'Saturday Night Live’ Mocks the Billionaire Space Race in New Sketch
Dubbed a ‘midlife crisis of cosmic proportions.’
“Saturday Night Live” poked fun at the billionaire space race in a new sketch that aired this weekend, with Owen Wilson playing Jeff Bezos aboard his Blue Origin spacecraft.
The sketch, titled “Billionaire Star Trek,” follows Bezos and his crew that flew in the company’s real-life inaugural space launch in July. The sketch is jokingly said to be part of the “Star Trek” franchise with a new series titled “Stark Trek: Ego Quest.”
“Space is freaking awesome,” Wilson says, wearing the Amazon founder’s signature cowboy hat.
A voiceover then gives more detail on the billionaire’s “crew of random weirdos,” which include Bezos’ brother, a “rich kid from the Netherlands” and “82-year-old astronaut Wally Funk.”
Fellow billionaire Richard Branson, played by “SNL” cast member Alex Moffat, then floats by in his Virgin Galactic ship, before challenging Bezos to a race, which the voiceover dubs “a midlife crisis of cosmic proportions.”
SpaceX founder Elon Musk, played by cast member Mikey Day, also makes an appearance, firing torpedos at Bezos’ ship. In real life, Bezos and Musk have an ongoing feud over a NASA lunar landing contract recently awarded to SpaceX.
“Space is only big enough for one weird white billionaire,” Day’s character says. “So you could say beating you is my ‘prime’ objective,” he snickers.
The sketch also takes aim at Bezos’ seeming disregard for his “valued” Amazon employees and the overall absurdity of billionaires using space as a frontier to flex their wealth.
Watch the entire clip above.
In other news, Elon Musk recently weighed in Jeff Bezos’ suing NASA, saying: “you can’t sue your way to the moon.”
