An October 2019 story in The Washington Post revealed a damning series of pre-certification internal social media messages from Forkner to colleagues and FAA officials revealing his concern over “egregious” changes to the MCAS flight parameters that he discovered in tests, on the one hand, and his plans to, nevertheless, be “jedi-mind tricking regulators” around the world to accept lower levels of training for Max line pilots. He wrote to one FAA official about removing any reference to MCAS from the pilots’ flight manuals: “Delete MCAS, recall we decided we weren’t going to cover it [because it is] way outside the normal operating envelope.”

In 2019, a few weeks after Trump’s order, Bezos applauded it: “I love this,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.” He was publicly unveiling Blue Origin’s lunar lander, Blue Moon. But, like Trump, Bezos was underestimating the technical challenges. And underestimating Musk. //

If all it took to succeed was a massive amount of money thrown at these projects, Bezos would have easily prevailed long before now. He amassed his many billions long before Musk. He set out a clear plan for Blue Origin in 2012, when Musk was still struggling with the trouble-plagued Tesla launch before he could apply himself to SpaceX. //

How has Musk so clearly surpassed Bezos?
It’s not simply about the hardware; it’s also about people. The differences in the two companies reflect the differences in the two men who own them. Recent revelations about a toxic and bureaucratically crippled workplace at Blue Origin offer some clues, but the cultural divide was baked in from the beginning. Blue Origin followed a conventional aerospace corporate model. SpaceX was far more like a Silicon Valley start-up driven by a charismatic leader. //

Some of the critiques were about contrasting technical choices made by the two companies, but the most consequential cultural differences were directly attributable to their leaders.

First, as was already well known, Musk is a tightwad. SpaceX “had a relentless focus on minimizing costs.” All purchase orders above $10,000 had been approved by Musk himself. Blue Origin, in contrast, was “riddled with poor cost estimating.”

Moreover, SpaceX was a relentless 24/7 operation with 80-hour workweeks, while “Blue is kind of lazy, a ghost town on weekends.” That didn’t mean that SpaceX engineers complained of working in a sweatshop. Quite the reverse: they were highly motivated to get results and, although they were generally paid less than they would have been at Blue Origin, they had Silicon Valley-type incentives like stock options that rewarded top performers. Musk annually culled the bottom 10 percent performers to keep standards high.