Jeff Bezos has clapped back at Elon Musk over a statement claiming the Amazon founder told people to sell Tesla and SpaceX stock because Trump ‘would lose for sure’.
Musk and Bezos have had a contentious rivalry over the years as they’ve flipped between being the richest and second-richest men on the planet.
On Thursday, Musk posted to X: ‘Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock.’
Bezos quickly issued a blunt response, writing back: ‘Nope. 100% not true.’
Musk was then quickly deferential in the replies: ‘Well, then, I stand corrected.’
Bezos had not tweeted at any point since his post congratulating Trump on his election victory.
‘Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing [Trump] all success in leading and uniting the America we all love,’ he wrote November 6.
It continued a series of overtures Bezos has made toward the president after the Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate in the race, though its since been clarified that the billionaire did not make that decision.
Jeff Bezos clapped back at Elon Musk after the Donald Trump ally claimed the Amazon founder told people the president-elect ‘would lose for sure’ and should sell all Tesla and SpaceX stock
He may need a good relationship with Musk to continue those peace offerings as the multi-hyphenate begins his work as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chair.
Bezos and Musk have had an occasionally contentious rivalry over the past two decades, with Bezos skeptical of Musk’s plan to colonize Mars and Musk saying Amazon should be broken up.
The rivalry goes back to 2004 when Bezos accepted an invite from Musk to tour the SpaceX facility.
Afterwards he received a ‘somewhat curt email’ after from Musk ‘expressing annoyance’ why Bezos hadn’t invited Musk to Blue Origin in Seattle, so Bezos promptly did.
But on the tour Bezos was taken aback when Musk started telling him how to run the company.
Musk said: ‘Dude we tried that and that turned out to be really dumb so I’m telling you, don’t do the dumb thing we did’.
Bezos thought Musk was ‘a bit too sure of himself’ given he hadn’t actually launched a rocket yet, Walter Isaacson wrote about the duo.
In another book written about the pair, Musk claims Bezos shafted him when both Bezos’ Blue Origin and SpaceX were beginning.
Musk and Bezos have had an occasionally contentious rivalry over the years as they’ve flipped between being the richest and second-richest men on the planet
‘I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored,’ Musk said.
The next known public spat between the pair was when Blue Origin protested SpaceX’s ability to use a NASA launchpad exclusively, which Musk categorized as a ‘phony tactic’
He then went off on Bezos’ space company as a whole.
‘[Blue Origin] has not yet succeeded in creating a reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending over 10 years in development,’ he said.
‘If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.’
However, he clarified: ‘I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.’
Much of Musk’s issues with Bezos have had to do with Blue Origin, as he’s criticized their hiring practices and attempts to patent technology that already exists, according to Business Insider.
Space News reported that SpaceX has an email filter that gets rid of 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 plan to colonize Mars and Musk saying Amazon should be broken up
While the feud has largely been one-sided in public, Bezos slammed Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars in 2019, calling it ‘un-motivating.’
‘Go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first and see if you like it, because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars,’ he said.
In the 2020s, Blue Origin and SpaceX have battled over NASA contracts.
Blue Origin filed a 2021 lawsuit against NASA, claiming a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract was unfairly awarded to SpaceX earlier that year.
The suit ‘challenges NASA´s unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals.’
Blue Origin was originally in competition with SpaceX and a third firm called Dynetics for what was expected to be two NASA contracts.
In response, Musk rolled his fellow multibillionaire Bezos, tweeting he ‘can’t get it up (to orbit).’
Musk has criticized Amazon, saying it ‘should be broken up’ and that Bezos ‘takes himself a little too seriously.’
While Musk is a massive Trump supporter and has been out on the campaign trail giving away $1million a day to newly registered voters who will pledge their support for the former president, Bezos has been 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 further fueled the antagonism with Bezos with a 2021 interview in which he praised Bezos for having ‘reasonably good engineering aptitude’ but he said he didn’t spend enough time on the details.
He mocked Bezos’ wealthy lifestyle and compared it to him living in rented quarters in Texas.
Musk said: ‘In some ways I’m trying to goad him into spending more time at Blue Origin so they make more progress. He should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub’.
While Musk is a massive Trump supporter and has been out on the campaign trail giving away $1million a day to newly registered voters who will pledge their support for the former president, Bezos has been 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 become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,’ he warned.
Trump was particularly aggrieved at Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post.
He would rage at what he called the ‘Amazon Washington Post,’ claiming spuriously that it had avoided ‘internet taxes.’
During his time in office Trump became ‘obsessed’ with retribution against Bezos for the Post’s negative coverage of him.
Recently, it appeared there was another brief peace when Musk praised Bezos for defending the Washington Post over his paper’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris or Trump
Musk wrote, ‘kudos to @JeffBezos’ while retweeting an earlier an earlier tweet that read, ‘Kudos to @JeffBezos for telling the newsroom the hard, bitter truth: there’s nothing wrong with the readers
‘Every hour, we’re getting calls from reporters from the Washington Post asking ridiculous questions,’ he ranted in once instance. ‘And I will tell you: This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, taxwise. He’s using the Washington Post for power.’
During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract with the Pentagon over the then-president’s ire about coverage in the Post.
Yet throughout the Trump presidency, Bezos resolutely supported the staff’s coverage and he has not interfered with reporting on his own business interests or personal life.
Bezos, in turn, criticized Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter: ‘Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?’
He did clarify his position: ‘My own answer to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.’
‘But we’ll see. Musk is extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity,’ Bezos added.
Bezos gave some clearer thoughts on Musk in an interview with Lex Friedman in 2023.
‘I don’t really know Elon very well. I know his public persona but I also know you can’t know anyone by their public persona – it’s impossible. You may think you do, but I guarantee you don’t.’
He complimented Musk as someone who ‘must be a very capable leader’ and didn’t disagree with suggestions the two were similar.
‘I agree with you and I think with a lot of these endeavors we’re very like-minded. So I think, I’m not saying we’re identical, but we’re very like-minded so I love that idea.’
Recently, it appeared there was another brief peace when Musk praised Bezos for defending the Washington Post over his paper’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris or Trump.
Bezos said that political endorsements ‘create a perception of bias’ and argued ending the long-running practice of endorsing a candidate for the White House was a ‘principled decision, and it’s the right one.’
‘Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None,’ 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 hard, bitter truth: there’s nothing wrong with the readers.’
