Jeffrey Preston Bezos, a 57-year-old dad from New Mexico, flew to the sting of area and again once more immediately. He wasn’t the one individual aboard the rocket, which was the first-ever crewed flight from personal area firm Blue Origin, however he is the one which digital camera crews flocked to as soon as the 10-minute journey was performed. Maybe they have been drawn in by his smile. Maybe they thought he was the winner of a sub-orbital Lex Luthor lookalike contest. Maybe his bulbous, pale cowboy hat caught their eye. 

In actuality in fact, it was as a result of Bezos is the founding father of Blue Origin and Amazon, and thought of to be the richest individual on the planet. This wealth not solely offers him the chance to construct, run after which trip his personal rocket ships, nevertheless it additionally makes folks actually inquisitive about what he has to say, no matter his relationship to the matter at hand.

When Bezos stepped again onto Earth after spinning round in zero-gravity for a couple of minutes, the cameras descended and his cowboy hat answered a handful of questions concerning the expertise. The world’s richest man shared his ideas about area, air pollution and wage despair, seemingly simply earlier than taking an SUV caravan to his personal jet and heading to considered one of his international luxurious estates. 

Here are three of probably the most centibillionaire issues Bezos stated after his Blue Origin flight immediately:

“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.” In this identical interview, Bezos mentioned his plans to broaden Blue Origin’s area tourism enterprise over the approaching many years, a enterprise that has the potential to pump massive amounts of carbon and other chemicals into the environment. Unlike ground-based emitters like automobiles or coal-powered crops, rocket emissions are expelled immediately into the higher environment, the place they linger for years. Additionally, Amazon has threatened to fireplace workers for talking up concerning the firm’s help of the oil and fuel industries.

“We need unifiers, not vilifiers. When you look out at the planet, there are no borders. There’s nothing. It’s one planet and we share it and it’s fragile.” As the CEO of Amazon, for years Bezos fought towards firm efforts to unionize, even amid credible studies of inhumane, exploitative situations for Amazon supply drivers and warehouse employees. 

Bezos, who amassed greater than $70 billion in private wealth final yr and regularly pays $0 in federal income taxes, then thanked those self same Amazon workers for paying for his journey to area. He stated, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.” That line, at the least, is totally correct.