Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has been to space. Tesla’s Elon Musk is the real winner.

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Investors usually want to know what is the most important story of the day, the thing responsible for driving stocks, perhaps the potential to become an investment theme that generates returns for months or years.

Jeff Bezos going to space is not that.

Sometimes this great thing is obvious. Monday was the Covid-19. the

S&P 500

fell 1.6%. the

Dow Jones Industrial Average

fell more than 2%. And for good reason: Covid-19 variants are a big deal, even if the market downturn turns out to be another blow on the way to higher yields.

Sometimes, however, investors also need to know what they shouldn’t be worrying about. Do you know which is the least significant story today? It’s Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos going to space.

The theft, while successful, was a bit anti-climatic for watchers of the live broadcast. There were a lot of “woohoos” and “awesome” ones said by the team that were audible to the audience. Even some “extraordinary”. Yet even newly created 82-year-old astronaut Wally Funk said at one point “It was only about five minutes.”

You wouldn’t know from the coverage, of which I was a big part. I’m addicted to stories of billionaires spending their money, much like People magazine is addicted to the Kardashians.

The Kardashian analogy is apt. The billionaire space race is fun for investors and more. It is the modern equivalent of a huge baroque garden or a Victorian menagerie with Indian wild animals.

Rich people spending money has always been one thing and sometimes it benefits everyone. In the garden category, you can always visit the gardens of Versailles. They are impressive, even inspiring.

Everyone, including Bezos, knows that the personal rocket business is ripe for criticism. The Amazon founder admits that critics of space tourism are largely correct. Still, space advocates point to the potential benefits of pushing the boundaries of technology. The world, after all, could end up with super-fast commercial jets or flying cars a generation or more on the road.

But the “to be sure” of the space tourism saga isn’t the potential benefits of the technology trickling down to space billionaires. Long-term technological improvements are the theoretical reason why any fad can be good for society. The dot.com era, for example, left us

Amazon.com

(AMZN) and more widespread Internet access.

However, not all fads are so generous. The financial crisis was driven by financial technology — secured debt obligations and credit default swaps. No one thanks their lucky stars for these products. There is no guarantee that fads will result in useful technology. Just look at the most recent financial innovation: commission-free transactions. This gave us stocks of memes.

But if the space race did anything, it made travel to the stars cheaper than ever. Remember that the space shuttle executed around $ 450 million per mission, according to NASA figures, while the orbiter – the plane behind the rockets – cost around $ 1.7 billion. . Ultimately, a generation of higher-than-average cost space shuttle technology investments left movies like Space Camp, American taxpayers slightly more in debt, and lack of launch capabilities in the United States. space for a decade.

That has changed now, but it has little to do with Bezos or Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic (SPCE). Instead, space lovers should thank

You’re here

(TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He, like other billionaires, has expressed ambitious goals to make humanity a multiplanetary species. Musk does not go into space on a sightseeing flight, however. It was he who brought launch capabilities back to America by pioneering the use of reusable rockets. It transports NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, while launching hundreds of small satellites that provide space Wi-Fi to customers around the world. Partly because of the move, SpaceX is worth around $ 74 billion in private markets.

Compare that to

Galactic Virgo

(SPCE), which is worth around $ 7 billion after creating what Canaccord analyst Ken Herbert described as ”

Disney

for the 1% of the 1%.

It sounds negative, but Herbert is evaluating buying the galactic stocks. He thinks clients should put stocks in their portfolios. This illustrates the true “to be sure” of a billionaire space story. If Bezos or Branson wants to create an organization to take them to space, so be it. These are high paying jobs for brilliant engineers. Billionaires can do whatever they want with their money.

Even Amazon’s stock doesn’t seem to care. Shares are down 03% at 10:36 a.m. Tuesday, while Virgin Galactic is down 7.7%. Tesla stock is up, however, by around 0.1%. the

S&P 500

increased by 1.1%.

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