Jeff Bezos farms style points on Blue Origin's historic autonomous spaceflight

What's going on here?

The world's richest man put on a cowboy hat this morning (for absolutely no apparent reason other than to aura farm) and full-sent himself into space.

On the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Bezos rode Blue Origin's New Shepard to the edge of space and back in a trip that took roughly 10 minutes. Software piloted the entire flight from liftoff to landing, making it the first crewed spaceflight in history with no trained pilot aboard and no way for anyone to manually fly it.

New Shepard's crew members included:

• Jeff Bezos (57)
• Mark Bezos (53, Jeff's younger brother)
• Wally Funk (82, the Mercury 13 pilot who passed astronaut testing in the '60s, but got passed over for being a woman)
• Oliver Daemen (18, a Dutch teenager whose dad was ballin' and bought him a ticket that cost somewhere north of $10 million)

This historic flight came only 9 days after Richard Branson's first ever spaceflight with Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity. While Branson beat Bezos in getting to space, his flight needed two pilots and didn't go nearly as high. He also wasn't wearing a cowboy hat…

Easy W for Bezos.

What does this mean?

Bezos now holds two prestigious titles: the richest man in the world and the drippiest man in space.

But space tourism is merely the opening act. Like Musk, Bezos is racing to build the infrastructure for space itself.

Today's launch was a proof of concept for Blue Origin: a rocket that flies itself, lands itself, and is safe enough for both an 82 year old and an 18 year old.

Why should I care?

1) Bezos just pitched the next AWS.

Bezos wants Blue Origin to build “the road to space” just like the internet, payment rails, and shipping networks were the infrastructure that Amazon was built on. His dream is for two kids in a dorm room to be able to start a great space company the way they could start a great internet company. Cheap, reusable rockets become the base layer everything else gets built on, just like cheap computing did for the internet startup economy.

2) It was a software milestone wearing a rocket costume.

The big breakthrough today was the code, not the rocket. Guidance, abort calls, booster landing: software handled everything, with no human backup if something went wrong. A program that flew four souls to and from space with no pilot in the loop is the real milestone. It's also why rocket companies now poach engineers straight from Google and Facebook.

3) It shows where tech money goes after software.

Bezos quit as Amazon CEO fifteen days ago and sells roughly $1B of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin. Musk is running the same play with rockets and brain chips. Building a software giant and spending the margins on moonshots is becoming the signature second act, and it's pulling the next decade of engineering jobs, funding, and prestige with it.