Blue Origin Raises Capital, Getty-Shutterstock Deal Dies, GPT-5.6 Launches Tomorrow | Diet TBPN

**Jordi Hays** (0:03)
It's great to be back.

**John Coogan** (0:04)
Yes, the Invest Like the Best hype song really has, I don't know, it's just burned its way into an incredible mental state. 100%, 100%.
You know who else is in a good mental state? Jeff Bezos, because he's getting a markup on the $25 billion he's put into.

**Jordi Hays** (0:24)
He's marking himself up.

**John Coogan** (0:25)
He's marking himself up.

**Jordi Hays** (0:26)
Alongside Co2.

**John Coogan** (0:27)
Yeah, the news is that Blue Origin is raising outside capital for the first time. He's participating. A fund, Co2, who he has also invested in through his family office, is also participating, but there will be an opportunity for some other true outsiders to get their first slice of Blue Origin. Andrew Ross Sorkin had the scoop in The New York Times today. You have to wonder if this is gossip coming out of Sun Valley.
The company is raising $10 billion. This is the first outside fundraise. It's hilarious to think about this 25-year-old company as being previously bootstrapped, but that's technically what it is, basically. One founder's capital just chipping away at a really hard problem for a quarter century, and now we are here. Bezos has been funding this basically solo on his quest to visit the stars.

**Jordi Hays** (1:21)
People can't really complain about the valuation because he's a big part of setting the price.

**John Coogan** (1:27)
Yeah.
He's doubling down. He's putting in $2 billion directly, and Co2 is getting twice as much allocation, $4 billion. There's another interesting Co2 tidbit I alluded to earlier from The New York Times piece. Bezos' family office is a major investor in Co2's innovative strategies fund, which is focused on emerging technology startups. So I'm not sure if the money is coming out of that fund specifically, but there is a connection there. He's been building a relationship with Co2 for a long time, and they are optimistic about Blue Origin's prospects. The valuation is expected to be $130 billion big for a private company. I was listening to Gavin Baker and Travis Kalanick talk about how crazy it was when Gavin was at Fidelity and he wanted to value Uber at $14 billion, and everyone thought he was crazy. The valuation turned into an auction, came in at $17 billion, and everyone was like, this is unprecedented. We've never seen a private company this big, and now $17 billion, even $60 billion in the private markets looks quaint by modern standards in an era where we have several trillion dollar private companies, many up in the $100 billion plus range. It's a wild, wild time. The Elon Bulls are saying, SpaceX is under price now because you have to imagine, I don't know if there's an exact revenue figure that's leaked for Blue Origin, but based on the size of that business, it has to be small, and so this has to be a very high multiple. But you're not really valuing this company on cash flow or even revenue. You're valuing it on the capability, which is it's the second company in the world, I believe, to bring a rocket to orbit, land it successfully, prove reusability. They got there before China, which has been trying to copy SpaceX for years, and so lots of really solid progress. Of course, there was that setback with the launch pad that exploded, but they figured out a solution to that, and things are chopping along just fine. The company is estimated to burn $5 billion this year, so this looks like a pretty standard 12 to 18-month fundraise at $10 billion, and it's burned something like $27 billion to date, which a billion a year, on average, over 25 years. Not too bad for such an ambitious project. Still a lot of money, but a big opportunity.
And you have to imagine, there are a number of other comps, like AST Space Mobile, as you like to call them. AST Space Mobile.

**Jordi Hays** (3:55)
Pop on the AST Space Mobile.

**John Coogan** (3:57)
ASTS.

**Jordi Hays** (3:58)
It's a $27, $28 billion market cap.

**John Coogan** (4:00)
$30 billion company, and I don't believe that they've gotten much to orbit yet. They've done some experiments, some tests. They're still early, but it's a huge market, and we've seen how fast...

**Jordi Hays** (4:09)
They have concepts of mass to orbit.

**John Coogan** (4:11)
Yeah, and we've seen how fast Rocket Lab and various... It's a big, it's a really, really big market. And so when you're going after a big opportunity, and you've been working on it a long time, and you got Jeff Bezos funding it, lots of reasons to be optimistic.