On the weekend of 30 May Elon Musk – a billionaire with a net worth of $38billion – launched a rocket into space. This private venture was in contrast to President Kennedy’s ‘moonshot’ ambition of 1961-69 – one of the greatest mobilizations of public resources and manpower in U.S. history. Musk’s ostensible aim is to colonise Mars; but his ultimate purpose is to extract future rents from billionaires ferried into space, and from taxi services conveying public aerospace sector (NASA) astronauts to the International Space Station.
A discordant note was struck on the day of Musk’s ‘Starship’ launch. Hundreds of thousands of Americans ignored the event while they angrily protested the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. No other event illuminated so vividly the huge gulf between ordinary Americans and a fabulously wealthy elite.
Elon Musk was not the only billionaire celebrating that weekend. American billionaires increased their wealth by $282 billion between 18 March and 10 April, when millions of citizens were in ‘lockdown’ to prevent the spread of the virus. This was an almost 10% gain, according to a recent report by the US Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). Over the same period 22 million Americans lost their jobs as the unemployment rate surged toward 15%.
