Jeff Bezos Brags About Rocket Landing With Mic Drop First Tweet

Jeff Bezos just accomplished the near impossible: one-upping Elon Musk.
Jeff Bezos founder of Blue Origin inspects New Shepards West Texas launch facility before the rockets maiden voyage.
Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos just accomplished the near impossible: one-upping Elon Musk.

Bezos's private space company, Blue Origin, has just completed a successful Earth landing of its New Shepard rocket, making it the first reusable rocket to land totally intact, something that has eluded Musk's SpaceX. In a press release announcing the momentous occasion, Bezos even struck a Musk-ian tone, laying out his plan "to seed an enduring human presence in space to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know."

The landing is a sign that Blue Origin, which many wrote off as another billionaire's eccentric side project, is a contender for the space race, right alongside better known companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. Just this month, Politico reported that the company hired its first in-house lobbyist and is starting to spend some of the money that Bezos poured into Blue Origin's political action committee.

There's good reason for Bezos—and his competitors—to take Blue Origin seriously. Private space flight is already shaping up to be big business, even in its infancy. Last year, SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract to ferry NASA astronauts to and from space. Boeing's contract to do the same was a whopping $4.2 billion.

But while the landing, itself, is historic, so is the way Bezos announced it—with his first Tweet.

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Of course, it wouldn't be a true Twitter debut without a little bit of snark from Marc Andreessen:

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