A shareholder of Amazon has filed a lawsuit against the company’s founder Jeff Bezos and the board of directors.
The plaintiff claiming that they were negligent in their evaluation of the decision to give Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, 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 suit claims that Amazon has already paid around $1.7 billion to the three launch service providers involved in the project, including $585 million to Blue Origin directly, and that the corporation has yet to send a prototype of its Kuiper satellite into orbit.
Amazon earlier this year, Project Kuiper will start mass building the satellites later this year and conduct beta testing with paying clients in 2024.
According to a lawsuit filed on August 28 in the Delaware Court of Chancery, the pension fund is requesting unspecified damages as well as legal costs.
