The media storm the publicists had been bracing for never occurred. There was no damage to control. The attention they had been instructed to deflect from the Baikal Trust never materialized.
And it was not because Ozy Khan was the thirty-seventh billionaire to launch himself boringly into space, in a space mansion of his own design. The thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth billionaires to do so, after all, had endured nearly as much press, both hostile and adulatory, as the first few had, decades earlier. The public, it seemed, never lost its appetite for the spectacle of great wealth ascending to extra-terrestrial heights. And the billionaires too, had perfected the art of image management in space. There had already been at least three short-lived, but successful reality shows from orbiting mansions.
Nor could the lack of a media storm be attributed to Ozy Khan being an obscure Central Asian oligarch rather than a prominent American or Chinese one. More obscure billionaires had managed to inspire large spikes of interest by ascending to vacations in luridly ostentatious space mansions, and been rewarded with notoriety around the world for their extended departures from it. A space mansion was a reliable ticket onto the center stage of global affairs.
Space after all, as one much-quoted wag had remarked in the 2020s, was the new Davos.
Even the fact that Ozy Khan would not be coming back was not without precedent. The seventh and eleventh billionaires, each terminally ill and with less than a year to live, had both launched themselves on one way trips into space with much funereal solemnity. Both had duly died in space with cosmic gravitas, and been forgotten. Only old people made hope-he-doesn’t-come-back jokes anymore.
Perhaps the lack of drama could be attributed, one commentator suggested, to the fact that Khan had been such a dull presence on earth, it was was hard to craft a story around his departure from it. His sprawling renewables and sequestration technologies empire lacked charisma. It embodied no daring technological vision, only powerful political connections, a lot of imitation and luck, and plodding, sound financial management. His official biography offered little of interest to the story-minded. His career suggested no more than the usual amount of tedious politicking, grift, and geopolitical murkiness.
There really was very little to say about Ozy Khan’s time on earth before he decided to leave it.
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