The space race is getting more complex. Instead of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk just trying to one-up each other with space-related projects, they’re trying to land and secure the best talent to make that happen.
To compete with the fact that many SpaceX employees became millionaires following the company’s recent IPO, Blue Origin is reportedly rolling out a more generous equity plan after internal backlash over an older scheme that left workers holding effectively worthless options while their counterparts at SpaceX got rich, according to agreements obtained by Business Insider.
But the new plan comes with an unusual non-compete clause: Employees would have to forfeit all of their stock options if they join a competitor (say, SpaceX) within 18 months of leaving the company, according to Business Insider.
Clearly, the timing isn’t a coincidence. Just weeks ago, Blue Origin’s biggest competitor, SpaceX, went public on the Nasdaq on June 12 in the largest IPO in history, turning an estimated 4,400 current and former employees into paper millionaires, from executives down to welders and machinists who’d been granted stock over the years. About 400 of them are now worth $100 million or more.
For a Blue Origin employee weighing a bigger equity package given that context, the trade-off is sharper than it looks, Evan Mills, an associate financial advisor at Scholar Financial Advising who counts SpaceX employees among his clients, told Fortune.
