Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is seeking to use the escalating conflict between U.S. President Donald Trump and SpaceX owner Elon Musk to strengthen his company’s position in the battle for key government space contracts, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing sources.
The rivalry between Musk and Bezos has been intense for years, but SpaceX has pulled far ahead. Musk’s company holds a dominant position among NASA and Pentagon contractors. In April, the U.S. Space Force awarded its largest-ever package of launch contracts for 2027–2032: SpaceX secured 28 missions worth $5.9 billion, while Blue Origin received just 7 missions worth $2.4 billion. Since 2020, SpaceX has remained the only U.S. company delivering astronauts to the ISS.
Within Blue Origin, executives have long voiced concerns that Musk’s closeness to Trump could skew contract awards in SpaceX’s favor. But the current fallout between the two billionaires offers Bezos’s company a chance to shift the balance.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Jeff Bezos has spoken with Donald Trump by phone at least twice recently. During these conversations, sources say, the president expressed strong interest in seeing a crewed mission to the Moon before the end of his second term. Shortly afterward, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp visited the White House and met with presidential chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Additionally, sources told WSJ that Bezos tried to curry favor with Trump by inviting him to his upcoming wedding, scheduled to take place in Venice on the last weekend of June. However, the president is unlikely to attend—the sources noted that his schedule for that period is already fully booked.
During Donald Trump's first term, relations with Jeff Bezos were tense. The president accused the Amazon owner of using his newspaper, The Washington Post, to systematically attack the administration. At Trump's urging, an investigation was launched into Amazon's contracts with the U.S. Postal Service—he claimed the company was receiving unjustified government benefits.
By his second term, the rhetoric had shifted. During the election campaign, The Washington Post declined to endorse Kamala Harris—breaking with the paper’s nearly half-century tradition of supporting the Democratic nominee. Bezos publicly backed the decision, and according to WSJ, Trump privately thanked him for it.
Bezos has built ties with the president’s inner circle: he befriended Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, and his company Amazon paid a record $40 million for the rights to a documentary film about Melania Trump—the largest sum the company has ever paid for a nonfiction project.
Nevertheless, a key obstacle for Blue Origin in its competition with SpaceX for federal contracts remains its technological lag. As The Wall Street Journal notes, Bezos’s company must "convincingly demonstrate that it can reliably and regularly launch its rocket into orbit."
The heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, developed by Blue Origin, launched for the first time only this January. While it reached orbit, the booster failed to land successfully, and a second launch—initially planned for spring—had to be postponed. SpaceX, by contrast, expects to carry out around 170 Falcon launches this year—a proven rocket that has become the workhorse of the U.S. space program.
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