The Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, who are Amazon shareholders, have filed a lawsuit alleging that the board of directors spent less than 40 minutes approving the launch agreements for Amazon's Project Kuiper mega-constellation while failing to even consider leading launch company (and Blue Origin rival) SpaceX.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon's directors gave the unproven, failing rocket firm owned by Jeff Bezos probably less than an hour of their time before approving it blindly. The plaintiffs contend that despite Bezos' obvious conflict of interest, the board did not adequately safeguard the bargaining process.

Early in 2019, Amazon unveiled Project Kuiper, a satellite broadband initiative. That same year, the business also applied for a license from the government to launch a constellation of over 3,200 satellites into low Earth orbit, with an estimated cost of several billion dollars.

Amazon had a "herculean task" ahead of it, the lawsuit states, as regulators had given the company just nine years to put its entire constellation into orbit. This meant that there was a deadline for negotiating a dozen rocket launches, possibly spread across several different providers.

A total of $1.7 billion has so far been spent by Amazon on the launch contracts, $585 million of which went to Blue Origin.

Along with the personal animosities between Musk and Bezos, the legal filing also highlights the ongoing rivalry between Blue Origin and SpaceX, which has seen both businesses compete for the same contracts, with Blue Origin losing out.

This week, the lawsuit was submitted to the Delaware Court of Chancery. The first publication to cover it was The Delaware Business Court Insider.