Jeff Bezos is introducing tough management tactics from Amazon to his space tech company Blue Origin.
The billionaire founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the vision of making space travel more accessible and eventually moving heavy industry off Earth.
Funded by billions from Amazon stock sales, Blue Origin focuses mainly on reusable rockets, space tourism and lunar exploration.
The aerospace engineering company reportedly brings in just over $1 billion in revenue, but it severely lags behind Elon Musk's SpaceX, which currently generates about $8 billion in annual revenue.
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While SpaceX has already launched hundreds of missions into orbit, Blue Origin has managed just one successful orbital flight - with most of its time spent dealing with repeated launch delays.
Now, Bezos is pushing for big changes to turn things around.
In an attempt to revive his space company, Bezos has been reportedly implementing Amazon's harsh and demanding work culture and policies, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.
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According to multiple former and current senior employees, Bezos has taken a much more hands-on approach to help restructure the struggling space company.
“The euphemism among Blue Origin alumni is that Blue Origin’s track record speaks for itself,” said one former executive.
A key player in Bezos’s strategy is Dave Limp, the former head of Amazon’s devices division, who took over as Blue Origin’s CEO in late 2023.
With the change in leadership also came company layoffs.
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In February 2024, around 10% of Blue Origin's 10,000-strong workforce was let go, marking the company’s most aggressive job cuts in its 25-year history. The layoffs came just a month after Blue Origin launched its 30-storey New Glenn rocket, a major milestone that took 12 years to develop and marked the company’s move into the satellite launch industry.
“We grew and hired incredibly fast in the past few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed,” Limp told employees in an email.
Similarly, over at Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy told employees last year he would make massive middle-management cuts to make the company run like 'the world’s largest start-up.'
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Now Bezos is applying the same pressure at Blue Origin and some insiders at Blue Origin believe it was inevitable.
“Jeff wasn’t a cold-blooded competitor with SpaceX and assured the team that they needed to focus on our mission,” one former Blue Origin executive said. “But over at Amazon, he was absolutely ruthless [...] it was only a matter of time.”
Despite securing NASA contracts, including one for a lunar lander, Blue Origin has struggled to keep pace with competitors.
Several current employees said the company is undoing the bureaucratic layers built under former CEO Bob Smith.
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As the company rapidly expanded, staff had a 'natural inclination to push decisions up,' one former executive described. “We wanted to push down decision making.”