Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ate iguana Saturday night while talking about the importance of space travel at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner in New York.
“The price of admission to space is very high,” he said, according to Bloomberg. “I’m in the process of converting my Amazon lottery winnings into a much lower price of admission so we can go explore the solar system.”
As the world’s richest person (a title that can change based on the naturally fluctuating stock market), Bezos wants to use his affluence to help further or create more explorative initiatives in the solar system. He’s said in the past that he sells $1 billion a year in Amazon stock in order to finance Blue Origin, an aerospace firm, which aims to make space travel more affordable, at least relative to what it costs currently. (RELATED: Gates, Buffett, And Bezos Are As Rich As The Bottom Half Of America)
And Bezos’ funding and general efforts seem to be appreciated. During the gala, he accepted the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award.
Perhaps to celebrate, he decided to nosh on a subjectively bizarre delicacy: iguana.
Jeff Bezos accepts award, eats iguana at Explorers Club gala https://t.co/ZNaUYT4Iwo pic.twitter.com/3WiX5AkezJ
— Bloomberg (@business) March 12, 2018
Tarantula and cockroach were also featured appetizers, Bloomberg reports.
Bezos did not say how much money he planned on contributing to his overarching goal, or more aptly, if there was going to be more than the previously stated $1 billion.
Other honorees, like Edith Widder, a marine biologist and oceanographer, said she prefers if Bezos uses his massive fortune to explore the ocean, not space. Another, James Watson, a molecular biologist and geneticist most famous for co-discovering DNA’s structure, said that rather than spending all of his money on space travel, Bezos should spend most of it on Earth’s direct needs — potentially in some way defying the ideals of the event he was attending.
Bezos may agree with that sentiment to a certain degree.
“We have sent a lot of probes to every planet in this solar system. Believe me, this is the best one,” Bezos said, according to Bloomberg. “The world that we live on is an absolute gem.”
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