Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a billionaire who’s read science fiction your whole life. Your mind, deluded by your immense wealth, thinks that the only way to “deploy this much financial resource” is to invest in space instead of paying taxes so we can collectively solve the problems on Earth. When a fictional television show about space colonization is canceled in its third season, you swoop in to save the day because not only do you fund a space company, but you also own a massive streaming platform — and it needs content. After chatting with some of the cast, you email your team asking to announce the show’s renewal, and — ten minutes after they reply — you take the stage and are lauded by sci-fi fans across the internet for saving the day.

This is exactly what happened when The Expanse was canceled by Syfy and quickly scooped up by Amazon Prime Video for a fourth season after a personal intervention by CEO Jeff Bezos. It’s hard to imagine having so much money that you could both fund a space race and the media that could inspire it all at the same time, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Earlier this year, Bezos put forward his vision for space colonization, which involved growing the human population to over a trillion people living in colonies orbiting Earth. Bezos asserted population expansion would allow a flourishing of the arts, with the creation of “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins,” and would help us avoid “stasis and rationing” on Earth for an economy of “growth and dynamism” in space. But Bezos’s vision completely ignores what the lives of the working class would look like in such a future. And he’s not the only billionaire making that mistake. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also believes humanity must become a “multiplanetary species” by establishing a colony on Mars that will grow into a city of over a million within a few decades. By his telling, it would be governed by a direct democracy with all laws requiring 60 percent support to be enacted, but only 40 percent support to be repealed — a libertarian’s space fantasy.