CEO of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company resigns
washingtonpost.comI 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.
Ya I just linked above to an ars tech article
They hired a guy that is at best “mid” to replace guy that was proven terrible. It’s not looking great… Youll know it’s really gone downhill when they hire a woman to take the fall after a bunch of generic executives tanked the company.
It would be nice if along with the link you would provide information about what the link is about.
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.
I think there are more than 2 factors (money, benefactor) involved in the success/failure of a space company.
Exactly.
Bezos' thought that if he was a benevolent benefactor and a good money source, if he gave Blue Origin a blank check and let them loose to "do rocketry", he would get good results.
But his laissez-faire approach didn't make him a good boss, it made him a bad one. Blue Origin runs along like a headless chicken. He wouldn't have tolerated this shit in Amazon, why does he tolerate this in Blue Origin?
But Musk proves that you need to get into the weeds, you need to manage it yourself, and ask the weird questions no one else dares ask.
It's one thing to look at an invoice for a "rocket radio" for $25k or whatever and go, "I guess that's what it costs, here is the money, go buy two and a coffee for yourself".
It's another thing to go "hang on a second! why exactly does it cost that much, why can't we use a $600 one that's commercially available?"
Musk gets a lot of flak for not "listening to the experts" but him ignoring them and asking "but why?" like a toddler is what allowed SpaceX to massively cut not only cost but also time, a far valuable thing.
This meant he did a lot of stupid things... but it also allowed him to discover a lot of pitfalls where a commercially available part was just as useful for the task as something "rocket grade".
There are two anecdotes that prove this. (giving the cliff notes version, you can read his biographies to learn more about these)
In one test, he tried to fix something by cutting away the broken part and taking the fuel penalty caused by the part being shorter (but still under the fuel budget margin).
Naturally people said you shouldn't try such hacks and should just replace the part... but he tried and it worked and even NASA was impressed by it. He ended up discovering his margins and saved time, allowing them to proceed through the rest of the testing process.
In another test, he tried to fix something by trying to glue something that should have been replaced. It ended up failing, and rightly people would say he was stupid to not listen to the experts... but here is what I took from it.
For one, Bezos wouldn't be caught dead trying to glue things himself, he would never get his hands dirty like that...But then he wouldn't even what part was broken to attempt a hack anyways. He doesn't have the lay of the land like Musk does.
But secondly, it shows how two billionaires with open chequebooks approach things differently. One would just cut a cheque to replace it, but learn nothing new... another would say, sure I will cut the cheque afterwards, but while we are here, why not try something risky?
If it works, we learnt something new, if not, I had the cheque book handy anyways.
I feel this approach is why SpaceX works. YMMV
The only reports we have of what Musk does at SpaceX are by people on his payroll, so we actually have no idea what he does at SpaceX.
Incorrect. We have reports from NASA employees who were there to monitor performance, and they talked to Ashlee Vance (1st biography author) and the other guy (Walter? the guy who wrote the second one)
there are also youtube videos of NASA employees discussing these things as part of their report on the Commercial setup.
So we do have 3rd party evidence. Not all of it make him look nice, but it does mention him, which proves his presence (or meddling, however you want to look at it) in the thick of things.
Yeah, they're all beholden in some way to the success of SpaceX or access for their books.
I'm not a Musk basher, I mean I do think he has behavior problems on X and runs constant pump and dumps in crypto, but I don't think he's an idiot or incompetent or what have you. I think Tesla and SpaceX are incredible achievements. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are like, "and it was all Musk, this proves it", which to me feels like an impossible claim to prove. Don't thousands of people work at SpaceX? Isn't it possible they're better at engineering, or had better luck?
I am talking about Musk vs Bezos, and how each one's leadership affects their respective organisation's performance.
Ceteris Paribus, given two billionaires, both with the ability to hire the thousands of excellent employees you mention, why does one succeed while the other doesn't?
The excellent employees at both organisations cancel out and we left with the two billionaire leaders and hence why we talk about them and not the employees.
> Ceteris Paribus
There's no such thing as ceteris paribus when it comes to organizations where thousands of people work, doing insanely complex work. There's literally way too many variables.
So is Google X, fwiw
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.
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.
If a rocket company CEO can be replaced by an e-tail company exec, what do CEOs do that warrant such high earnings again
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?
Yeah a good ceo would have saved a ton of money but where are you going to find one? It’s not like the system produces people who effectively quash toxic managing culture. More than likely the system and incentives actually promote the most toxic folks to the top. You would probably have equal or better results by promoting a promising mid level leader that’s still in touch with the group floor reality.
It depends on the situation. There are cases where the organization wants to do everything and you need a leader who will force them to prioritize. There are cases where you have several internal groups with competing objectives and need a leader who can get them to cooperate. There are cases where everyone is already moving in the right direction and you need a leader who will take all the stops out. There are cases where bold and perhaps unpopular decisions need to be made and seen through.
If you have a CEO who is currently stingy about making process improvements that aren't sexy and is focused largely on office politics and that's not what the company needs at the moment, promoting someone who has been down in the trenches is a great option. Conversely if a company is bloated and needs to tighten its belt to survive, you might want someone who can look at it as dispassionately as possible. Really you can't look at it in terms of good or bad ceo, but rather appropriate or inappropriate.
There are often just bad ceo hires. It’s not always about picking the best tool for the best situation sometimes it’s just some dude that padded his resume the best, and got lucky to be in the right place at the right time who was likable by the right group on the board. There are a lot of duds out there that come in talk a big game and then leave a mess in their wake. In blues case though this guy was hand chosen by Besos so the only property that matters is being liked by Jeff. So who knows what he saw in him.
> 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
Maybe you could argue this is what they should be doing, but it's clearly not what they are doing. The vast majority of CEOs simply suck some of the blood out of the company before flying off an parasitizing another one. You say the other answers are snarky; I say yours is naive.
> Would you have paid someone twice his salary if you thought they could do better?
No, I would have paid a random engineer who didn't want the job 1/10th of the CEO's salary and gotten a TREMENDOUSLY better outcome.
Found the CEO
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.
They remind us that we are all gorillas more quickly than others.
They network very effectively with other high net worth people
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.