In the soft hush of a Tanzanian dawn, where the calls of chimpanzees weave through the mist-shrouded canopy of Gombe Stream National Park, Jane Goodall once found her life’s calling amid the gentle giants she came to champion. For six decades, the British primatologist’s name evoked images of quiet revolution: a young woman in khaki shorts scribbling observations in waterproof notebooks, challenging the scientific patriarchy with revelations about tool-using chimps that reshaped our understanding of animal intelligence. But in her twilight years, as the weight of 91 orbits around the sun pressed upon her, Goodall turned her gaze not to the forests she saved, but to the fractious boardrooms and war rooms of power. In a posthumously released Netflix special, Famous Last Words: Dr. Jane Goodall, aired just days after her passing on October 2, the conservation icon delivered a parting shot that has reverberated from Silicon Valley bunkers to the halls of the Kremlin: a wry, unflinching wish to bundle Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and a cadre of global strongmen onto one of Musk’s own Starships and launch them into the cosmic unknown. “Send them off to the planet he’s so sure he’s going to discover,” she quipped, her eyes twinkling with the mischief of a chimp plotting an escape. At an hour when world leaders grapple with climate cataclysms and geopolitical tinderboxes, Goodall’s final edict—equal parts satire and indictment—has sparked a firestorm, forcing a reckoning with the alpha males she likened to her primate kin.

The special, a 55-minute tapestry of reflection filmed in March amid the blooming jacarandas of her Bournemouth home, was conceived as part of Netflix’s audacious Famous Last Words series—a Danish import where luminaries like Goodall confront mortality on camera, their unedited truths unsealed only after death. Executive producer Brad Falchuk, the Glee creator whose pivot to poignant fare includes this existential venture, sat across from her in a sun-dappled conservatory, the air thick with the scent of Earl Grey and aged leather-bound journals. “There are people I don’t like,” Goodall began, her voice a melodic lilt honed by decades of lectures from Davos to the UN General Assembly. “And I would like to put them on one of [Elon] Musk’s spaceships and send them all off.” Falchuk, leaning in with a conspiratorial grin, pressed: “Would he be the host?” “Oh, absolutely,” she shot back, a spark of impish glee lighting her face. “Along with Musk would be Trump, and some of Trump’s real supporters. Then Putin, President Xi, Netanyahu and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”

The clip, a mere 90 seconds amid broader meditations on hope and habitat loss, detonated upon release. Within hours, #JaneSendsThemToSpace trended worldwide, amassing 4.2 million engagements on X alone—Swifties repurposing friendship bracelets into “Exile Kits,” climate activists Photoshopping the rogues’ gallery into zero-gravity memes, and pundits dissecting the zinger like a UN resolution. Viewership spiked to 12 million in the first 24 hours, eclipsing even the series’ premiere with David Attenborough. Goodall, ever the storyteller, framed her fantasy not as venom, but as a parable drawn from Gombe’s groves. “I’ve spent my life watching alpha males,” she elaborated, her hands gesturing like branches in the wind. “The stamping, the branch-waving, the rock-throwing—it’s all dominance display. But in chimps, it serves the troop. In humans? It scorches the Earth.” Her words, laced with the authority of one who’d named over 250 Gombe chimps and mobilized a global youth army through Roots & Shoots, landed as both elegy and exhortation in an era where billionaires launch joyrides to orbit while rainforests burn.

Goodall’s animus toward these figures was no late-blooming grudge; it rooted deep in her half-century crusade against environmental entropy. Musk, the South African-born spacefarer whose Tesla empire and Starship dreams have minted him the world’s richest man, drew her ire for what she saw as eco-hypocrisy. “He preaches Mars colonization as salvation,” she noted in the special, her brow furrowing like weathered bark, “yet his factories guzzle resources, his rockets scar the skies. If we’re to flee Earth, why not start by shipping the arsonists away?” Their feud simmered publicly: In 2023, Musk had branded her a “genocide advocate” on X after she warned of population pressures on biodiversity, a barb that prompted Goodall to quip in a Guardian op-ed, “Elon dreams of red planets; I fight for the green one we’re losing.” Trump, the brash New York real estate scion turned 47th U.S. President, evoked her chimp analogies with metronomic regularity. Back in 2016, she’d likened his campaign rallies to “male chimpanzees competing for dominance—slapping the ground, dragging branches to intimidate rivals.” By his 2025 reelection, with policies gutting the Paris Accord anew, Goodall viewed him as the apotheosis of unchecked ego: “A troop leader who devours the forest to build his throne.”

Putin, the steely KGB veteran presiding over Russia’s vast taiga, represented to her the perils of authoritarian grip on fragile ecosystems. “Siberia’s lungs—our planet’s carbon sink—wither under his wars and wildcat drills,” she lamented, referencing the 2024 Arctic oil spills that choked beluga pods and thawed permafrost. Xi Jinping, architect of China’s Belt and Road behemoth, symbolized the juggernaut of unchecked growth: “A billion dreams, but at what cost to the Yangtze’s dolphins or the panda’s bamboo?” And Netanyahu, ensnared in endless Middle East maelstroms, embodied division’s toxic yield: “Walls and wars that poison shared waters, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.” In Goodall’s spaceship saga, these alphas—mirrors of Gombe’s fractious F troop—would orbit in enforced harmony, their bluster muted by the void. “Perhaps up there, without borders or boardrooms, they’d learn what chimps know: survival demands cooperation, not conquest.”

