In order to prevent talent drain caused by SpaceX listing, Blue Origin plans to adjust employee incentive mechanisms to stabilize the core team.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin has launched a new employee stock plan aimed at quelling employee dissatisfaction and making incentive measures more comparable to competitor SpaceX. The new plan not only establishes a new exercise benchmark price of $9.50 per share, but also specifies that options will be settled in cash, meaning that employees will receive the cash difference directly upon triggering a liquidity event, rather than holding actual company ownership. The plan also adds new items to the list of "liquidity events" that can trigger cashing out, including external financing rounds or tender offers. It is understood that this major move in incentive mechanisms is widely interpreted in the market as a direct defense against rumors that competitor SpaceX is preparing to go public. With Elon Musk's SpaceX likely to hold a record-breaking IPO in June 2026, with an estimated valuation of $1.75 trillion, the industry upheaval poses a serious risk of talent drain for Blue Origin. For a long time, SpaceX has enabled thousands of employees to achieve financial freedom through frequent stock repurchases on the secondary market, while Blue Origin employees are constrained by the existing plan's expiration restrictions and lack of liquidity channels. By including events such as "external financing" and "company buybacks" in the list of triggers for reward disbursement, Bezos is trying to bridge this wealth gap to ensure stability in his engineering team during critical lunar landing projects and heavy rocket development cycles. Although Blue Origin's current CEO, Dave Limp, has explicitly stated in internal communications that the company currently has no plans for an immediate IPO or a consideration of a total sale, the company's commercial transformation is clearly accelerating. Internal documents show that Blue Origin has set a goal to achieve positive gross profit by 2029, marking its attempt to transition from a research project that has long relied on personal funding from Bezos to a mature commercial entity capable of self-sustenance. Currently, Blue Origin plans to improve operational efficiency through reform of its internal incentive mechanisms. Despite recent setbacks with launch anomalies and FAA grounding investigations, the company is still striving to begin high-frequency launches of the New Glenn heavy rocket as planned in 2026, as a key support for competing for NASA's Artemis lunar lander contract and closing the gap with SpaceX.