Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.
He might have bought the Washington Post as a vanity project, but that has not stopped him as using it as a propaganda tool.
> Jeff Bezos loves space exploration. He loves O'Neil's vision of orbital colonies, and he firmly believes that moving heavy industry to orbit will leave Earth better off. That's not a vanity project.
If that was his strategy he would have been much better of in actually investing his money in, actual space stations. There is a clear aspect of dick measuring with Musk. Like Blue literally threw out a lot of their plans because SpaceX was moving ahead of them so fast.
But instead of using SpaceX capability, they fight against it, sue SpaceX and do everything to compete with SpaceX.
For example, its well known how much Bezos wants to beat Musk and SpaceX in a major NASA competition. This has been reported on. They regularly change plans and reorient themselves and go 'all in' on some major project. This has been reported on quite a bit. Even when it is not profitable for them.
They have also de-empathized their Space station, partly because NASA is less interested. But if Bezos has 2-3 billion $ per year to burn, that would be his actual focus.
So this whole 'its all about getting to O'Neil vision' faster is really only part of the situation and do not really explain much of BlueOrigin strategy as company.
Maybe in the early days when Blue was basically a think-tank, this was true, but its not any longer.
I disagree. The poet Gary Snyder thought space travel was unimaginative - that living life as things are on earth was more interesting and challenging. Owning the Washington Post gives him control over a high visibility U.S. news operation. Nothing vanity about that.
Oh you know, probably his clearly stated intentions of driving industry off-earth and into orbit.
Is SpaceX also a vanity project? No, Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere.
Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they're full of shit. In fact, in both of their cases, it means they're extremely driven by... real ambitions.
There is clear evidence Musk's original goal with SpaceX was just to encourage more investment into NASA. Remember it was started before Tesla existed and before Musk was a billionaire.