Tag: Jeff Bezos

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Swole chad Jeff Bezos decides his net worth is not for keeping

‘CEO, Entrepreneur, born in 1964, Jefferey, Jeffrey Bezos,’ said in a recent interview with CNN News that he intends to donate a majority of his current $124 billion USD (roughly $164 CAD) net worth during his lifetime, with a major chunk of his money going towards climate change and “supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions.”

 

Bezos is currently the fourth-richest person in the world, behind Gautam Adani, Bernard Arnault & family, and Elon Musk, according to Forbes. This happens to be the first time Bezos has made a public announcement regarding his intentions to give away most of his money. Bezos, alongside his partner Lauren Sánchez said they are “building the capacity to be able to give away this money.”

The two of them announced American singer and songwriter Dolly Parton as the recipient of the Bezos Courage and Civility Award and a $100 million grant. Previous recipients of the grant and the award include celebrity chef Jose Andrés and Dream.org founder Van Jones.

Bezos has also in the past committed $10 billion over 10 years, which is roughly 8 percent of his current net worth, to the Bezos Earth Fund, which prioritizes reducing the carbon footprint of construction-grade cement and steel, advancing technologies to monitor carbon emissions, pushing financial regulators to consider climate-related risks, and more.

This comes amid a time when Amazon is reportedly planning to lay off thousands of employees.

Source: CNN News

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Bezos’ dream for the first commercial space station is a suburban nightmare

Source: Shutterstock https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/typical-light-industrial-small-business-offices-762000640

Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin has unveiled its initial plans for the world’s first-ever commercial space station.

While specifics are still scarce, the space station will be modeled after “business parks,” i.e. the blight of the suburbs.

As Mashable wearily reports, “a business park is a collection of office buildings, with some grass or hey even a water feature or two in between structures, if you’re lucky.”

For context, the first-ever business park has its roots in segregation, wealth and white flight, opening in “an upper-class white suburb of Birmingham, [Alabama], in the early 1950s as commuters became uneasy with simmering racial tension in city centers.”

In the years that followed, business parks received further criticism for their negative impact on surrounding communities and suburban sprawl, and tendency towards being abandoned and left in vacant disrepair.

For its part, Blue Origin says that its bold creative vision for humanity’s first permanent steps into that hallowed final frontier will “provide the essential infrastructure needed to scale economic activity and open new markets in space.” Yikes.

The station, tentatively named the “Orbital Reef”, is scheduled to be up and orbiting sometime between 2025-2030.

Blue Origin has so far completed two successful tourist flights into space — or more specifically, into low Earth orbit.

Passengers have included Bezos himself, naturally, and Canadian sci-fi legend William Shatner.

Source: Mashable

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How to watch William Shatner get launched into space

Source: @blueorigin Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CU3nF2rgYuC/

Today’s the day to watch Canadian actor William Shatner — known best for his role as Star Trek‘s Captain James T. Kirk — become the oldest person to go to space.

Originally scheduled for October 12th, the launch was delayed a day due to poor weather conditions.

Blue Origin, the aerospace company that organized this sub-orbital spaceflight, is currently streaming live from West Texas in lead-up to the “second human flight” of its New Shepard launch vehicle.

You can also follow @blueorigin on Twitter for launch updates.

 

Or, you can watch the livestream below:

New Shepard’s first-ever tourist flight took place on July 20th, with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on board.

Image source: @BlueOrigin

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Oh god, William Shatner is getting launched into space

Canadian actor William Shatner is on the passenger list for Blue Origin’s next commercial flight into space, because of course he is.

The Verge reports that Shatner will be joining the 11-minute voyage on the aerospace company’s New Shepard rocket alongside former NASA engineer and Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen, French software executive Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin vice-president of mission and flight operations Audrey Powers.

Shatner is best known for his role as James T. Kirk, the shirt-ripping, alien-wrestling, diplomat-smooching captain of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise — and best loved by this author as James Spader’s queer platonic husband in the criminally forgotten aughts’ court drama Boston Legal.

At 90 years old, Shatner will become the oldest person to ever visit space — you know, the nonagenarian-friendly place where “astronauts lose on average 1 percent to 2 percent of their bone mineral density every month.”

The New Shepard is a suborbital rocket system and Blue Origin’s entry into the complicated new frontier of space tourism.

Blue Origin’s CEO, noted soft-serve ice cream enthusiast Jeff Bezos, was among the passengers on New Shepard’s first tourist flight in July.

While the Canadian Space Agency’s website assures me a short-duration flight poses little risk to Shatner’s bones, I would kindly ask that no one contact me at 9:30am ET/6:30am PT on Tuesday, October 12th when live launch coverage is scheduled to begin, as I — alongside my father, who remembers sitting down to watch black-and-white ST:TOS episodes every week as a kid — will be busy.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Source: The Verge