[laurowyn]

My point is he could buy a lot of time to save the business. He's not "running out of time". The entire article just feels like: woe is the billionaire's pet project failing because it's not profitable in an unreasonably short amount of time despite plenty of cash availability if said billionaire wants to continue and achieve their original goals.

[dionysus_jon]

Is 20 years an unreasonable amount of time?

[laurowyn]

Where did anybody expect Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic by this point? 17-20 years of R&D, building on decades of rocket science and space exploration, consulting with NASA et al. and between the three of them, only 1 has been able to send humans into orbit and that was only very recent.

20 years to go from a pile of cash and no experience, to a full production line of safe orbit-capable launch vehicles is a very big ask. SpaceX has achieved that, but at the cost of many of its employees (just look at the press around SpaceX working conditions).

Yes, it's longer than the time between the Mercury missions and Apollo 11, but the 50s-60s era of space travel was significantly higher risk. If corners could be cut in the same way, no doubt 20 years would have been fairly reasonable. Add in an existing presence in space R&D and the shorter time frames of the space shuttle program seem even more reasonable. But that just isn't possible in today's safety first world.

[robertlagrant]

Equity in Amazon is not the same as cash.

[colinmhayes]

Well luckily we have markets that can quickly turn equity in Amazon into cash. Bezos has in fact been doing that to the tune of billions of dollars a year to fund Blue Origin. I don't see him stopping any time soon.

[LightG]

Come on, cut it out ... I've heard this time and time and again in relation to billionaires.

It might as well be.

It doesn't take a genius to leverage equity ... and Bezos will have effective financial genius working for him.

[robertlagrant]

I disagree. This is worth saying because:

1) time and time again, particularly in the media, I hear net worth bandied about as though it's the same as cash. Bezos is worth X billion - think what that cash would pay for!

2) billions in equity can't be translated into billions in cash. Millions, for sure. But not billions.

3) any statements that talk about taxing the rich inevitably seem to come down to transferring equity to the state over time based on a current stock market valuation.

All of the above seem misinformed and/or a bad idea, and worth trying to establish fundamental understanding in this area. If you already have that understanding then that's fantastic.

[nradov]

Several million stock investors would beg to differ.