Call it the great cash out. Over just nine days in February, as Bloomberg reported on Feb. 20, Amazon.com(NASDAQ: AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos unloaded a total of 50 million shares of Amazon stock, netting $8.5 billion in proceeds -- nearly $1 billion per day of selling. Now inquiring minds want to know: What is Bezos planning to do with all the cash?
One possible answer: He's going to buy himself another space company.
United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin: Together at last?
For the better part of a year now, rumors have swirled around the fate of United Launch Alliance, the rocket-launching joint venture formed by Boeing(NYSE: BA) and Lockheed Martin(NYSE: LMT) in 2005 -- and until SpaceX entered the national security launch market in 2016, America's primary means of delivering government satellites to orbit.
Ars Technica first broke the story back in March of 2023, and rumors soon sprang up about who might be bidding for ULA. Would Boeing -- or Lockheed -- try to buy out its partner? Might a second-tier space company like Northop Grumman(NYSE: NOC) try to expand its business by buying ULA? Or perhaps another defense giant, such as Textron(NYSE: TXT), would see buying ULA as a way to break into the space business itself?
From the very start, however, one company always seemed the most likely to want to own ULA. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin was a rising star in space circles, and had a successful suborbital rocket and a budding space tourism business. It also built rocket engines for ULA, but had no actual, orbital rocket of its own with which to deliver payloads to orbit.
What Blue Origin did have was a multi-multi-(multi)-billion-dollar founder in Jeff Bezos, and therefore easy access to the billions of dollars it would cost to take out ULA. And now, as the bidding for ULA finally nears its (presumed) end, wouldn't you know it?
Jeff Bezos is accessing those dollars himself, in a series of transactions yielding $8.5 billion. Cash.
Ars breaks the story again
Citing unnamed sources, Ars Technica predicted last month that a sale of ULA was imminent, and might happen "within a month or two." That timeline, coming so quickly on the heels of reports of Bezos selling Amazon stock, certainly does seem to suggest that Bezos (and Blue Origin) are laying the groundwork for a purchase of ULA.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the government would permit such a sale.
On the one hand, buying ULA would give Blue Origin immediate access to ULA's growing fleet of Vulcan Centaur orbital rockets -- for which Blue Origin itself already provides the engines -- as well as a host of contracts to launch the same for ULA customers. (Blue Origin therefore wouldn't have to wait to see if its planned New Glenn rocket can make a successful flight to enter the space race immediately.) At the same time, winning Bezos as a backer would give ULA an immediate cash infusion as it works to upgrade its technology to better compete with Elon Musk and SpaceX.
On the other hand, though, with Blue Origin so close to testing New Glenn, the U.S. Air Force is on the cusp of having three companies to choose from when picking its rocket rides -- and three companies bidding against each other to help keep prices down. Allowing ULA to merge into Blue Origin would derail that plan, at the very moment it might begin paying off for the government.
What happens next
I don't know about you, but if I were a government regulator right now, I'd be thinking that's a very good argument -- albeit a self-interested one -- for forbidding a merger between Blue Origin and ULA to proceed. If Boeing and Lockheed really feel compelled to sell their joint venture, I'd be inclined to agree to a sale to Textron, certainly, to Northop, probably, or to almost any other would-be buyer, possibly.
The one option I wouldn't want to see under any circumstances, though, is a purchase of ULA by Blue Origin.
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John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool recommends Lockheed Martin and Textron. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
