Untangling the Jeff Bezos web: Who pays for the billionaire's space lust?
In the beginning there was Jeff Bezos. He created Amazon in 1994 and became filthy rich in the decades that followed, reaching a net worth exceeding $241 billion in 2025.
Bezos has used a portion of his accumulated wealth on such things as The Washington Post newspaper (2013), a divorce (2019), and a Venice destination wedding for his second wife (2025), among other splurges.
Yet Blue Origin, his privately held aerospace company, has been his most ambitious and costly endeavor outside of Amazon, one that has consumed increasingly large amounts of money since he founded it almost 25 years ago. Casual observers conflate Blue Origin with Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband satellite network and it's easy to see the confusion, since Bezos founded both. But while there are connective threads between the two, the companies march to very different beats and it remains unanswered if Blue Origin will have as great an impact on the world as Amazon.
Bezos has been a devout space advocate for decades. As high school valedictorian, he told his graduating class he dreamed of the day when mankind would colonize space and leave Earth to be a big nature preserve, as reported by The Atlantic in 2019. His beliefs remained steadfast throughout his time at Princeton University, where he became president of the local Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) chapter.
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