Jeff Bezos Made Some Revealing Comments After His Trip into Space.
We shouldn’t be excited about billionaires and their joy rides.
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Well, Jeff Bezos finally made it to space.
The richest man on earth fulfilled his dream, and took a joy ride on a spacecraft owned and operated by his company Blue Origin. Frankly, I thought a lot of my frustration about billionaires and their space pet projects was released earlier this month after Virgin Group’s founder Richard Branson made it to space. I didn’t think I even had the energy to address Bezos’ trip. That is, of course, until I happened to stumble upon the comments he made afterwards.
In his interview following his ten minute flight, Bezos said:
“I also wanna thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer. Cuz, you guys paid for all this. So seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
Oh they paid for it all right.
We all did.
We’re living in the midst of a pandemic that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of jobs in the U.S. alone while Bezos nearly doubled his wealth. Meanwhile, this joy ride is where he decided to focus his energy.
It’s genuinely difficult to even know where to begin when considering all the ways we paid for the richest man on earth to spend ten minutes in space. For one, of course, the trip was made possible because the man has unprecedented, unfathomable amounts of wealth that goes largely untaxed. The trip was paid for by the exploitation of his workers, who were stripped of their $2 an hour hazard pay in the middle of a pandemic, back to making a measly $15 an hour. Amazon’s warehouse employee who was denied pregnancy accommodations and then miscarried paid for it. Amazon workers who are forced to urinate in plastic bottles to keep up with their delivery schedule paid for it. The 189 Amazon workers who called from 46 sites over five years reporting threats of suicide paid for it. The drivers who are monitored for how often they yawn have paid for it.
