It's a good summary, but I'm not sure the repeated digs at Bezos are really necessary. I think anyone who would bother to read this already gets the differences. Not sure that he really needs to point out, twice, that height doesn't matter at that stage of testing.
Edit: Just got to the end and saw this was prior to launch, so before Bezos' "welcome to the club" tweet. I guess in that context it's a bit more subtle at least, but still seems like he was making a point of the difference from Blue Origin.
> Or you know, it could be that he has invested $10 billion into building Blue Origin over 21 years and likes his company and wants to wear the uniform because he's proud of it (even if you think lowly of it).
That makes as much sense as a NFL team owner suiting up with helmet and shoulder pads just because his team is playing.
I guess Bezos is free to dress up as an astronaut whenever he feels like it and gets out of bed, but is that something that happens whenever Blue Origin doesn't summon the media to do a press release?
love the (intentional?) irony that the first 20 something paragraphs say absolutely nothing besides "bezos like longform narrative, and he wrote it in a very short email once".
A run down on the tech and some key employees credited with contributions would've made it more interesting for me. Something a little more than Bezos + 1 second. This article sounds a lot like the Jobs hating ones, just from a positive perspective.
Anyway Bezos has obviously already done tons for Amazon. The article does nothing to boost Amazon's image and it's a weak attempt at boosting Jeff's.
He clearly understands the value of PR. Take Tesla cars for instance, they are certainly good electric cars, but they are even better sold. It is a car you want even if you've never seen one. SpaceX launches are shows, they even managed to make failures look awesome.
How a man that puts so much attention in his companies image can forget about his own. His unhinged nature is his public persona. In fact, the only time I think he messed up was with the "pedo" accusation. It is possible that the joint incident was planned: if you consider it carefully, he smoked where it is legal, just once, and then came out saying that he doesn't like the high. It totally matches the adventurous, laid back but clear minded image he wants to project.
Jeff Bezos on the opposite doesn't really care about PR. His Twitter is generic, I'm not even sure if he actually reads it, let alone write it. For a company dealing directly with consumers, Amazon is rather low profile, they simply deliver, and make money. As for Blue Origin, they are quite secretive, completely unlike SpaceX. That's this lack of PR that made him a villain.
> There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs.
Or you know, it could be that he has invested $10 billion into building Blue Origin over 21 years and likes his company and wants to wear the uniform because he's proud of it (even if you think lowly of it). Bezos is very well known to be a space nerd.
Mind that Bezos also has his own aerospace company -- Blue Origin -- so it'd in fact be in his interest to report negatively about SpaceX. (If you subscribe to the theory that he's personally interfering with WaPo's editorial choices, which I do not.)
I read about Bezos in Google+ (it was by Steve Yegge, I suppose) and from that, it seemed like he is a jerk but more importantly, a visionary, not unlike Steve Jobs.
Edit: Just got to the end and saw this was prior to launch, so before Bezos' "welcome to the club" tweet. I guess in that context it's a bit more subtle at least, but still seems like he was making a point of the difference from Blue Origin.
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