Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is sure to benefit from his record-high $941 million selloff of Amazon shares. The sale, executed this week and reported in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, represents just a thin slice of the Amazon founder’s estimated $80 billion net worth. But it meshes with his comment last month at a Colorado space conference that he sells “about a billion dollars a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.” Blue Origin’s share of the proceeds is likely to go toward testing its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, developing the BE-4 rocket engine, building a rocket production facility in Florida – and keeping the lights on at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash. The SEC filing also shows that Bezos donated about $1 million worth of his stock to a non-profit organization.
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