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Jeff Bezos said in late May that he will officially step down as Amazon CEO on July 5.
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That’s 15 days before he and his brother will fly into space on a Blue Origin spacecraft.
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Andy Jassy will have already replaced Bezos as Amazon CEO by the time he goes to space.
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Jeff Bezos announced Monday that he’s flying into space on July 20 with his brother Mark in what will be his company, Blue Origin’s, first human space flight.
That July 20 launch date is just 15 days after Bezos will officially step down as CEO of the tech giant on July 5, a “sentimental” anniversary that falls 27 years after Amazon was incorporated on the same date in 1994.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. He said he planned to focus more on the company upon leaving his CEO role at Amazon.
It is unclear if the space flight was scheduled with Bezos’ exit date in mind. The company did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
At Amazon, Bezos will be replaced by Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud platform. Jassy has been at the company for 24 years and is a close confidant of Bezos.
Bezos and his brother will take an 11-minute trip to the very edge of space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, named so after the first American to travel to space, Alan Shepard. As he wrote in an Instagram post, Bezos has dreamt of traveling to space since he was five years old.
“I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure – it’s a big deal for me,” Bezos said in a video posted Monday.
Read more: Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin launched a rocket that could make way for space-tourism flights this year
Bezos’ scheduled space flight also puts him into space ahead of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company is also a major player in space exploration. However, SpaceX has already sent a crewed ship to the International Space Station.
There will be six seats on the New Shepard spacecraft, and one of them is being auctioned off. The bidding for one seat has reached $2.8 million. The auction winner will be announced on Saturday.
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