Elon Musk wants Jeff Bezos to know he’s number 1. Tesla’s co-founder responded to a tweet from Bezos early on Monday with a silver medal emoji after the gap between the world’s two richest people increased last week through the surging valuation of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. His net worth is now US$222-billion, while Amazon.com’s Bezos is at $190.8-billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The jab escalates the public spat between the two billionaires, who are both trying to revolutionise the space industry.
Bezos’s Blue Origin is challenging a US government contract with SpaceX to develop technology to land people on the moon again, while Musk has previously taken to Twitter to call Amazon’s founder a “copy cat” for his e-commerce firm’s space-focused ventures. In a recent filing with US regulators, Amazon’s satellite subsidiary also accused Musk and his companies of flouting regulations with a general attitude that “rules are for other people”.
🥈
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 11, 2021
In his tweet late on Sunday, Bezos posted an image of a 1999 article from Barron’s that criticised Amazon and described it as one of many stories that predicted his company’s demise.
Musk, 50, added about $9-billion to his fortune on Friday after an agreement with investors valued SpaceX in excess of $100-billion, more than quadruple the size of Blue Origin, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.
Musk still derives around three-quarters of his wealth from Tesla, which he co-founded in 2003 after making a fortune from the sale of e-commerce site PayPal to eBay for $1.5-billion. — Reported by Ben Stupples, (c) 2021 Bloomberg LP
