Blue Origin's $140bn Valuation: 175x Sales, and Why New Glenn Must Fly to Justify It
Blue Origin has raised about $10 billion at a reported $140 billion valuation, against $800 million of 2025 revenue and a company expectation of $1.4 billion this year. SpaceX, with profits and 130 Falcon 9 launches a year, trades at about 108 times trailing sales. The desk thinks the new investors are paying for a launch cadence New Glenn has yet to show, and expects no more than four New Glenn flights in 2027.
For 26 years Jeff Bezos was Blue Origin's only shareholder, and its business model fit in one sentence. "I sell about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year and I use it to invest in Blue Origin," he told reporters in 2017. The bill has since run to $32 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported on Thursday that the company has closed its first outside round: about $10 billion, including $2 billion more from Bezos, at a valuation of about $140 billion.
The price is the story. The Journal's figures, put Blue Origin's 2025 revenue at $800 million and its expected 2026 revenue at $1.4 billion. That makes the round 175 times last year's sales and 100 times this year's hoped-for sales. The company internally projects more than $30 billion of annual revenue by 2030. That is a projection shown to investors, and nobody should mistake it for guidance. The desk's view is that the $140 billion mark prices Blue Origin as a proven second SpaceX when its heavy rocket has flown three times, failed once and then blown up on the pad.
The terms line up with what leaked in July. CNBC and TechCrunch reported then a $10 billion raise at $130 billion pre-money, with Coatue putting in about $4 billion and Bezos $2 billion. Add the new cash to the pre-money figure and you get the $140 billion now reported. Outside investors are putting up about $8 billion for roughly 5.7% of the company; Coatue's slice buys under 3%.
Every buyer in this round will have made the same comparison. SpaceX listed in June at $135 a share, a $1.75 trillion valuation, on $18.7 billion of 2025 revenue, according to its S-1 as summarised by TradingKey. At a market value of about $2.01 trillion this week, SpaceX trades at roughly 108 times trailing sales. On the $45 billion of 2026 revenue Morgan Stanley has forecast, it is about 45 times forward sales. Blue Origin at 100 times its own 2026 expectation is more than twice as expensive on the forward measure and about 60% dearer on the trailing one.
The two companies are not comparable on anything underneath those multiples. SpaceX reported $6.6 billion of adjusted EBITDA for 2025. Starlink alone booked $11.4 billion of revenue and $4.4 billion of operating profit from 10.3 million subscribers. Falcon 9 flew about 130 times. Blue Origin discloses no profit figure, has no broadband revenue and grounded its New Shepard tourist rocket in January to redirect staff to the lunar programme. An investor paying up for SpaceX is paying for a cash machine that also burns money on Starship and xAI. At Blue Origin the investor is paying for the development spending itself.
New Glenn's flight log is short enough to recite. The first launch, on January 16, 2025, reached orbit but lost its booster. The second, on November 13, 2025, sent NASA's ESCAPADE probes towards Mars and landed the first stage. The third, on April 19 this year, reflew a booster but an upper-stage engine problem left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite in the wrong orbit, and it was deorbited. Then on May 28 a vehicle being readied for the fourth flight exploded during a static fire at Launch Complex 36, the company's only operational New Glenn pad. In August chief executive Dave Limp traced the failure to the main oxygen valve on one BE-4 engine and said a small modification could be retrofitted to existing engines. Blue Origin still targets a return to flight before the end of 2026, using a crane-and-transporter approach instead of rebuilding the destroyed erector. The Motley Fool reported nine FAA-mandated corrective actions to close first.
Every large contract in the backlog depends on that rocket. NASA's $3.4 billion Blue Moon award for Artemis lunar landers includes an uncrewed demonstration and a crewed landing. After the explosion NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency wanted an alternative launcher for the first Blue Moon lander, and the uncrewed Mark 1 lander has slipped to the first quarter of 2027. In the Space Force's Phase 3 Lane 2 awards of April 2025, Blue Origin won seven national security missions worth up to $2.4 billion, against 28 for SpaceX ($5.9 billion) and 19 for ULA ($5.4 billion). It cannot fly them until New Glenn is certified, and in December 2025 it described itself as halfway through a four-flight certification campaign. That was before the April failure. ULA's Vulcan also flies on BE-4 engines, so the valve fix touches a competitor's rocket as well.
Then there is Amazon. Its broadband network, renamed Amazon Leo, bought 12 New Glenn launches in 2022 with options on 15 more. That is Blue Origin's largest commercial customer, and it is a company where Bezos is executive chairman and the largest individual shareholder. Launch revenue from Leo is arm's-length on paper and related-party in substance. Outside investors should want to know how much of the $1.4 billion expected this year, and of the 2030 projection, comes from Amazon, and on what pricing.
The $30 billion projection also faces the arithmetic. Getting there from $1.4 billion in four years means growing about 115% a year, compounding. Launch alone cannot do it. SpaceX's own filing puts Falcon 9 revenue at $67 million to $97 million per flight. Even 30 New Glenn flights a year at $100 million each, a cadence Blue Origin has never approached, would be $3 billion. The rest has to come from services: the lunar business, in-space vehicles such as Blue Ring, and TeraWave, the 5,408-satellite communications network Blue Origin announced this year. For TeraWave to carry most of the gap it would need to earn more than twice Starlink's 2025 revenue within a few years of first service. Starlink took about five years of commercial service to reach $11.4 billion.
There is a serious case for the price. The U.S. government wants two heavy-lift providers, and after ULA's delays Blue Origin is the only credible second source for reusable heavy launch. SpaceX's public market value implies investors will pay about $2 trillion for the leader, and a duopoly's number two is often worth more than a tenth of number one. Bezos has also shown he will keep funding the company whatever the round says. All true, and it explains why the round filled. None of it changes the cash flows. A strategic premium already sits inside SpaceX's 108 times. Paying more than that for a company without a flying rocket assumes Blue Origin's execution risk is lower than SpaceX's, and its record says the reverse. At SpaceX's trailing multiple, Blue Origin would be worth about $86 billion; at SpaceX's forward multiple applied to Blue Origin's own 2026 expectation, about $63 billion.
Bezos is the clearest winner. He brings in outside money at a record private mark, sets a price for his largest non-Amazon asset and eases the pressure to keep selling Amazon stock. He filed in August to sell about $4 billion more. SpaceX also gains: its own multiple looks moderate next to its rival's. The late-stage buyers, led by Coatue, carry the risk. So do NASA and the Space Force, whose Artemis schedule and assured-access policy now depend on how fast one pad in Florida gets back to work.
The desk expects New Glenn's return to flight to slip into 2027 and the rocket to complete no more than four launches in calendar 2027. That would leave national security certification unfinished and put the 2030 projection out of reach. Three checkpoints would change the call: a successful launch before December 31, which would put Blue Origin on its own schedule; a NASA decision in the coming months on whether Blue Moon Mark 1 flies on another rocket; and any disclosure, in a later round or an IPO filing, of how much 2026 revenue came from Amazon. Two clean flights by the end of the first quarter of 2027 would make four in the year look conservative.