I know just enough about the light spectrum and the red shift to understand why this is funny (thanks Prof. Brian Cox!), but it underlines how shallow my knowledge is. So much cosmology, so little time…

Yes, agreed. He seems to regard life as a zero-sum game, in which he can’t win unless someone else loses, so he doesn’t understand the concept of win-win. It’s a kind of cognitive bias which is a serious weakness in someone who apparently imagines himself to be a master of ‘the art of the deal’.