“Being a Billionaire Is a Lot Harder Than It Looks”: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Want to Burn Their Cash in Space

Welcome to the new space race, as the world’s richest men compete over who has the biggest rocket—and the ability to win lucrative contracts.

A few years ago a tech luminary in Silicon Valley told me about a very serious predicament that at the time only affected around 2,000 people on the entire planet. If you were one of those fateful few, he told me, it was a difficulty that would keep you up at night, staring at the ceiling with worry and constant anxiety. What was this insurmountable challenge? This Gordian knot? This unfortunate predicament only a few poor souls had to contend with? The challenge of being a billionaire, of course.

“Just think about it,” the luminary told me. “It’s nearly impossible to spend a billion dollars.” I laughed at the ridiculousness of this statement, but he went on, doing the math in front of me to make his point. “The most expensive Gulfstream jet in the world is $65 million; a couple of very fancy houses will cost you $20 million, $30 million total; many of the highest-end cars are only a few hundred thousand dollars each. You’ve done all that and you’ve still got around $900 million or so left to spend.” I responded, “Well, you could just give it away to people and organizations in need.” “Ahh, but you can’t,” the man said to me. “Are you just going to hand it to someone and hope they do the right thing with it? You have to build entire infrastructures to give the money away.” He went on to explain that you need to hire legions of people, often hundreds, including teams of lawyers and tax lawyers, finance experts, project managers, communications staffers, and so on, to manage the distribution of the money. “Just look at Warren Buffett. Rather than figure out how to give his money away, he just gave it to the Gates Foundation to do it for him.” Then, the man explained, there is the “problem” that your billions will only grow, often quicker than you can give them away, with interest and rising investments. “Being a billionaire is a lot harder than it looks,” the man said.

There are two people on the planet who seem to have figured out how to spend their multiple double-digit billions without much trouble. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who have swapped places back and forth on the mantle of richest person on earth over the past year, are in the midst of a multibillion-dollar space race that is literally helping them burn through their fortunes while trying to be the first to make it to the final frontier. (A third person, Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, has also figured it out, giving away a round of grants worth $2.74 billion last week, on top of the nearly $6 billion she gave away last year.)

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