#38 The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

**David Senra** (0:00)
Some 50 years after the advent of the space age, no one had ever flown a rocket past the edge of space and landed it vertically. Now it had been performed twice in less than a month.
The sight of the boosters standing on terra firma, scorched but triumphant, portended a sense of arrival and offered a hope for another Apollo 11 moment, the next giant leap many had felt they were promised but had never come.
For decades, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean after powering their payloads to space. To Musk and Bezos, this was an incredible waste, like throwing away an airplane after flying from New York to Los Angeles.
Now they had shown that rockets could fly not just up but back down, landing with precision and reigniting interest in human space in a way not seen in decades.
Musk and Bezos were the leaders of this resurrection of the American space program, a pair of billionaires with vastly different styles and temperaments. Always audacious, Musk had plowed far ahead, his triumphs and failures commanding center stage. Bezos remained quiet and clandestine. His mysterious rocket venture kept hidden behind the curtain.
At its heart, the story was fueled by a budding rivalry between the two leaders of the new space movement. The tension would play out in legal briefs and on Twitter, skirmishes over significance of their respective landings and the thrust of their rockets, and even a dispute over the pad that would launch them. Musk, the brash hare, was blazing a trail for others to follow, while Bezos, the secretive and slow tortoise, who was content to take it step by step in a race that was only just the beginning.
That was from the introduction of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Space Barons, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport. So today is going to be a little different. Normally each episode is focused on just a biography of one founder. And when I started reading Space Barons, my initial idea was to separate the ideas in this book into two separate podcasts. One was going to be on Jeff Bezos and his ideas, and the next was going to be on Elon Musk and his ideas. But what I realized after highlighting and organizing all my notes is that the book does such a great job of comparing and contrasting their styles. This theme that they just touched on in the introduction is present throughout the book, that Bezos is the tortoise and Musk is the hare. That I just decided, you know what? I'm going to combine them into one. All right, so let's get right into this book. Amazon's strategy was get big fast, luring customers with the convenience of the internet and low prices that the site was becoming known for. So this is, let me give you some context. This is right around 2003 Jeff Bezos, Amazon's already pretty successful, not nearly successful as it is now in present day. He's taking some of the wealth that he generated from Amazon and he wants to, he started a rocket company called Blue Origin, which is what this book is about. And he's in Texas looking for, at the start of the book, he's in Texas looking for land, which is eventually gonna be where he's gonna build his, where they can build the rockets and launch them into space. And he gets into, he's in a helicopter looking at land. He winds up almost dying in a helicopter crash.
The chapter is actually called A Silly Way to Die, which is a quote that Jeff Bezos said went through his mind while the crash was happening, that this is such a dumb way if I died.
So that's just the context. So this is happening in early 2003, is where we're at right now in the book. Okay, so it says, despite the get-rich-quick hype that had surrounded so many internet startups, Amazon took a slow and steady approach, keeping its prices low, offering free shipping, even while critics said it would never work. In headlines during the late 1990s, Businessweek had derided the company as Amazon.toast, and Barons called it Amazon.bomb. With an unflattering photo of Bezos, which showed it to an audience and said, my mom hates this picture. So that's Bezos talking to an audience. But by early 2003, with sales in every major segment growing by double digits, Bezos was as confident as ever in the company's approach. So I want to stop there again. Something we talk about on every single podcast and every single biography that we read about founders is something very important for you to internalize, is that if you're going to do anything, you have to be expected to be criticized. And just understand that some of those criticisms may be valid, but a lot of them are not. And it doesn't matter if they're valid or they're not, you just have to know that they're going to be present. How silly does Businessweek and Barons look now, 20 years later, saying, oh, this guy's crazy, it's not going to work out, Amazon.toast, Amazon.bomb. He's the richest person in the world, and Amazon, I think, just passed a trillion dollar market cap.