Jeff Bezos has clapped back at Elon Musk over a statement claiming the founder of Amazon told him to sell shares of Tesla and SpaceX because Trump ‘will lose for sure’.
Musk and Bezos have been contentious rivals for years as they are the richest and second richest people on the planet.
On Thursday, Musk sent to X: ‘Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos told everyone that @realDonaldTrump is going to lose, so he has to sell all his Tesla and SpaceX stock so he has to sell all his Tesla and SpaceX stock. ‘
Bezos quickly responded, writing back: ‘No. 100% not true.’
Musk was quickly deferential in reply: ‘Well, then, I stand corrected.’
Bezos has not tweeted since the post congratulating Trump on his election victory.
‘Congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President for his remarkable political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has a greater chance. We wish him (Trump) every success in guiding and uniting the America we love,’ he wrote on November 6.
It continues a series of overtures Bezos has made to the president after the Washington Post refused to endorse a candidate in the race, although it has since been clarified that the billionaire did not make that decision.
Jeff Bezos hits back at Elon Musk after Donald Trump ally claims the Amazon founder told the president-elect ‘they’re going to lose’ and should sell all Tesla and SpaceX shares
He may need a good relationship with Musk to continue his peace offer as the multi-hyphenate begins work as co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Bezos and Musk have had an occasionally contentious rivalry over the past two decades, with Bezos skeptical of Musk’s plans to colonize Mars and Musk saying Amazon should be dissolved.
The rivalry goes back to 2004 when Bezos accepted an invitation from Musk to tour the SpaceX facility.
Then he received a ‘rather terse email’ after from Musk ‘mentioning the distraction’ why Bezos didn’t invite Musk to Blue Origin in Seattle, so Bezos did it right away.
But on the tour Bezos was surprised when Musk began to tell him how to run the company.
Musk said: ‘Well, we’ve tried it and it’s really stupid, so I’m telling you, don’t do the stupid thing that we’re doing.
Bezos thought Musk was ‘a bit too sure of himself’ because he hadn’t launched a rocket yet, Walter Isaacson wrote about the duo.
In another book written about the couple, Musk said that Bezos cheated on him when Bezos’ Blue Origin and SpaceX started.
Musk and Bezos have had an occasionally contentious rivalry over the years as they are the richest and second richest people on the planet.
“I really do my best to give good advice, which most people ignore,” Musk said.
The next public spat between the pair was when Blue Origin objected to SpaceX’s ability to use NASA’s launchpad exclusively, which Musk categorized as a ‘false tactic’.
He then moved on to Bezos’s space company as a whole.
‘(Blue Origin) has not succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending more than 10 years in development,’ he said.
‘If they show up in the next five years with a vehicle that meets NASA’s human rating standards that can be put on the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is supposed to do, we’ll be happy to meet their needs.’
However, he clarified: ‘I’d rather find a unicorn dancing in a fire escape.’
Many of Musk’s problems with Bezos have to do with Blue Origin, as he criticized the practice of hiring and testing existing patented technology, according to Business Insider.
Space News reports that SpaceX has an email filter that removes the words ‘blue’ and ‘origin.’
Bezos and Musk have had an occasionally contentious rivalry over the past two decades, with Bezos skeptical of Musk’s plans to colonize Mars and Musk saying Amazon should be dissolved.
While the dispute was largely one-sided in public, Bezos slammed Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars in 2019, calling it ‘unmotivated.’
“Live on top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it, because it’s a gardening paradise compared to Mars,” he said.
In the 2020s, Blue Origin and SpaceX have been fighting over NASA contracts.
Blue Origin filed a 2021 lawsuit against NASA, claiming the $2.9 billion lunar lander contract was unfairly awarded to SpaceX earlier that year.
The suit ‘challenges NASA’s invalid and improper evaluation of the proposal.’
Blue Origin initially competed with SpaceX and a third company called Dynetics for what it hoped would be two NASA contracts.
In response, Musk lashed out at fellow multibillionaire Bezos, tweeting he ‘can’t go up (to orbit).’
Musk has criticized Amazon, saying it ‘needs to be broken up’ and Bezos ‘takes himself a little too seriously.’
While Musk is a big supporter of Trump and has been out on the campaign trail giving $1 million a day to newly registered voters who will give their support to the former president, Bezos is more of a thorn in Trump’s side.
Indeed, when Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten how Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price
He increased his antagonism with Bezos with an interview in 2021 in which he praised Bezos for having “pretty good engineering skills” but said he didn’t spend time on the details.
He mocked Bezos’ wealthy lifestyle and compared it to him living in a rented place in Texas.
Musk said: “In some ways, I’m trying to get him to spend more time at Blue Origin so that he can go further. He should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub.”
While Musk is a huge supporter of Trump and has been out on the campaign trail giving $1 million a day to newly registered voters who will give their support to the former president, Bezos is more of a thorn in Trump’s side.
Indeed, when Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten how Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price.
‘If I’m president – oh, do they have a problem. They’re going to have problems like that,’ he warned.
Trump is particularly concerned because of Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post.
They will rage against the so-called ‘Amazon Washington Post,’ falsely claiming to have evaded the ‘internet tax.’
During his tenure Trump became ‘obsessed’ with retribution against Bezos for the Post’s negative coverage of him.
Recently, there appeared to be another brief peace when Musk praised Bezos for defending the Washington Post over his newspaper’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris or Trump.
Musk wrote, ‘kudos to @JeffBezos’ while retweeting a previous tweet that read, ‘Kudos to @JeffBezos for telling the newsroom the bitter truth: there’s nothing wrong with reading.
“Every hour, we get a call from a reporter from the Washington Post asking us an indecent question,” he said. ‘And I will tell you: It is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon has gotten away with murder, taxwise. He used the Washington Post for power.’
During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after it said it had blocked a $10 billion cloud computing services contract with the Pentagon because of the president’s anger over coverage in the Post.
But during Trump’s presidency, Bezos firmly supported the coverage of his staff and he did not bother to report about his business interests or his personal life.
Bezos, in turn, criticized Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter: ‘Does the Chinese government just gain a bit of influence through the city square?
He explained his position: ‘My own answer to this question is probably no. A more likely outcome in this regard is trouble in China for Tesla, rather than censorship on Twitter.’
‘But we’ll see. Musk is really good at navigating this kind of complexity,” Bezos added.
Bezos gave some clearer thoughts about Musk in an interview with Lex Friedman in 2023.
‘I don’t know much about Elon. I understand the public persona but I also know you can’t understand anyone from their public persona – it’s impossible. You might think so, but I assure you not.’
He praised Musk as someone who ‘should be a very capable leader’ and disagreed with the same advice.
‘I agree with you and I think with many of these efforts, we are very similar. So I thought, I’m not saying we’re identical, but we’re very similar, so I like the idea.’
Recently, there appeared to be another brief peace when Musk praised Bezos for defending the Washington Post over the paper’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris or Trump.
Bezos said political endorsements ‘create a perception of bias’ and argued ending the long-standing practice of endorsing White House candidates was a ‘principled decision, and it’s the right one.’
‘The president’s support did nothing to tip the electoral scale. No undecided voter in Pennsylvania is going to say, ‘I’m going with the endorsement of Newspaper A.’ Nothing,’ he wrote.
In response, writing on X, Musk wrote, ‘kudos to @JeffBezos’ while retweeting an earlier tweet that read, ‘Kudos to @JeffBezos for telling the newsroom the true, bitter truth: there’s nothing wrong with reading it.’
