Elon Musk isn't the only billionaire with rockets. There are at least two others who have hoped to amass their own fleet of pointy steel thingies that fly in the air: 's Jeff Bezos and Virgin's Richard Branson. Well, Musk can cut Branson off of that list because Virgin Orbit is out of the race. Amazon Last week, Virgin Orbit filed for after failing to secure key funding that would have helped it stay afloat. Virgin's problems began in January though, when a rocket containing commercial and defense-related research satellites failed to reach orbit. Virgin had pinned everything on the January launch, its sixth since being spun off from Branson's space tourism firm Virgin Galactic. bankruptcy Now, rocket failures seem to be part and parcel of the space industry. Hell, Musk's SpaceX before it finally became successful. The key difference here, though, is that while SpaceX had funding to continue on with its experiments, Virgin does not. had a bunch of failures Virgin's premise was different than SpaceX's: while Musk's company offers large rockets with the option to take a higher payload into orbit, Virgin was set up to launch small rockets and offer short-notice launches from anywhere. Basically, Virgin was competing for speed at the cost of a lower payload, while SpaceX takes on more payload at the cost of speed. Both business models have their own upsides and downsides, but demand for Musk's large rockets seem to be 😏. higher There's also a bit of a.. Uhm, funny anecdote involving Virgin's financial woes. Apparently, a certain Matthew Brown, a Texas-based venture capital investor, offered to bankroll $200 million into Virgin Orbit last month to help with the company's problems, only for the company to notice something really fishy about him. For example, Brown said he had worked with OpenAI, despite of that being the case. He had also claimed to run a Houston-based private wealth firm called Woods Family Office, with $6 billion in funds — again, with no evidence supporting his claim. any evidence So, understandably, Virgin cut contact with Brown and threatened to take legal action against him if he ever discloses confidential details about the potential investment. With Branson out, where does this leave Bezos? Well, Bezos certainly isn't flying rockets at the moment, particularly after his company Blue Origin's failures last year. Currently, Blue Origin's rockets are after one of them crashed during a mission in September. However, the company expects to resume flying by the , leaving Musk as the clear winner for now. grounded end of this year Amazon ranked #28 in this week's . Tech Company Rankings 👋 You’re reading HackerNoon's Tech Company News Brief, a weekly collection of tech goodness that combines HackerNoon's proprietary data with internet trends to determine which companies are rising and falling in the public consciousness. Subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday! here In Other News.. 📰 Should AI reject tasks? A from the U.K. might hold the answer. new poll Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars with each other, a special report reveals. The company has been by a lawsuit as a result. hit its first ever store in India. The company ranked #14 in this week's . Apple launched Tech Company Rankings Dogecoin became the of , albeit for a limited time. Twitter ranked #67 this week. official symbol Twitter Well, that didn't take long. Meta, soon after releasing , has now released a new AI model called SAM that can identify and "cut out" any object within an image. Check it out . Meta ranked #88 this week. LLaMA here And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️ — Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

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With Virgin's Collapse, Musk is Left With the Bigger Rocket 🚀

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Sheharyar Khan

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With Virgin's Collapse, Musk is Left With the Bigger Rocket 🚀

Too Long; Didn't Read

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