The people who are behind this effort are not doing this for "shits and giggles". In fact, these "wealthy joyriders" have specified exactly why they are doing

The people who are behind this effort are not doing this for "shits and giggles". In fact, these "wealthy joyriders" have specified exactly why they are doing it. Our future is uncertain. Visionary people spend their resources in a manner that brings about change that others later take for granted. For humans to survive far into the future it is necessary to become a multi-planetary species. For that to happen, it not only requires international cooperation amongst different nations but also individuals like Musk and Bezos, who have dreamt of these things since they were kids, and are now willing to allocate their substantial resources towards commercial endeavors that eventually bring about that reality. When you have billions of dollars, there are many ways you can choose to spend your money. Some choose to use it on fleeting pleasures, but luckily humanity has others who have decided to use those resources in a systematic way that would help the greatest number of people possible, those like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We need those people. And we also need people who are willing to indulge the wildest fantasies of the human imagination in a completely reasonable way, like Musk and Bezos, who are thinking far ahead (and Bezos is the ultimate long term thinker), and realize that they now have the ability to bring about the innovation and lay out the first steps of commercial space exploration, which is necessary if the light of human consciousness is to see all the wonder the universe and the future has to offer. Potentially, thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions of people populating multiple star systems. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people who are spending substantial amounts of money to make space travel feasible today, despite how unrealistic it seems to most of us.