Nine days ago Richard Branson floated around a cabin in a flight suit and grinned at a camera. This morning Jeff Bezos did roughly the same thing in a cowboy hat, in a capsule shaped like something you would draw if someone said draw a rocket. Both landed safely. Both were called historic by their own press teams within the hour.
I watched the second one on my phone at Ovation with a cortado going cold, and what struck me was not the engineering. It was that after ten years and something like a combined five billion dollars, I still could not tell you what either company is claiming to be.
Virgin Galactic says space tourism, then democratizing space, then something about opening the frontier. Blue Origin says millions of people living and working in space, then heavy lift, then a lunar lander, then a four-minute joyride for a lottery winner and an eighteen-year-old. These are not positions. These are wish lists with a launch date attached.
You can build the most expensive brand asset in human history and it still means nothing until you decide what question it answers for someone who is not you.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, at a much smaller scale and with much smaller rockets. A founder builds a thing of genuine technical beauty and assumes the thing will explain itself. It never does. Meaning is assigned, not emitted. If you do not assign it, the press assigns it, and the press assigned this one in about four minutes: two rich men racing each other, in a summer when a lot of people are counting hours instead of altitude.
Compare it to what a clear position sounds like. Patagonia does not tell you it makes technical outerwear. It tells you what the outerwear is in service of, and every product decision is legible against that. You can disagree with it. You cannot be confused by it.
Meaning is assigned, not emitted.
Here is what both companies had available and did not take. Branson could have owned experience, all of it, the training and the theater and the return. Bezos could have owned infrastructure, the unglamorous long game of getting mass to orbit cheaply, and let the tourism read as a funding mechanism rather than the product. Two different companies. Two different customers. Instead they raced for the same nine minutes of altitude and the same headline, and the headline was about them.
A brand asset with no argument attached is a very expensive photograph.
Karaoke Thursday, sticky floor, the host who calls everyone baby. I am doing Rocket Man. I have made peace with the obviousness. Truffles is unmoved by all of it, as usual.