{"id":8587,"date":"2021-10-25T19:00:13","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T19:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1371058"},"modified":"2021-10-25T19:00:13","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T19:00:13","slug":"why-the-musk-vs-bezos-space-feud-is-probably-fake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=8587","title":{"rendered":"Why the Musk vs. Bezos space feud is probably fake"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Flick through a news feed on your phone and you are likely to scroll across an article discussing the heated rivalries<\/a> of the new space race. Forget the geopolitical struggles of a cold war. This time, it\u2019s Tesla CEO Elon Musk versus Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: the two richest men<\/a> in the world duking it out over whether SpaceX or Blue Origin, their respective companies, will be the dominant force in the new industry of private space flight.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic gets a mention too, but the Brit being a relative pauper, and his space plane lacking the phallic majesty of his fellow billionaires\u2019 rockets, he has received diminishing attention in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

The Musk v Bezos rivalry makes for good press and is stoked occasionally in tweets by both parties, but is it real? Probably not, according to our research, published in the book The New Patriarchs of Digital Patriarchy: Celebrity Tech Founders and Networks of Power<\/em><\/a>, which analyses 95 popular books about the technology industry.<\/p>\n

It is easy to see that, at a basic level, Musk\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s stated plans for space domination are complementary, rather than competitive. Bezos dismisses Musk\u2019s plan to colonize Mars as unrealistic, while Musk thinks it will take too long to build the infrastructure for the giant orbiting space stations that Bezos proposes. Read between the lines and you can see how they had been rhetorically dividing up the space industry into separate monopolies even before their rockets broke the \u201cKarman line<\/a>\u201d \u2013 one definition of where outer space begins.<\/p>\n

The reality is that, as with other technology billionaires, such as Alphabet\u2019s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg or even Palantir\u2019s Peter Thiel, their interests align more often than they diverge. This new space race is partly a celebrity publicity stunt to generate clickbait headlines that build public awareness of, and popular support for, a new commercial frontier. If we focus on the rivalry and keep asking who\u2019s winning, perhaps we won\u2019t ask the big whys of commercial space colonization.<\/p>\n

In general, there is little in the tech barons\u2019 interest to actually work against one another. Writing in his 2014 book Zero to One<\/em>, Thiel has claimed<\/a> that \u201ccompetition is a relic of history\u201d, and because a competitive market is seen as fundamental to capitalism, \u201cmonopolists lie to protect themselves\u201d. These billionaires, all monopolists, may indeed use their celebrity profiles to create the illusion of competition where there is none. Google co-founder Larry Page also stated in a speech<\/a> that Silicon Valley\u2019s billionaires \u201ctravel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue\u201d.<\/p>\n

We learned through our research that the west coast billionaires that dominate the tech industry do indeed support each other financially and strategically. We carried out a digital search of a 10 million word database, containing the books we investigated, which is known as a broad context collocation. The algorithm searched for instances in which the entrepreneurs were listed together, and sorted it by context \u2013 such as collaboration, rivalry, friendship, political lobbying and philanthropy. This helped us identity a dense network, which you can see in the diagram.<\/p>\n

\"Diagram