produce about $1.4 billion in revenue this year, with that number soaring to more than $30 billion in 2030.
Part of the expected revenue would be derived from a satellite-communications business that hasn't launched any devices to orbit yet, and a planned fleet of artificial-intelligence satellites. A big chunk would emerge from demand for rocket launches, the documents said.
Across its business lines, Blue Origin faces competition with other rocket operators and satellite and spacecraft firms-but especially from Elon Musk's SpaceX., the industry leader. Blue Origin, according to the documents, will be able to cut what it called SpaceX's lead with its New Glenn vehicles.
New Glenn is a massive vehicle with a reusable booster. Blue Origin has conducted three missions with the rocket so far, but hasn't flown since a vehicle blew up on a Florida launchpad in May. The company is redeveloping that complex.
Last year, Bezos said in an interview there was plenty of room for winners in the space industry.
"SpaceX is going to be successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there's some company out there right now that hasn't even been founded yet that is also going to be successful," he said at the time.
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