'Rich Dad Poor Dad' Author Robert Kiyosaky On Why Jeff Bezos Is Taking On Elon Musk

Robert Kiyosaki — the author of bestselling financial education book "Rich Dad Poor Dad" — shared with his mailing list subscribers what one of his trusted experts believes to be a bigger opportunity than Amazon Inc. AMZN was in its early days.

See Also: BEST ROBERT KIYOSAKI BOOKS 

What Happened: Kiyosaki said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has started selling stock at a much faster pace than before — largely to finance a new endeavor that he himself describes as "the most important thing I'm doing right now."

In 2017, Bezos said that he would sell only $1 billion of stock per year, but in 2020 he sold over $10.2 billion and in 2021 he has already sold $5.1 billion.

Kiyosaki-promoted entrepreneur, investor and hedge fund manager James Altucher expects that more about the project will be revealed at an Oct. 19 conference. This endeavor places Bezos in direct competition with Elon Musk's Starlink global internet service powered by a vast low-orbit satellite constellation. 

Altucher's analysis points out Amazon's patent grant #10556709, which describes an energy-efficient system capable of launching payloads into orbit at high speeds. A maritime that would use the principles of whip dynamics to move a cable with one or multiple aerial vehicles attached to "create, propagate, and accelerate a whip waveform along the cable toward the payload." This would — in principle — accelerate the payload enough to reach orbit.

Altucher believes that this technology will be used to power Bezos' "Universal Internet," which is also known as Project Kuiper — a network of 3,236 satellites in low-earth orbit supposed to provide high-speed internet anywhere on earth. Sounds familiar? That's because tech mogul Elon Musk kickstarted a near-identical project called Starlink that is already partly functional.

The financial education promoter suggests that "going by Amazon’s past record of undercutting competition" the service "could be at a fraction of the cost of what people pay for their internet today."

Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Angels was quoted as saying that he expects such a network could serve as many as 4 billion new customers, which Altucher points out is 12 times Amazon's current client base.

Consequently, he asks "what would 12 times more customers mean to their valuations?" He expects that Amazon could grow to be valued at "more than the GDP of almost every country on earth" after this technology is adopted worldwide.

See Also: HOW TO BUY AMAZON (AMZN) STOCK 

Project Kuiper Is Not New — What Is New?

Kiyosaki claims that Amazon leased two buildings with approximately 219,500 square feet for the project and plans to move its headquarters away from Seattle "to possibly be closer to this project."

Furthermore, 2019 saw Bezos go on "on an engineer hiring spree" that included bringing on Rajeev Badyal — a former vice president at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, who worked at Starlink.

Bezos also hired aerospace engineer Mark Krebs, who helped develop the first two SpaceX prototype satellites. Amazon also posted hundreds of open job positions for satellite engineers referencing low earth orbit.

According to Altucher, the launch costs can be 50 to 400 times the cost of the satellite itself, which makes the aforementioned patented technology a potential game-changer.

Amazon is seemingly serious in its intention to go ahead with the project, considering that its "StarNet" won a unanimous 5-0 bipartisan vote in its favor last year. In other words, Amazon already has the permission to build and launch 3,236 satellites for its internet network.

The Amazon Bull Argument

Altucher points out that when Amazon attempted a large-scale innovation like this with Amazon Web Services, its stock price soared 8,400% and "investors who got in then and stuck with Amazon were rewarded with a huge windfall." Those investors "could’ve turned $10,000 into over $850,000."

Furthermore, Altucher believes that "what we're about to see could dwarf that" since Amazon Web Services was a $35-billion opportunity, but this could be worth "even trillions of dollars in revenue."

Despite that, he suggests looking beyond Amazon, since there will be a spate of smaller opportunities that will jump on the "band-wagon" that will "grow much faster than Amazon can ever hope to."

He points out that since the early 1980s, shares of computer giant International Business Machines IBM gained 660% in 18 years, while still-nascent Intel INTC skyrocketed by 25,500% in the same time. Each $1,000 invested in Intel became $256,000.

IBM, just like Amazon, was already a huge company, while Intel still had plenty of room to grow.

Another example is Apple AAPL, which grew by 200% within four years after the launch of the first iPhone. Many of its suppliers grew much faster than Apple itself.

Pegatron is one of those companies — its shares were trading at $2.02 , ut a major contract from Apple shot them up to $44.80 within one year: a 2,117% gain.

Similarly, he suggests that investors should look into potential Amazon suppliers and companies that could profit from the booming space industry.