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The Senate Might Authorize a $10 Billion “Bail Out” Contract of Jeff Bezos’ Space Firm.

“How are we going to pay for that?”

Lauren Elizabeth
3 min readMay 26, 2021
Mandel Ngan–AFP/ Getty Images

On July 20th, 2020, TIME Magazine and Bloomberg’s Jack Pitcher published an article concerning Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, specifically about how in a single day, he added $13 billion to his net worth. It was the most money that anyone has added to their wealth in a single day since the Bloomberg Billionaire Index was created in 2012.

Now here we are one year later, with the United States Senate now preparing to use taxpayer money for what boils down to a $10 billion bailout contract of Bezos’ Space Firm.

Sara Sirota and Ryan Grim with The Intercept wrote an article detailing how after Bezos’ Blue Origin lost a multi-billion contract to put astronauts on the moon to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, evidently the Senate has decided NASA must award not one but two, contracts. The amendment for the second contract that is is likely to go to Blue Origin — who estimated their cost was going to be twice that of Space X — is not a sure bet thanks to Bernie Sanders, who introduced an amendment to eliminate it from the Endless Frontier Act. But that doesn’t mean Senators like Maria Cantwell of Washington (where Blue Origin is headquartered and Jeff Bezos lives) aren’t working hard to try to get it through, and it has…

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Lauren Elizabeth
Lauren Elizabeth

Written by Lauren Elizabeth

Lauren is a writer & leftist with analysis on topics related to politics & policy. She can be reached at LaurenMartinchek@gmail.com or Twitter @xlauren_mx

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