By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The CEO of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced in an all-hands call on Thursday company-wide layoffs of “about 10 percent” of its employees, a sweeping readjustment as it aims to cut costs and ramp up rocket launches.
The layoffs affect roughly 1,400 of the company’s nearly 14,000 employees – mostly concentrated in Florida, Texas and Washington – and comes as Blue Origin starts production of its giant New Glenn rocket, which had its first long-awaited debut launch last month.
“There’s no easy way to communicate this,” CEO Dave Limp told employees in the meeting, which was scheduled the night prior and lasted about 10 minutes. “There’s no question that we’ve had a lot of successes over the last few months.”
“But that being said, when you look at the foundation of the company and what we need to get to over the next three to five years, we just came to the painful conclusion that we aren’t set up for the kind of success that we really wanted to have,” Limp said.
Limp said the decision would help Blue Origin scale New Glenn manufacturing and increase the rocket’s launch cadence, two goals crucial to competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its dominant Falcon 9.
To do that, the company needs a culture that is “quick, nimble, decisive, and very focused on our customers,” said Limp, who was plucked by Bezos from Amazon’s customer-focused devices unit in late 2023 to lead Blue Origin.
Limp has been tasked with streamlining Blue Origin’s many business units – from space stations to lunar landers for NASA – and pushing for greater focus on New Glenn, giving the company a fresh sense of urgency after years of development paralysis, multiple employees say.
But some employees believe morale and the company’s culture has suffered amid Limp’s push for speed, two employees said, adding some staff are seeking jobs elsewhere regardless of who survives Thursday’s layoffs.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette, Editing by Franklin Paul)
