Jeff Bezos’s Space Style

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the whole thing was that it wasn’t that noteworthy at all: another Tuesday. Another billionaire businessman paying to catapult himself into space.

Yet the sight of Jeff Bezos, in his beige cowboy hat and blue spacesuit (wearing a custom Omega Speedmaster over the sleeve as if he were Buzz Aldrin), high-fiving astronauts and then waxing profound about the experience afterward, resonated in ways that Sir Richard Branson’s wild ride did not.

It has taken Amazon just 27 years to become a $1.8 trillion company. Depending on the oscillations of the stock market, Mr. Bezos is either the richest or the second richest man in the world. Yet he has become this without achieving commensurate mystique.

He has not, like Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, hosted “Saturday Night Live” and managed to do a surprisingly good job at it. He has not, like Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, shown Americans the power of a minimalist mock neck. He did not, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, spend a pandemic quarantining with Jay-Z.