Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos knows how to do maths well and does not discount. Leaving Amazon in the summer of 2021, the company founder has gradually stepped away from the business to enjoy life with Laura Sánchez, his partner, after his divorce from ex-wife MacKenzie Scott. Like all major partners of hi-tech giants, Bezos continues to make so much money and inflate his wealth that he remains in second place in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind only Elon Musk.
Bezos has recently returned to the limelight because, according to a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, he plans to sell 50 million Amazon shares by January 2025. A move that, according to the current value of the shares, would secure him $8.7 billion. At the moment, it has completed almost half of the plan, placing 24 million shares on the market with revenues of $4 billion. A huge figure that, however, represents just 2% of Bezos’s wealth, still holding over 980 million Amazon shares, a figure equal to 9% of a company valued at $1,750 billion.
From Seattle to Miami to avoid paying taxes
Staggering numbers that after a life devoted to working to grow his creature, Bezos decided to enjoy by leaving Seattle, Washington State, to move to Miami. Florida’s main city’s sun, beaches and entertainment are undoubtedly attractive. However, good Jeff claims that the reason for the move was the desire to be close to his parents and to the activities of Blue Origin, the space company that has one of its most active centres in Florida.
What Bezos did not say is that the move is synonymous with convenience because the state does not provide for taxes on capital gains from the sale of shares or bonds over $250,000.
In contrast to the state of Washington, which in 2022 enacted a law setting the tax rate to be paid by those who complete that type of transaction at 7%. If Amazon’s shares maintain the same current value, doubled by the end of 2022, when Bezos will sell the remaining part of the stake to be dumped, in total, the billionaire will count on more than $600 million that he would have had to pay into the public coffers, had he remained in Seattle.
The Blue Origin-SpaceX duel
Having said that with that money, he repaid himself Koru, the 127-metre yacht that cost (it seems) $500 million, together with the last two villas purchased for a total of $147 million in Indian Creek, a super-exclusive area of Miami, in Bezos’s mind, there are still thoughts of business, almost all of them focused on Blue Origin. The company, founded in September 2000, was among the first to open up the new frontier of suborbital space travel, arriving over time to build and experiment with the New Sheppard aircraft and reusable vector rockets, to the point of collaborating with NASA, which for various projects has pumped more than $35 million into Blue Origin’s coffers. In recent years, however, work has proceeded slowly, unlike that of SpaceX, which Blue Origin even sued (losing the case) after Musk’s company was awarded a $2.9 billion contract by NASA itself.
With the conquest of space being Bezos’s dream since he was a boy, the founder’s sights are set on giving Blue Origin new life to relaunch the challenge to Musk and try to win a duel with multiple meanings. A first seal has already been set because last spring, Blue Origin was awarded a $3.4 billion contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander that will transport astronauts to the lunar surface by the end of the decade (1.15 billion was the funding granted to SpaceX).
A plan in which Blue Origin will collaborate with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics, with a total investment of more than $7 billion to increase the chances of success of the Artemis programme, with which the US Space Agency aims to send astronauts to the Moon at regular intervals.
