Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post Runs BRUTAL Expose on Jeff Bezos’s Space Travel Company, Uncovers Toxic Workplace Culture
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The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, published a damning exposé on Monday revealing a toxic workplace at Bezos’s Blue Origin.
The article was “based on interviews with more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees and industry officials with close ties to the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.” The Post obtained documents from inside the company as part of its reporting. The article ran a month after 21 current and former Blue Origin employees published an essay alleging a toxic culture at the company.
The article paints an unflattering picture of the management style under Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith that enabled a company culture that “had become dysfunctional, resulting in low morale and high turnover, significant delays across several major programs and a failure to successfully compete with Elon Musk’s venture SpaceX.” A former employee called it an “authoritarian bro culture.”
In 2019, following an outside investigation, Blue Origin fired its vice president of recruiting Walt McCleery over his behavior that included making women feel uncomfortable.
Blue Origin’s senior vice president of human resources, Mary Plunkett, told the Post that the aerospace company views “all claims seriously and we have no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. Where we substantiate allegations of misconduct under our anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policy we take the appropriate action — up to and including termination of employment.”
Bezos, Smith and Post chief information officer and Blue Origin advisory board member Shailesh Prakash declined to comment to the Post.
The Post report was published just days before Blue Origin is set to launch on Wednesday a human spaceflight, its second ever, that will include actor William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Blue Origin’s first human spaceflight, which included Bezos and both the youngest and oldest person to travel to space, was in July.
