After decades of seeing fictional billionaires like Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark put their wealth into awesome efforts to change the world – the year 2021 finally saw a few of them do something more than just open a boring foundation: they actually built rocketships and went in them to go into space.
This was met with a lot of unhappy reaction on the internet because of course, “if someone has enough money to advance privatized space travel then why can’t they just give it to me?” – or some similar response with the same general thesis. Yawn.
In America, a lot of coverage of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos preparing to go into space has been the big item for years, with only minor mentions of how UK billionaire Richard Branson of the Virgin company has also been planning Virgin spacecrafts and to a similar extent, we only see side-mentions of Elon Musk’s effort with SpaceX – but in a surprise move from Branson: Virgin beat Bezos to busting space-sex quicker than SpaceX. (alternate headline?).
An added layer of amusing coincidence is that Virgin’s ship is shaped like a plane and Bezos’ ship is shaped like a penis.
The big thing that got people heated about what captains of industry spend their capital on to change this dull world was when Bezos pointed out that this was made possible because the company he started has good employees that helped make it popular enough to be so widely adopted by customers that he could pay for such an endeavor.
The reason they didn’t like this sentiment was because they interpreted it differently. Specifically, Bezos said: “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this”; and this was stretched to mean some kind of admission of exploitation along the lines of “you losers who work for me and you suckers who buy shit from my company bankrolled this hobby of mine. Morons”. Which is weird, but less weird when you know that these same people have been demonizing Amazon for only paying workers really-well, and not really-REALLY-well, and … well – on the customer end of it, they have no argument because Amazon undeniably trounces competition in prices so it’s not like Amazon buyers are getting gouged with huge markups. So it’s really just the employee part that is acting as a confirmation-bias where people set up a false premise that if billionaire has billions of dollars then it is immoral for them to pay the lowest-tier job roles in their company at industry competitive rates – they should be gifting them MORE for their work because, shucks – they’re billionaires!
Lame.
But its even more lame that private industry builders are using their money to advance space travel and instead of being happy about it, so many are just using it as another excuse to feel bad about the world and how it differs from what they think it should be. It’s lame and it’s a shame. A lame shame with unwarranted blame.