Blue Origin says it has sold nearly $100m (£73.4m) in tickets to paying customers who want to follow Jeff Bezos and William Shatner into space.

It’s a company that has been almost entirely funded from the pockets of the Amazon founder who has reportedly spent several billion on getting it up and running.

Today, due to shifts in share price, Bezos is only considered the second wealthiest man in the world with a net worth of around $189bn (£138bn) but how much is that really?

According to the UK’s Office for National Statistics, the median annual pay for full-time employees for the tax year ending April 2020 was £31,461.

It would take more than four million years of full-time employment for someone on that wage to match Bezos.

According to jobs site Glassdoor, the average pay for a customer service representative at Amazon is £25,742 per year.

They might be upset about this discrepancy, but then Jeff Bezos had the decency to thank them for helping to fund these little flights into space, so that’s probably minimised all of their concerns.