Jeff Bezos says his rocket company Blue Origin will likely go public within the next few years – after one of his $150 million rockets recently exploded into a massive fireball, setting the company back in the race to catch up to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Bezos said the inking of a massive $10 billion funding round last month – which for the first time included outside investors and $2 billion of his own cash – was a signal it’s nearing time for a public listing.
“I see the financial future of Blue with some clarity now,” the billionaire Amazon founder told Fox News on Wednesday at Blue Origin’s Florida factory.
Securing the funding round meant it “probably makes sense for Blue Origin to be a public company at some point,” Bezos said, adding that a listing will likely come “several years from now.”
Bezos has plowed some $28 billion of his own capital into Blue Origin since founding the company in 2000. The company operates commercial launch services, builds payload-carrying rockets, lunar landers and rocket engines.
Last month’s funding round valued the company at $140 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Blue Origin reportedly logged $800 million in revenue last year and expects to generate about $1.4 billion in this year. Revenue could reach more than $30 billion in 2030, the company predicts.
Blue Origin has been banking on ramping up missions for its New Glenn rocket to help it rival SpaceX’s booming space business – but got a setback from the May test launch disaster which obliterated the company’s rocket and launchpad. The equipment was unmanned.
Blue Origin is preparing to return its New Glenn rocket to flight in December, Bezos said.
SpaceX held its own record smashing public listing in June, which minted Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
In the spring, Blue Origin placed a customer’s satellite in the wrong orbit, sending that firm’s stock tumbling
Bezos’s firm launched the satellite from its Cape Canaveral, Fla., area site — but it wasn’t hurled high enough. Stock for the client, AST SpaceMobile, dropped nearly 12%.
Bezos has been seeking to build a colony on the moon, in part because he said lunar soil could be used to manufacture solar cells and oxygen produced on the moon could serve as rocket propellant.
“We’ll go to Mars. We’ll do all the other things. But we need to go to the moon first,” Bezos said in the Wednesday interview, nodding to Musk’s ambitions for the red planet. “It won’t just be a mission and leave,” he said. “It’ll be a real sustainable lunar base.”