Billionaire Jeff Bezos says Blue Origin is heading for an IPO

American billionaire Jeff Bezos said his rocket company Blue Origin will probably go public, though not for several years, as the space venture he has bankrolled for a quarter century starts raising money from outside investors.

"I think, someday, Blue Origin will have an IPO," Bezos said on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier on Oct. 7. "It would be several years from now."

He said it "probably makes sense for Blue Origin to be a public company at some point."

The comments came weeks after Blue Origin closed its first outside funding round, raising $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that the round valued the Kent, Washington-based company at $140 billion.

$28 billion of his own money

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, about 18 months before Elon Musk started SpaceX, and has funded it almost entirely himself. He said on the program that he has put $28 billion of his own money into the company.

Blue Origin has spent most of that time trailing SpaceX, which went public in June and dominates the commercial launch market with its reusable Falcon 9 rockets and Starlink satellite network.

Blue Origin has still won major government work, including multibillion-dollar contracts from NASA and the U.S. Space Force. It is building a lunar lander for NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon.

Its push to compete with SpaceX in commercial launches was set back in May, when a New Glenn rocket exploded on the launch pad during a static-fire test. Bezos said the company plans to fly the heavy-lift rocket again soon.

"December of this year, we're going to fly that vehicle again," he said.

The Amazon founder's other bets

Blue Origin is the largest of the private ventures Bezos has built outside Amazon.com Inc., which he founded in 1994 and ran until 2021. He remains Amazon's executive chairman and one of its largest shareholders, and his fortune rests mainly on his Amazon stake.

His other holdings include The Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 for $250 million, and Bezos Expeditions, his personal investment firm.

A listing would give ordinary investors their first chance to own a piece of Blue Origin. Bezos did not say how much of the company he would sell or which exchange it would choose.