Musk, Bezos, and the Battle to Control Space

I'm Caleb Bissinger. This is the next big idea. For the last few years, the global space race has been dominated by two private citizens. Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos. They've launched thousands of satellites.

They've designed lunar landing modules, drawn up ambitious plans to build AI data centers in space. I wanted to understand why these two multi multi-billionaires are so obsessed with galaxies far far away. And more importantly. What do their efforts to conquer the cosmos mean for the rest of us down here on Earth? So I called up Josh Tieringell. He wrote the cover story for this month's issue of The Atlantic. It's called Choose Your Overlord, Musk versus Bezos.

For most of human history, Josh writes, the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments. It's a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African born engineer are well positioned to now exercise that power. He adds, both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind's understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that Unlike every other market they've previously conquered.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (57 minutes, 10,494 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.