July 20, 2021

Jeff Bezos Thanks Amazon Workers and Customers for Making Him So Rich He Can Go to Space

And they say collective action isn’t possible.

bezos

Chuck Bigger/Space Symposium via ZUMA Press Wire

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On Tuesday, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire in as many weeks to sort-of go to space. The world’s richest man spent several minutes in zero gravity on Tuesday aboard a rocket developed by his company Blue Origin. Going to space, or almost-space, is not, in itself, anything new—Alan Shepard became the first American to leave the atmosphere 60 years ago; four different current or former United States senators have been up there since. Perhaps the most striking thing about Bezos’ efforts is how low the bar has been set that a joyride that lasted shorter than a bathroom break at Amazon can be seen as an international news event.

It’s easy to be cynical about all of this, but in fairness, no one could put it more cynically than Jeff Bezos.

After he landed safely, the newly minted spaceman sat for an interview, and sounding somewhat punch-drunk off the thrill of the experience, summed up the whole fair in a very concise way.

“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,” he said.

Yes, that’s…that’s just about it. Tuesday’s launch was depressing less because of the spectacle in West Texas than because it’s tough to find the error in Bezos’ statement. It was a tremendous collective effort principally for the benefit of one person—an “interestingly shaped” manifestation of the broken political economy that made Bezos possible. This is the end product of all that sweat and sacrifice—of delivery workers peeing in bottles, of warehouse workers staring at propaganda about their boss while they take a shit, of people doing manual labor for $15 an hour, of humans getting injured at his factories and then being forced into a Kafkaesque company healthcare system, of Amazon employees working to hide their co-workers’ injuries, of economic concentration and runaway inequality, of a tax system that is designed to allow someone to become the world’s richest person while sometimes paying no income tax at all.

“Awesome!” Bezos shouted, trying to catch a skittle in his mouth 52 miles above the ground. “It’s so good.”

This is where all the money went.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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