The World's Richest Men Are 'Exchanging Words' Again, As Musk Accuses Bezos of Undermining Trump
1min read On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk targeted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, reigniting "another online dispute" between two of the world's top billionaires.
Musk wrote on X in the early hours of Thursday: "Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock."
A few hours later, Bezos responded, saying this claim was "100% not true."
As the "top contributor" to Trump's election victory, Musk spent over $130 million to support Trump's re-election. Since the election, Musk has frequently appeared at Trump's Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, and was appointed to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce wasteful spending.
It was previously widely expected that Musk's close relationship with Trump meant that if Trump lost the election, Tesla and SpaceX would be hit.
Investors believe that Musk's companies will benefit from Trump's victory, especially Tesla and SpaceX. Over the past month, Tesla's stock price has soared by about 55%.
Musk is a close ally of Trump, while Bezos has a tense relationship with Trump. Trump has called Amazon a monopoly and complained about the way Bezos' Washington Post reports on him. Amazon, in turn, claims that Trump, while in office, pressured the Pentagon to prevent Amazon from obtaining a $10 billion cloud computing contract because the company is led by Bezos.
At the end of October this year, Bezos' Washington Post broke with tradition and announced that it would not endorse any presidential candidate. This is the first time in more than 30 years that the newspaper has refrained from taking sides in a U.S. election, causing a huge controversy. Critics say the newspaper made this decision out of fear of retaliation from Trump.
The discord between Musk and Bezos has a long history. The two have competitive relationships in areas such as artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles, and they both run space companies (SpaceX and Blue Origin), competing for government contracts.
Amazon plans to launch a satellite broadband service, Project Kuiper, to compete with SpaceX's satellite internet project, Starlink. Amazon also acquired the autonomous vehicle company Zoox, which is a competitor of Tesla.
Musk has previously mocked Bezos as a copycat and boasted about being richer than Bezos. He also complained about Bezos' lawsuit against SpaceX and claimed "It's time to break up Amazon", because "Monopolies are wrong!"
Bezos, on the other hand, has expressed skepticism about Musk's vision of colonizing Mars and has implied that Musk's acquisition of Twitter (now X) could complicate Tesla's situation in China.