The backlash was swift, a digital thunderclap that underscored the chasm between Goodall’s idealism and the realpolitik she skewered. Musk, ever the provocateur, fired off a midnight X post from his Austin lair: “Jane’s got spirit—wrong planet, though. Mars needs builders, not banishers. RIP to a legend who forgot: Innovation saves worlds, not snark.” Trump’s Mar-a-Lago war room spun it as “sour grapes from a tree-hugger who couldn’t hack the deal,” with surrogates like Steve Bannon decrying it on pod saves as “elitist eco-fascism.” From Moscow, Kremlin mouthpieces dismissed her as “a colonial relic meddling in great powers,” while Beijing’s state media buried the special under waves of panda diplomacy fluff. Netanyahu’s office issued a terse statement: “Dr. Goodall’s passion for peace was unmatched; her words, however, overlook the threats we face.” Yet, amid the salvoes, admiration swelled from unexpected quarters. Greta Thunberg hailed it as “the mic drop humanity needs,” while UN Secretary-General António Guterres, a Goodall ally since her 2002 Messenger of Peace mantle, praised her “fearless truth-telling” at a Geneva climate huddle. Even faltering bipartisan voices in Washington—Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—invoked her in a joint tweet: “Jane’s wish? A reset button for leaders lost in ego. Let’s honor her by hitting it.”

Goodall’s life, a luminous arc from postwar London to global icon, lent her broadside an unassailable gravitas. Born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on April 3, 1934, to a typewriter factory manager and a novelist mother, she was a child of boundless wonder—devouring Tarzan tales, sketching birds in Hampstead Heath, dreaming of Africa while toiling as a waitress in Mayfair. At 23, with £100 scraped from secretarial gigs and a hatbox for luggage, she sailed to Kenya, landing in Louis Leakey’s orbit as his secretary and protégé. Gombe, that sliver of paradise on Lake Tanganyika’s eastern shore, became her crucible: In 1960, she pitched a tent amid the red colobus troops, observing without interference—a radical ethos that birthed her 1971 bombshell, In the Shadow of Man. Chimps weren’t “it,” but “he” or “she,” with personalities, politics, wars (the infamous 1974-1978 Gombe Chimpanzee War she chronicled), and even cannibalistic kin-slayings that mirrored humanity’s shadows. “We are unique, yes,” she’d muse in TED Talks viewed by billions, “but so, in some ways, are all other creatures.”

Her activism burgeoned like a baobab: The Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977, now spans 100 countries, rescuing chimps from bushmeat poachers and empowering girls in Congo’s conflict zones. Roots & Shoots, her youth engine launched in 1991 amid Tanzania’s civil strife, has ignited 150,000 chapters, from Mumbai’s anti-plastic patrols to Seattle’s urban bee havens. At the UN, her pleas pierced summits—warning in 2019 that “we’re sleepwalking toward the edge of an abyss,” her frail frame belying a voice that commanded kings. Yet, frailty crept in: By 2024, osteoporosis confined her to a scooter at conferences, and whispers of her “final chapter” circulated after a bout with pneumonia. Goodall, ever the optimist, embraced it. “Death is part of life,” she told Falchuk, invoking Gombe’s circle of loss—Old Man the chimp’s quiet fade, her second husband Derek Bryceson’s valiant stand against cancer. “I’ve no regrets. Only a plea: Don’t let hope die with me.”

Her October 2 passing, at her Bournemouth cottage overlooking the English Channel, was as serene as a chimp’s midday doze—surrounded by family, a well-thumbed Bible, and a chimp plush from her grandchildren. Tributes flooded in: King Charles III called her “Britain’s conscience,” while Leonardo DiCaprio, a fellow Jane Goodall Institute trustee, vowed to “amplify her roar.” Gombe swelled with pilgrims—rangers releasing rehabilitated chimps in her name, their hoots a forest requiem. But the spaceship wish overshadowed the eulogies, polarizing her legacy into saint and scold. Conservationists like E.O. Wilson hailed it as “prophetic satire,” a nod to Swift’s A Modest Proposal for our overheating age. Detractors, from Fox News to RT, branded it “bitter senility,” ignoring her decades of bridge-building with adversaries—tea with oil barons, dialogues with poachers turned rangers.

In the special’s coda, Goodall pivots from cosmic jest to earthly urgency, her face softening like dawn on the rift valley. “These dark times—wars, wildfires, extinctions—test us,” she urges, channeling the “spirit of obstinance” that saw Britain defy Nazis. “Like Churchill, we must stand firm. Hope isn’t passive; it’s the seed we plant in despair.” She envisions a world where youth lead: Tanzanian girls coding anti-deforestation apps, Brazilian boys patrolling Amazon fringes. “I’ve given you tools—now wield them. For the chimps, for the children, for the only home we have.” Falchuk, moved to tears in the control room, later reflected: “Jane was fearless in all things—even farewell. Her wish? Not exile, but a mirror: See your alpha games for what they are, and choose better.”

As October’s equinox yields to autumn’s chill, Goodall’s broadside lingers like contrails over the Serengeti. Musk’s Starship, prepping for Artemis III, hums with irony—its payload bays empty, but imaginations full. Trump, fresh from a Davos sideline, muses on Truth Social about “fake news from the monkey lady.” Putin, from his Black Sea bunker, reportedly chuckled over blini. Yet, in boardrooms and backyards, conversations stir: What if her wish weren’t whimsy, but warning? In Gombe, a young researcher—named Jane by her parents—watches a chimp mother cradle her infant against the gathering dusk. “She’d approve,” the researcher whispers, echoing a legacy that outlives flesh: Not banishment, but awakening. For in the end, Goodall’s final flight wasn’t to the stars, but into hearts—urging us, one unlaunched rocket at a time, to steer our shared ship home.