Elon Musk Criticizes Jeff Bezos for Being a Playboy

Billionaire Elon Musk says the Amazon founder needs to party less and work harder if he wants to get into orbit.

Elon Musk (left) and Jeff Bezos are the two richest tech billionaires in the world. Photo: AFP

“Do you think Jeff Bezos is a good guy?”, Alec asked Elon Musk on Twitter.

“He’s fine, I think. Looks like he’s spending a lot of time in the hot tub these days,” the world’s richest billionaire replied.

Musk then even gave advice to the person who is second only to him in terms of wealth: “If he wants to go into orbit, he should party less and work more.”

According to Moneycontrol, Musk’s answer alluded to the space race of the two billionaires and Bezos’ recent failure. At that time, Blue Origin – Bezos’ aerospace company – had to postpone its fifth space flight due to some problems related to the aircraft. The company has not even been able to give a schedule for the next flight.

The dispute over Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s space ambitions has been going on for 15 years, ever since the two founded rival companies. Bezos owns Blue Origin, which aims to send humans back to the Moon, while Musk wants SpaceX to help make Mars habitable. The disagreement between the billionaires dates back to 2004, when the two met to discuss their reusable rocket ambitions. “I really tried to give him good advice, but he just ignored it,” Musk said after the meeting, according to Christian Davenport’s book The Space Barons. The last time the two men were on the same page was in April, when Musk wanted to convert Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter, while Bezos wanted to do the same for part of Amazon’s headquarters.

15 years of confrontation between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos

The argument between the two American technology billionaires originated from a dinner in 2004.

Bezos is the richest man in the world, owns Amazon – a multi-industry empire and participates in the effort to put people on the Moon with Blue Origin. Musk is the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, who always cherishes the ambition of electric car projects and sending people to space.

The tense relationship between Bezos and Musk has not improved for many years, and even heated up with the arguments on Twitter.

The source of all the conflicts that followed started in the 2000s, when Jeff Bezos was not yet a “giant” in the technology industry as today. He founded Amazon in 1995 and sold shares to the public for the first time in 1997. Many years later, Amazon became a leading corporation with Prime, a streaming service and Amazon Web Services, a cloud platform.

Bezos has always been interested in space. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school in 1982, he dreamed of building bases off Earth for millions of people. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to pursue this goal.

Elon Musk was already a millionaire by the early 2000s, but Tesla had yet to take shape. By the time Bezos founded Blue Origin, Musk had sold his startup Zip2 to Compaq for nearly $300 million and was building PayPal, which would later earn $1.5 billion when it was sold to eBay.

Musk made $160 million from the PayPal deal and used that money to found SpaceX in 2002. “In the early days, I didn’t even let my friends invest because I was afraid they’d all lose. I thought it was better to lose my own money,” Musk recalled in a 2018 interview.

The Musk-Bezos rivalry began when the two CEOs met for dinner in 2004. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX were in their early stages and had not yet completed a launch. That didn’t stop tensions from escalating as the two disagreed on their ambitions to develop reusable rockets.

“I tried to give him good advice, but he ignored it,” Musk said of the meeting. The two CEOs rarely clashed after that, but things heated up again when they tried to lease a NASA launch pad in 2013.

SpaceX wanted exclusive use of a NASA launch pad, while Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance filed a petition with the US government to prevent that from happening. Bezos proposed turning it into a “commercial spaceport for all launch companies.”

Musk called the move a “fake deterrent” and criticized Blue Origin: “They have not yet succeeded in building a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite more than 10 years of development. If they can figure out a way to ship a spacecraft that meets NASA’s human-carrying standards and docks with the International Space Station in the next five years, we’d be happy to meet their needs on pad 39A. I think it’s easier to find unicorns on a launch pad,” Musk said.

SpaceX later won the right to use NASA’s pad 39A.

In 2014, the two companies continued to clash over patents when Blue Origin was granted a patent for an unmanned ship that can be used to return a rocket booster to Earth. SpaceX sought to overturn the patent, as it would have to pay Blue Origin if it wanted to deploy a similar vehicle.

SpaceX argued that the technology was not new and that the concept of an unmanned ship had been around for decades. The judge agreed, prompting Blue Origin to withdraw most of the patent applications.

Musk and Bezos have been at odds publicly lately, mostly on Twitter. Both have attacked each other over rocket reuse technology. Bezos posted a video praising Blue Origin after the company successfully landed its New Shepard rocket in 2015. Musk immediately claimed that SpaceX had done it three years earlier.

The feud goes beyond space ambitions. Musk has been unfavorable to Blue Origin’s hiring practices and has repeatedly poked fun at Bezos in interviews, claiming that the rival has repeatedly tried to poach SpaceX employees.

“Blue Origin has been making precision attacks on specialized talent by offering double the current salary. I think that’s unnecessary and quite rude,” Musk told biographer Ashlee Vance in 2015, adding that SpaceX has included the words “blue” and “origin” in its email filters.

When asked about Bezos by a BBC reporter in 2016, Musk replied: “Jeff who?”

The SpaceX boss has also been a frequent Twitter target, including statements aimed at the Blue Origin CEO. He has frequently called Bezos a “copycat,” especially after Amazon announced plans to launch internet satellites and buy self-driving taxi company Zoox. In 2019, Musk continued to criticize Bezos after Blue Origin unveiled its design for a lunar-based all-terrain vehicle called Blue Moon.

For his part, Bezos has been less vocal about his dislike of Musk and SpaceX, but has repeatedly made veiled comments about his rival’s plans, especially Musk’s biggest ambition of sending humans to live on Mars.

Bezos has focused on sending humans to the Moon and described the idea of ​​reaching Mars as “unmotivating.” “Try living on Mount Everest for a year and see if you like it, because it’s like a paradise compared to Mars,” the Blue Origin boss said in 2019. When introducing Blue Moon, Bezos also mentioned SpaceX’s Mars ambitions with the words “far, far away”.