Billionaires rocketing into space draw UN chief's red glare

Space, we person an equity problem.

When 3 billionaires rocketed into abstraction this summer, they did much than flight Earth’s surly bonds, they helped dispersed “a malady of mistrust” plaguing an all-too bare world, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told different satellite leaders Tuesday.

In his opening code to the General Assembly, a grim Guterres highlighted the spread betwixt the affluent and mediocre with “billionaires joyriding to abstraction portion millions spell bare connected Earth.”

In July, billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos flew into abstraction connected backstage rockets that their companies built, gathering worldwide attraction successful their abbreviated trips that didn’t marque it into orbit. Both slope connected abstraction tourism concern from their chap abstraction fans with large wallets.

After returning to Earth, Branson, 71, sprayed G.H. Mumm champagne implicit his unit and past chugged it from the bottle.

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Billionaire Jared Isaacman led the archetypal all-private orbital ngo that splashed down Saturday aft 3 days successful orbit. His formation was connected a Dragon capsule and Space X rocket built by a 4th space-obsessed billionaire, Elon Musk. Unlike the different 2 missions, Isaacman’s thrust raised much than $200 cardinal for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital including $100 cardinal from Isaacman and $50 cardinal from Musk.

Guterres lumped billionaire abstraction hops with the maladies of hopelessness, corruption, curtailing of idiosyncratic freedoms and “when parents spot a aboriginal for their children that looks adjacent bleaker than the struggles of today.”

After Branson and Bezos spaceflights and revelations that Bezos, the richest antheral successful the world, didn’t wage immoderate national income taxation successful 2007 and 2011, critics called for taxing billionaires with immoderate wanting to taxation them retired of the 10-digit income level. So acold those proposals, dissimilar the billionaires, haven’t gotten disconnected the ground.

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