Just another few days in the life of the world’s richest person.
One of the cool things about being the world’s richest person is you can cash in over a billion dollars worth of stock to fund your space company on a Monday, and then on Tuesday that space company can give you a lift on one of their rockets into space.
Actually, it was almost $2 billion in of Amazon stock that Jeff Bezos sold. The former Amazon CEO dumped about 960,000 shares, each worth nearly $1,900, so that would be approximately $1.8 billion.
Bezos said he’s going to sell $1 billion worth of Amazon stock every year to fund Blue Origin.
All eyes will be on Bezos Tuesday, as he takes off on an 11-minute, 2,300 mph trip to the edge of space, a few miles higher into the sky than his billionaire buddy Richard Branson went last weekend.
He wil ride in a suborbital rocket called New Shepard, and it will go straight up into space, roughly 62 miles before the rocket burns all of its fuel, and Bezos and the rest of the crew will fall down to the West Texas surface with parachutes.
It will be the first time New Shepard will have humans on board. It has already flown 15 automated test flights sans humans.
Assuming the weather cooperates on Tuesday, Bezos should be airborne around 8 am Eastern. The whole trip will be available on livestream through Blue Origin. You can see the exterior shots of the rocket and capsule as it launches. As for the shots of Bezos floating around in zero gravity, those will be distributed after the flight.
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