With Virgin's Collapse, Musk is Left With the Bigger Rocket 🚀

Elon Musk isn't the only billionaire with rockets. There are at least two others who have hoped to amass their own fleet of pointy steel thingies that fly in the air: Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Virgin's Richard Branson. Well, Musk can cut Branson off of that list because Virgin Orbit is out of the race.

Last week, Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy after failing to secure key funding that would have helped it stay afloat. Virgin's problems began in January though, when a rocket containing commercial and defense-related research satellites failed to reach orbit. Virgin had pinned everything on the January launch, its sixth since being spun off from Branson's space tourism firm Virgin Galactic.

Now, rocket failures seem to be part and parcel of the space industry. Hell, Musk's SpaceX had a bunch of failures before it finally became successful. The key difference here, though, is that while SpaceX had funding to continue on with its experiments, Virgin does not.

Virgin's premise was different than SpaceX's: while Musk's company offers large rockets with the option to take a higher payload into orbit, Virgin was set up to launch small rockets and offer short-notice launches from anywhere. Basically, Virgin was competing for speed at the cost of a lower payload, while SpaceX takes on more payload at the cost of speed.

Both business models have their own upsides and downsides, but demand for Musk's large rockets seem to be higher 😏.

There's also a bit of a.. Uhm, funny anecdote involving Virgin's financial woes. Apparently, a certain Matthew Brown, a Texas-based venture capital investor, offered to bankroll $200 million into Virgin Orbit last month to help with the company's problems, only for the company to notice something really fishy about him. For example, Brown said he had worked with OpenAI, despite any evidence of that being the case. He had also claimed to run a Houston-based private wealth firm called Woods Family Office, with $6 billion in funds — again, with no evidence supporting his claim.

So, understandably, Virgin cut contact with Brown and threatened to take legal action against him if he ever discloses confidential details about the potential investment.

With Branson out, where does this leave Bezos? Well, Bezos certainly isn't flying rockets at the moment, particularly after his company Blue Origin's failures last year. Currently, Blue Origin's rockets are grounded after one of them crashed during a mission in September. However, the company expects to resume flying by the end of this year, leaving Musk as the clear winner for now.

Amazon ranked #28 in this week's Tech Company Rankings.

In Other News.. 📰

• Should AI reject tasks? A new poll from the U.K. might hold the answer.
• Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars with each other, a special report reveals. The company has been hit by a lawsuit as a result.
• Apple launched its first ever store in India. The company ranked #14 in this week's Tech Company Rankings.
• Dogecoin became the official symbol of Twitter, albeit for a limited time. Twitter ranked #67 this week.
• Well, that didn't take long. Meta, soon after releasing LLaMA, has now released a new AI model called SAM that can identify and "cut out" any object within an image. Check it out here. Meta ranked #88 this week.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon