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Space: the final frontier for the planet’s wealthiest?

By:   []

Date: 2021-08

On 20 July, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire in a matter of weeks to take a flashy joyride into space. The date was significant, marking 52 years since the first moon landing in 1969.

Nine days previously, another billionaire, British business mogul Richard Branson, had also taken off for the edge of space. A third billionaire, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, has reportedly reserved a seat to visit space with Virgin Galactic, Branson’s company.

What’s the point of these intergalactic endeavors? The three billionaires claim it’s a necessary, almost philanthropic, investment in the future of humanity.

Bezos, who founded his Blue Origin rocket company more than 20 years ago, ultimately wants to build space pods, in which “trillions” of people would live and work – an idea thought to have been influenced by one of his Princeton professors, Gerard K O’Neill.

“The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” Bezos said. “If we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.”

Branson, who first announced his intention to make a space plane in 2004, to ferry hundreds of thousands of ordinary people into space, argues that trips to space will help preserve Earth. “I want people to be able to look back at our beautiful Earth and come home and work very hard to try to do magic to look after it.”

Musk, meanwhile, has an even more outrageous plan. He says human beings should be a “multi-planet species” and prepare to settle on Mars.

But as well as an obsession with space travel, the three men have something else in common: all have track records of avoiding or minimizing their tax bills.

Amazon, Bezos’s company, finally paid some federal tax in 2019 after two years of paying $0 in US federal income tax. In fact, in both 2017 and 2018, Amazon actually received a federal tax refund of $137m and $129m respectively. In 2020, corporate filings by Amazon EU Sarl – the company’s Luxembourg unit, through which it handles sales for its European operations – showed record-high income for 2019, but it still managed to pay zero corporation tax.

As for Bezos himself, according to an investigation published by ProPublica in June, his wealth increased by $127bn between 2006 and 2018. During that period, he paid a ‘true tax rate’ of just 1.1%.
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