A shareholder of Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the firm’s founder Jeff Bezos and the board of directors, alleging that they failed to thoroughly review the decision to give Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, launch contracts for the company’s Project Kuiper satellite project.
According to the lawsuit brought by the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund earlier this week, the Amazon board selected Blue Origin for contracts worth billions of dollars while ignoring SpaceX, a competitor controlled by Elon Musk and with a better track record.
The goal of Amazon’s Project Kuiper is to beam high-speed internet to rural areas via a network of over 3,000 satellites. As a result, it competes with Musk’s Starlink.
The launch contracts were at the time the second-largest capital investment in Amazon’s history, according to a filing by Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension trust, a multi-employer trust.
The thousands of anticipated Kuiper internet satellites will be housed in a 100,000-square-foot, $120 million processing centre. This undertaking is a component of Amazon’s $10 billion commitment to building a network of 3,200 low-Earth orbiting satellites that will deliver high-speed internet to every country in the world. The Kuiper internet network will compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink from SpaceX and work in tandem with Amazon’s online services.
