Jeff Bezos funds space travel because he has nothing better to do

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spends a tiny fraction of his net worth to fund Blue Origin, the aerospace company he started in 2000. For a man worth $127 billion, that tiny fraction amounts to $1 billion a year, which he gets by liquidating Amazon stock, Bezos said at an Axel Springer awards event in Berlin, Germany, hosted by Business Insider's US editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell.

"The only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel," he said in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. "Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune."

[Yeah, umm, while I'm not saying AT ALL that you shouldn't fund your space program, Jeff, there are other things - plenty of other things in fact - that you could do at the same scale as well that might actually be more directly and immediately beneficial.]

"The solar system can easily support a trillion humans," he said. "And if we have a trillion humans we would have a thousand Einsteins, and a thousand Mozarts, and unlimited — for all practical purposes — resources from solar power and so on."
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-liquidates-billions-to-fund-blue-origin-2018-4?r=US&IR=T