Our Billionaires Are Blasting Off. Good Riddance! – Inequality.org

Three of the richest billionaires on Earth are now busily spending billions to exit our Earths atmosphere and enter into space. The world is watching and reflecting.

Some commentators see our billionaire trio Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk as heroic heirs to the legacies of Charles Lindbergh and Sir Edmund Hillary, the first mere mortals to high jump the Atlantic alone and scale the worlds highest mountain.

Our billionaires racing into space, other charmed commentators are adding, arent just thrilling humankind. Theyre uplifting us. The technologies that the space operations Branson, Bezos, and Musk develop could benefit people worldwide far into the future, says Yahoo Finances Daniel Howley.

But most of our commentators seem to be taking a considerably more skeptical perspective. Theyre dismissing the space antics of Branson, Bezos, and Musk as the ego trips of bored billionaires, cynical stunts by disgustingly rich businessmen, as one British analyst puts it, to boost their self-importance at a time when money and resources are desperately needed elsewhere.

Space travel used to be about us, a collective effort by the country to reach beyond previously unreachable limits, writes author William Rivers Pitt. That was the Cold War propaganda, anyway, and it had an unavoidable allure. Now, its about them, the 0.1 percent.

The best of these skeptical commentators can even make us laugh.

Really, billionaires? comedian Seth Meyers asked earlier this month. This is what youre going to do with your unprecedented fortunes and influence? Drag race to outer space?

Lets enjoy the ridicule. But lets not treat the billionaire space race as a laughing matter. Lets see it as a wake-up call, a reminder that we dont only get billionaires when wealth concentrates. We get a society that revolves around the egos of the most affluent among us and an economy where the needs of average people go unmet and dont particularly matter.

Characters like Elon Musk, notes Paris Max, host of the Tech Wont Save Us podcast, are using misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement and gain tax-dollar support for various projects designed to work best if not exclusively for the elite.

The three corporate space shells for Musk, Bezos, and Branson SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic have all benefited greatly through partnerships with NASA and the US military, notes CNN Business. Their common corporate goal: to get satellites, people, and cargo into space cheaper and quicker than has been possible in decades past.

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Our Billionaires Are Blasting Off. Good Riddance! - Inequality.org