CEO of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company resigns

[throw9away6]

I heard that the management culture at blue was pretty toxic and Bob was a big part of the problem. They have many super talented hard working engineers but are run by accountants and a bunch of Boeing management rejects. That is a huge cause of organizational problems.

[travisporter]

Ya I just linked above to an ars tech article

[ryzvonusef]

IIRC, Bezos used to sell $1Bn worth of Amazon stock every year to fund Blue Origin, not sure what the funding format is now.

Blue Origin is proof that just throwing money at a problem does not achieve results, and saying the Musk's only contribution to SpaceX to was "using his money to buy success" is a fallacy.

I don't how much you can look into his "engineering" prowess.. but clearly it was more than zero.

[camgunz]

I think there are more than 2 factors (money, benefactor) involved in the success/failure of a space company.

[leoh]

So is Google X, fwiw

[allthecybers]

This is a head scratcher for sure. Replace a bad CEO who over hired relative to productivity, with a guy who presided over an unprofitable consumer hardware business and had to layoff 10,000 people. You’d think between Amazon and the Bezos bucks they’d be able to find someone better.

[throw9away6]

I don’t hear that blue over hired. They seem to be severely short headcount for the work that needs to be done. I think it’s more that inefficient management structure failed to capture process improvements so everything is just really hard and inefficient on a day to day pace. Most resources are dedicated to firefighting so it’s hard to make improvements. I had heard that Amazon had similar problems and instead of fixing recurring systematic process problems the Amazon model is to throw headcount at the problem.

[raydiatian]

If a rocket company CEO can be replaced by an e-tail company exec, what do CEOs do that warrant such high earnings again

[SilverBirch]

There a few snarky answers to your question but the real answer is simple: what CEOs do is extremely hard, they don't just need to build a rocket, they need to build a 1,000 person team capable of producing rockets. Despite what some people may think there's no 1 person who has all the knowledge required to put a rocket into space, so the CEO is responsible for bringing all that knowledge together. Take a look at the flip-side - this bad CEO has been basically fired, how many billions of dollars do you think he cost Bezos through his failure? Would you have paid someone twice his salary if you thought they could do better?

[geodel]

Nothing much really. It is just they know a guy personally who can pay their high salary. If you know also someone like that just go get your high earning.

[mensetmanusman]

They remind us that we are all gorillas more quickly than others.

[nico]

They network very effectively with other high net worth people

[kristianp]

https://archive.is/G7hfA

[travisporter]

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/bob-smith-is-finally-g...

[kristianp]

Blue Origin is a joke. They seem to spend most of there effort building buildings. And the engines they're supplying for Vulcan Rockets are delayed.