In a world where most people are one tariff away from overdraft, Leon Voss decided the real crisis was gravity. Gravity, he felt, was an affront to acoustics.

Long known for his obsessive pursuit of audio perfection, Voss—tech magnate and self-proclaimed ‘Dark Gothic Audiophile’—insists his vinyls be stored at the altitude where they were originally mastered, to preserve their ‘geospatial tonal integrity.’ His latest venture in Audiophilia features a very special and very private sound room.

Enter Atrium Caelestis, the first listening room situated in low Earth orbit. Within its obsidian walls—lined with vicuña wool and light panels that subtly shift temperature in sync with the celestial equator—Voss listens. The ambient environment is governed by an algorithm modeled on lunar phases and whale songs. The music’s tempo is synced to his heartbeat to ensure his own body never muddies the sound.

Alone, of course. Not even his private acoustics advisor—a direct descendant of Beethoven on his father’s side and Mozart on his mother’s, and the closest thing to a human tuning fork the world has ever seen—has access.

Voss claims the lack of gravity allows music to “self-actualize.” That each note is more honest, unshackled, and emotionally spherical. He insists it’s transcendence.

His Earth-based listening rooms—one perched on an eroding cliffside, another buried in active volcanic rock, a third suspended in a redwood canopy—feature climate-stabilized silence chambers, and diffusion arrays carved from the petrified roots of extinct trees thought to have “natural resonance.” That none of these terrestrial temples sufficed should surprise no one.

When asked about the space elevator itself—the first ever constructed and a technological marvel scientists have dreamed of for generations—Voss demurred. “It’s not about the technology,” he said. “It’s about the passion.” Indeed, the schematics remain confidential, and Voss has refused all collaboration with NASA or any known space agency. The price tag—never officially released—is estimated in the hundreds of billions.

Yet he sees no contradiction between his commitment to sonic purity and the noise of the world below. If anything, it affirms his mission. As he once put it: ‘I turned my father’s multinational into a global empire, I think I’ve earned it. Besides, people buy yachts they never sail all the time. At least I use mine.’

Now, he’s expanding the station to include a zero-gravity recording booth—because, as he explained, only in weightlessness can microphones truly “capture sound unburdened by mass.”

Meanwhile, Earth continues. People toggle Bluetooth settings for the fifth time and speakers emit polite chimes before doing absolutely nothing.

But Voss isn’t most people. He has chosen, with the blithe audacity of a man who believes shared atmosphere is optional, to take one of humanity’s greatest engineering dreams—and bend it into a monument to his own auditory taste.

Not because he’s enlightened. But because he has the funds, an irrational fixation, and a planet-sized platform to indulge them.