July 5th of 27 years ago, in a garage in Seattle, on the initiative of a thirty-year-old engineer who was not satisfied with the rich salary he received from a hedge fund, took away the first online library. His name? Amazon, the creature of Jeff, the adopted son of the Cuban exile Miguel Bezos and of Jacklyn, the mother who had given birth to him at the age of 17, when he was still in high school. “July 5 is not just any day for me,” she recalled Jeff Bezos, who in the meantime became the richest man in the world, when he announced to the shareholders his decision to leave his position as CEO of the e-commerce giant, carving out the role of executive chairman for himself, free from the constraints of management.
Naturally starting from 5 July: two weeks before the little trip prepared with the utmost care to celebrate retirement: an absolute novelty, the first space tourist mission, a privilege hitherto granted to a select club of astronauts. Date of the trip, July 20, just to escape the heat that oppresses North America these days. Other than Caribbean Polynesia or Antarctic ice. This time, embarked on his Blue Origin spacecraft, Bezos would have really established a historic record with this little trip out of town with his brother, a still unknown guest and a real surprise: Wally Funk, an 82-year-old lady that in 1961, despite having passed all the tests, she was excluded from NASA because she was a woman. Better late than never, she limited herself to saying Wally, who has already packed his bags to reach Bezos at the Texas base as quickly as possible.
But the king of Amazon has not reckoned with Richard Branson, the English billionaire who has been pursuing the dream of being for 17 years the first Scrooge to enter orbit. Bezos leaves on the 20th? Well, Virgin will bring the mission forward to July 11, nine days earlier. A spite that has a precise economic value: after the announcement, Virgin Galactic's stock rose by 25 percent on the Stock Exchange.
All that remains is to wait for a countermove from the founder of Amazon, determined to defend the right to be the first billionaire to indulge in an eleven-minute outing at 62 miles from the atmosphere. Unless the usual Elon Musk I don't want to reserve a surprise. Difficult, because the owner of Starlink, engaged this summer in covering the sky with satellites to ensure Internet service at any latitude, has already anticipated that his goal will be Mars, to be reached within six years. The time it takes to think of a suitable mausoleum, because Tesla's boss has already said that he wants to be buried on the red planet, where the probes sent by China and the United States are already digging.
In short, if you don't hurry, finding a place in space risks being more difficult than planting an umbrella on the beach on August XNUMXth. Also because from Oracle's Larry Ellison a Sergey Brin of Google the list of rich people who are not satisfied with the role of lenders, but go in search of extreme emotions, grows longer.
A hobby that Bezos, in truth, has been practicing for some time together with the adoptive father and the brother Mark, which will accompany him on Blue Origin. The trio rode 50 miles through a desert area of Texas, far from any gas stations. His curriculum includes several speleologist missions in hitherto untouched caves, hundreds of meters underground. And he took a three-week vacation to go hunting in the ocean for the remains of the Apollo 11 space capsule, the spacecraft that had brought the first men to the moon. A sort of Indiana Jones with a taboo: the helicopter, which he, the victim of a serious accident that could have ended tragically, hasn't taken on for years.
The curriculum of the English enemy is no less rich. Richard Branson, a Formula E driver, did not deny himself practically anything. From the solo crossing of the English Channel on a surfboard (bare ass in the wind, to boot) to the balloon crossing of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, not to mention jumping, well harnessed, from the roof of the Palm Casino in Las Vegas or of the project to explore the abyss with Virgin Oceanic, his submarine. Such an adventure companion is worth the $250 ticket for the flight into space (in top-of-the-range conditions, he assures).
It will certainly cost less to fly on LTA, which stands for lighter than air, the airline he is working with, together with NASA, Sergei Brin, one of the pioneers of Google (assets 108 billion dollars). The goal is to build a zero-emission aircraft based on hydrogen. A worthy initiative, but the prototype (a sort of Zeppelin from the XNUMXs) is a super-luxury jet reserved for the privileged few in search of thrills: like Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil.
Who loved the bottom of the ocean was Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who died in 2018, owner of a fleet of submarines to point to the abyss. Including Pagoo, a yellow submarine in line with Beatles songs. “Down there, a thousand feet below sea level, it's really dark and silent. And animals are really weird. What a blast – Allen added in an interview with the Seattle Times – to listen to Pink Floyd down there”.
