The ride to space yesterday cost Bezos approximately $5.5 billion dollars. To put that into the perspective of how much money that is, I'm 45 years old and if I was given $5.5 billion dollars and told that I had to spend it all by my 80th birthday, I would have to spend approximately $430,000 A DAY in order to have zero dollars by the time I'm 80 years old. Part of my point is that it would be very difficult to find ways to spend that kind of money in 35 years. At some point, you have everything you need or want/need to do.

With that perspective of how much 5.5 billion dollars is, you have to wonder what other ways that money could have been spent. Was his goal to "build a road to space" worth it? One article suggested that with $5.5 billion dollars, he could have saved 37 million people from starving or provided 2 billion COVID vaccines for struggling countries. You just have to wonder what other good that money could have done for this struggling world. It's quite sobering.

I know that he gives away millions of dollars every year to good causes and even yesterday gave $200 million away to charities. He also gives billions to environmental efforts. Even Bezos admitted in an interview with CNN that he understands why people are critical of his flight to space and that it could have been spent in other places.

In the end, it is his money to do with what he wants and maybe there is some good that might come out of his test flight to space to add to the infrastructure to space travel. Yet, when you see all the needs of this world and how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, it's tough not to imagine other ways to use $5.5 billion (or $205 billion in net worth) to make a broader, definitive, and more lasting impact on humanity. But, maybe this venture will do just that.