[ksaj]

The fact that Branson pretended to ride his bicycle to the launch pad, commented on his fictitious ride, and then subsequently admitted he made it all up, suggests a huge amount of this is for show. There is definitely a one-upmanship going on, and perhaps some really oddball humour that only the billionaire trio would understand.

All three of them are doing related but distinctly different things, so I think the competitiveness is mainly a gag. If the end result proves to be beneficial in the general sense, I'm happy to let them at it.

[salawat]

The funny thing about all this, is that back in college, the CS program included a semester on Ethics. Using computers to prevaricate or otherwise exaggerate one's accomplishments was one of the first trivial examples of maluse of computational resources.

Seems like that's one of the first uses a non-trivial demographic of users go for.