No more spacewalks and blood boys – here’s what billionaires should really be spending their money on

What would you do if you had a ton of money? Buy a house perhaps, or go on an amazing holiday? Maybe you’d treat yourself to membership of the local spa.

Full disclosure, if I win the lottery (unlikely, as I rarely buy a ticket), I’ll be upgrading to a house with a utility room, buying a mid-range coupe car, and self-publishing the poems that no one else seems to want.

But what if you had an unimaginable amount of money? We can all dream of how we might spend a million quid if it fell into our laps, but what if you were a multi-billionaire? The world could be your oyster – and the universe your playground.

Jared Isaacman, who this week became the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space, is certainly a remarkable and very rich man. His self-made fortune has been estimated at $1.9bn, and he has been able to put some of those dollars to good use by buying military planes and paying Elon Musk for the use of his spaceship.

We all know the days of cheap flights are over, but Isaacman seems to think nothing of popping into orbit at an estimated cost of $200m – though at least that’s for four tickets.

And to what end? They tested a new kind of spacesuit, and the mission dispensed with the use of an airlock, which had been the norm in past spacewalks. So, some useful technological advances – if you think that the future of humanity rests on our ability to one day escape Earth.

As he floated outside his space capsule, Isaacman gazed down at the blue planet and announced, with self-important inanity: “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”

Well, I tell you what matey, if there’s lots to do down here, why not spend $200m on saving the rainforests, or building sanitation infrastructure in the world’s most-deprived cities?

Isaacman’s pal Musk is another one who could use his billions for good. But instead, he throws his cash away by overpaying for Twitter in an attempt to control the world’s online discourse.

And then there’s Bryan Johnson, another vastly wealthy tech bro, who spends millions researching the secrets of anti-ageing. This includes having monthly plasma infusions from his son – aka his “blood boy” – in an attempt to keep himself young. As is the case with Isaacman, the project is one of personal achievement dressed up as research towards global advancement. Most people just want access to decent healthcare to deal with their everyday problems – not to live to 110 with the body of Chris Hemsworth.

Perhaps the trouble for all these ultra-rich folk is that they see only the very micro and the uber macro. On the one hand is their cosseted day-to-day life of beautiful homes, private jets, super yachts and every little whim catered for. On the other is their view of the world: either from space or through the numbers of profit and loss charts.

The stuff in between – the stuff that most people are dealing with in their daily lives – must barely register. Hospital waiting lists, the rising price of flour, problematic public transport – why would a billionaire even notice?

The counterargument to all this is that there are plenty of absurdly wealthy bods who give a lot of their money to good causes. But that ought to be the standard, not a means to some sort of philanthropist’s prize and the world’s gratitude.

When Jared Isaacman and his crew splashed down off the Florida coast on Sunday morning, they will have done so with a sense of a job well done – and with the congratulations of Nasa ringing in their ears. But when the next billionaire wonders what to do with a spare hundred million dollars, let’s find them something more useful to spend it on.