In a phone call described as “all-hands” by Reuters, the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced layoffs affecting around 10% of his staff.
The company-wide layoffs will affect around 1,400 people.
Blue Origin had 14,000 employees before the layoffs with offices in Texas, Florida, and Washington State.
Reuters reports that the meeting lasted 10 minutes and was scheduled the night before.
Related: How Do Billionaires Become Best Friends? They Launch Rockets on the Same Day. That’s What Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Did.
“There’s no easy way to communicate this,” CEO Dave Limp said in the memo obtained by tech site GeekWire. “There’s no question that we’ve had a lot of successes over the last few months.”
Limp was likely referring to the company’s successful launch of its New Glenn rocket in January.
“But that being said, when you look at the foundation of the company and what we need to get to over the next three to five years, we just came to the painful conclusion that we aren’t set up for the kind of success that we really wanted to have,” Limp added.
Amazon founder Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000. He’s currently the third richest man in the world with $248 billion, per Bloomberg.
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