Here's the cruel irony of Blue Origin's Sunday launch: the hardest part went perfectly, and the easier part broke everything.
New Glenn's first stage — a 321-foot rocket named Never Tell Me the Odds — lifted off from Cape Canaveral, separated cleanly, and then guided itself to a smooth landing on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles downrange. That landing was historic. It marked the first time Blue Origin successfully reflew an orbital-class booster, a milestone the company has been chasing for years while watching SpaceX make the same trick look routine.
For about ten minutes, it was a genuinely great morning for Jeff Bezos' rocket company. Then things unraveled.
Blue Origin confirmed that New Glenn's upper stage — the part responsible for delivering the payload to the right place — underperformed and released its cargo into the wrong orbit. The passenger in question was a cellular broadband satellite for AST SpaceMobile, a company building a network designed to beam connectivity directly to regular smartphones. The satellite powered on after separation, which is something, but it ended up in an orbit too low to sustain operations. Whether it can be maneuvered into a workable position remains unclear.
To understand why this stings beyond just one bad mission, you need to know what New Glenn is supposed to be. This isn't a science experiment — it's Blue Origin's commercial and institutional workhorse, and critically, it's the rocket NASA is counting on to deliver hardware for the Artemis lunar program. Repeated upper stage problems are not a footnote. They go straight to the heart of whether New Glenn is ready for the missions it's been contracted to fly.
Sunday's flight was New Glenn's third overall. The rocket's debut in early 2025 ended with an upper stage issue too, though for different reasons. The November 2025 mission went cleanly end-to-end, which made that flight the outlier in a pattern that Blue Origin will now need to explain carefully to NASA and commercial customers.
The booster reuse achievement still matters, and Blue Origin deserves credit for it. SpaceX's competitive advantage isn't just that Falcon 9 lands — it's that boosters turn around in days and fly again and again, driving costs down dramatically. Blue Origin has now proven it can recover and re-fly a New Glenn booster, and CEO Dave Limp has said the company plans to reuse engines from previous flights on future missions as well. That's the foundation of a scalable launch business.
But foundations don't matter much if the rocket keeps dropping things in the wrong place. Blue Origin has two very different stories to tell right now, and the one about the upper stage is going to be louder for a while.
AI
ByteDance Profits Crater Over 70 Percent as AI Spending Surges
ByteDance made a lot of money in 2025. Then it spent even more of it.
The TikTok parent company saw its net profit drop by more than 70 percent last year compared to 2024, according to sources familiar with the figures. The culprit, at least in the official narrative, is a massive ramp-up in AI investment during the second half of the year. ByteDance declined to comment on the numbers, which is about as close to a confirmation as you typically get in these situations.
A 70-plus percent profit decline is jarring on its face, but context matters here. ByteDance is not a struggling company quietly bleeding cash — it's one of the most profitable consumer tech businesses on the planet voluntarily setting money on fire to stay competitive in the AI race. This is a strategic choice, not a crisis. The question is whether it's the right one.
The AI spending arms race has claimed profit margins at virtually every major tech company that's decided to play seriously. Microsoft, Google, Meta — they've all absorbed massive capital expenditure hits in recent years as they build out data centers, acquire chips, and hire researchers. ByteDance joining that club is less surprising than the sheer scale of the drop. Seventy percent is not a rounding error.
What makes ByteDance's situation particularly interesting is what's happening on the revenue side while profits are cratering. Overseas revenue grew by nearly 50 percent in 2025, lapping domestic growth of around 20 percent by a wide margin. International business now accounts for more than 30 percent of total revenue, up from 25 percent the year before. For a company that spent years being viewed primarily as a China story, that's a meaningful shift.
The engine behind that overseas surge is TikTok Shop, ByteDance's e-commerce play that's been aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia and the United States. Gross merchandise value on the platform grew nearly 70 percent year-over-year. That's the kind of growth that makes investors forget about short-term profit compression — assuming the political environment cooperates, which for TikTok is never a safe assumption.
The broader picture here is a company at a genuine crossroads. ByteDance is betting that absorbing painful losses now, while pouring resources into AI infrastructure and international commerce, will position it to compete with the next generation of AI-native products and platforms. That bet might pay off. But it's also being made under the constant shadow of regulatory pressure in the US and geopolitical tension that could disrupt TikTok's operations at almost any moment.
Spending like there's no tomorrow works best when you're reasonably confident there will be one.
Source: TechNode
The TikTok parent company saw its net profit drop by more than 70 percent last year compared to 2024, according to sources familiar with the figures. The culprit, at least in the official narrative, is a massive ramp-up in AI investment during the second half of the year. ByteDance declined to comment on the numbers, which is about as close to a confirmation as you typically get in these situations.
A 70-plus percent profit decline is jarring on its face, but context matters here. ByteDance is not a struggling company quietly bleeding cash — it's one of the most profitable consumer tech businesses on the planet voluntarily setting money on fire to stay competitive in the AI race. This is a strategic choice, not a crisis. The question is whether it's the right one.
The AI spending arms race has claimed profit margins at virtually every major tech company that's decided to play seriously. Microsoft, Google, Meta — they've all absorbed massive capital expenditure hits in recent years as they build out data centers, acquire chips, and hire researchers. ByteDance joining that club is less surprising than the sheer scale of the drop. Seventy percent is not a rounding error.
What makes ByteDance's situation particularly interesting is what's happening on the revenue side while profits are cratering. Overseas revenue grew by nearly 50 percent in 2025, lapping domestic growth of around 20 percent by a wide margin. International business now accounts for more than 30 percent of total revenue, up from 25 percent the year before. For a company that spent years being viewed primarily as a China story, that's a meaningful shift.
The engine behind that overseas surge is TikTok Shop, ByteDance's e-commerce play that's been aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia and the United States. Gross merchandise value on the platform grew nearly 70 percent year-over-year. That's the kind of growth that makes investors forget about short-term profit compression — assuming the political environment cooperates, which for TikTok is never a safe assumption.
The broader picture here is a company at a genuine crossroads. ByteDance is betting that absorbing painful losses now, while pouring resources into AI infrastructure and international commerce, will position it to compete with the next generation of AI-native products and platforms. That bet might pay off. But it's also being made under the constant shadow of regulatory pressure in the US and geopolitical tension that could disrupt TikTok's operations at almost any moment.
Spending like there's no tomorrow works best when you're reasonably confident there will be one.
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