Image by Viktor Forgacs.

A professional cyclist from Spain was recently paralyzed from the chest down after a catastrophic crash at a Red Bull event. He rides for Monster — another multibillion-dollar energy-drink empire. Yet instead of these corporations covering his lifelong care, the burden has been offloaded onto the public through a fundraiser organized by the non-profit Road2Recovery. Not funded by Red Bull. Not funded by Monster. Funded by ordinary people covering the debts of billion-dollar brands that trade in risk and abandon responsibility.

This isn’t an accident of marketing; it’s how modern capitalism launders harm through empathy.

Red Bull gives you wings. The public pays when they break.

On the surface, a fundraiser looks compassionate — a community rallying around someone in crisis. But what looks like compassion is moral outsourcing. The public pays for recovery so that corporate empires can keep financing spectacle without accountability. Communities are mobilized as safety nets so billion-dollar brands never have to be.

As a professional mountain biker and critic of empire’s moral branding, I’ve learned that the arena changes, but the architecture of exploitation does not. There is a pattern to this economy: athletes risk their bodies to construct corporate mythology, and when those bodies break, the companies step aside and let the community absorb the fallout.

Red Bull and Monster have global monopolies, athlete stables, event empires, and marketing budgets larger than the GDP of small nations. Suppose they can afford to sell “fearless immortality” and build empires on the spectacle of broken bodies. In that case, they can afford full-coverage care for those whose broken bodies fuel their brand mythology. They appear to choose not to, because outsourcing the........

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