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Billionaire Jeff Bezos inside of the Blue Origin rocket.
While record-breaking wildfires burned across the Western United States, Amazon CEO and billionaire Jeff Bezos stepped out of his space capsule to a crowd of cheering fans. His company Blue Origin’s first launch into space was a success.
Bezos became the second billionaire to reach space and cement his stature as a leading private space industry figure. The three billionaires building the private space industry so far are: Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk with SpaceX and Bezos with Blue Origin. . Musk has yet to make the trip to space himself.
Upon his return, Bezos made it a point to thank Amazon workers, who “paid for all this,” a stark contrast to the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and the union-busting efforts pushed by Amazon around the country.
After his return, with a cowboy hat on his head and a childlike grin on his face, Bezos fashioned himself a sort of jolly frontiersman. Indeed, these billionaires see themselves as virtuous trailblazers of a new space age.
Branson, who preceded Bezos’s space trip by about a week, nearly said as much. “If we can do this,” exclaimed Branson as he looked out of the spacecraft's window, down at the rest of us, “just imagine what you can do.” With a billion dollars, he should have added.
What do these men share in common beyond their money, eccentricities, and desire to float in space? They don’t like paying taxes.
Branson has moved billions between tax havens to avoid paying in his home country of England. A groundbreaking ProPublica investigation revealed that most of the United States’ richest billionaires maneuver their fortunes to pay less taxes than most Americans. For a number of years, Bezos and Musk, the two richest men in the world, paid no federal income taxes.
While Branson has the more docile plan of business expansion and commercial space travel (think space tourism), Bezos and Musk share a more intense ambition: a vision of capital-led space expansion and settlement. Bezos envisions settlements on the moon. Musk, famously, locates humanity’s future in the colonization of Mars.
Behind their space ambitions is a recognition of the more earthly challenges to our future: the depletion of resources, population growth, and most importantly, climate change. In his post-launch briefing, Bezos even spoke of the Earth’s fragility and the need to protect it.
“As we move about the Earth, we damage it,” he said. In a separate interview, he stressed the need to keep Earth “as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”
Admissions like this demonstrate a willful ignorance of the billionaires’ own complicity in these existential crises.
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The Blue Origin rocket, which cost more than $5 billion to take Jeff Bezos to space for four minutes.
Bezos’s Amazon in particular has become a pollution behemoth. The company is responsible for a carbon footprint that rivals that of some countries. At the same time, Bezos and his company fund a leading climate-change-denial think tank and reject grassroots employee demands for greater climate action.
Bezos may be giving more attention to the company’s climate impact; Amazon has created the Amazon Climate Pledge to reach net zero emission by 2040, and Bezos himself has pledged $10 billion toward the new Bezos Earth Fund. But, one year after creating the pledge, the company’s carbon emissions increased by 19 percent, and Bezos has only given a fraction of his pledge.
Climate change is an immediate crisis that, at this point, we are in a stage of harm management and not prevention. Proponents of the Green New Deal argue that to salvage our planet and its inhabitants requires a war-like scale of mobilization. Estimates of the cost of reconstructing a new, green economy usually amount to trillions of dollars of government spending.
In short, $10 billion isn’t going to cut it.
Today’s billionaires exhibit a power that entire countries once only dreamt of—and many still do. Where some find inspiration and awe, a growing number of people are disillusioned with the glaring, shocking inequality of billionaires doing somersaults in zero gravity.
Even rocket launches have lost the shine they once held. Whereas in 1969 a country watched, captivated, as the first American stepped foot on the moon, this past summer, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successful launching in Florida was merely a blink in the news cycle.
Why? To be frank, we had larger and more immediate concerns at home on Earth. And we still do.
Inequality levels in the United States are among the highest levels ever recorded. During the pandemic, U.S. billionaires have collectively increased their fortunes by more than $1 trillion. A survey shortly before the pandemic showed that nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t have more than $1,000 saved.
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Jeff Bezos wearing a cowboy hat after his return from space.
Upon his return from the sky, Bezos made it a point to thank Amazon workers, who “paid for all this.” This rhetorical thanks is a stark contrast to the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and the union-busting efforts pushed by Amazon around the country.
It’s important to remember how these billionaires made their money and what their space race really means while so many issues persist at home.
While they continue their privatized space race, the rest of humanity is imperiled. The planet will continue to burn, and inequality will worsen until massive action and investment is taken, which means billionaires finally paying their fair share.
Billionaires would do best to put their space race on pause and focus more of their attention on this planet.