Eleven people in the world die every minute — most from preventable causes like hunger. That doesn’t seem to faze three billionaires who could afford to right the world’s ship solely on the rise in their net worth during the pandemic. Instead, these unspeakably greedy billionaires, chief among them Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, are off to the wild blue yonder to turn space into a capitalist profit center via a sub-orbital tourist business. But the vast bulk of Americans need not apply. For the first trip, the Bezos entourage held a lottery. The winning bid? $28 million. “We need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.” [Jeff Bezos] Considering that in order to snag a seat on Bezos’ next flight, a ticket will cost $300,000 or more, the universe of space travelers and their “kids” is miniscule. Only about two million people in a U.S. population of 333 million could afford a seat on the next joyride. [Vertical Research Partners] Remember this is the guy who could give all Amazon’s U.S. workers (one million+) a one-time $105,000 bonus and still be as filthy rich as he was before the pandemic. What he did instead as the pandemic was raging: eliminated the $2-an-hour pay boost intended to reward frontline workers for continuing to come into work. While he was cheating his workers, he was hard at work building a half billion-dollar yacht. Think that’s as obscene as it gets? Check out “Billionaires Doing the Two-Step in Space While Most Americans Try to Stay Afloat” and you may wind up wishing he stays in space permanently.
