Looking into your peers’ pockets is a bad habit. But good luck telling Blue Origin employees that.
For most of us, SpaceX’s eye-popping IPO showed us investors’ eagerness to back Elon Musk and his space and AI ambitions. For employees of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, the other rocket company, it was a reminder of what could have been.
BI’s Tom Carter reports on the FOMO among some Blue Origin workers watching their SpaceX rivals’ net worths skyrocket while theirs stay firmly grounded.
Conversations with former Blue Origin employees revealed how the company’s old stock options plan essentially left them holding lottery tickets. Workers could sell their shares, which had a 10-year lifespan, only in the event of a sale or if the company went public.
That’s unlike most other tech startups, where employees can sell shares during private liquidity events such as additional funding rounds. And since most workers knew Bezos was unlikely to sell or bring Blue Origin public, their stock options didn’t feel like much of an option at all.
“You technically hold this document, but it would almost be like telling someone, ‘Hey, you have the rights to buy the house in your neighborhood next to you if the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow,'” one former employee said.
More recently, Blue Origin has updated its equity plan with more ways to cash out. But that’s little solace for former employees who have seen their rivals get filthy rich.
When it comes to dueling companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin are just a warm-up act for the main event.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s competing plans to go public later this year pit their employees, backers, and egos squarely against each other. It’s like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson facing off in the 1984 NBA Finals, but global tech supremacy is on the line.
Their CEOs couldn’t even agree to hold hands for a photo op. Now they’re going to battle it out in the public market. At least Bird and Magic eventually did a commercial together.
Potentially having two companies with market caps close to or above $1 trillion enter the public market within months (or even weeks) of each other is unparalleled.
The closest recent example I could think of was Uber and Lyft’s dueling IPOs, which dropped within two months of each other in 2019. But those ride-sharing companies aren’t in the same league.
OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s share prices will be constantly compared. (It’s already happening with their valuations.) And any significant price divergence between the two will be cheered or groaned by their respective employees and investors.
Both companies could end up fine. Bird and Magic played for the famous “Dream Team” in the 1992 Olympics and are considered all-time greats in their own right.
But when it comes to the markets, investors have a habit of picking sides.
Just ask Uber ($147 billion market cap) and Lyft ($5.4 billion market cap).
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