How space travel dreams sparked Jeff Bezos’ long feud with Elon Musk
The technology executives Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who share grand visions for exploring and settling humans in space, have increasingly found themselves feuding over exactly how our future in that final frontier should look.
The billionaires’ many disagreements have arisen because both of them have businesses that are pursuing reusable rockets, next-generation spacecraft and ambitious space-settling plans.
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Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the multinational technology company focused on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming and artificial intelligence, who is also founder of Blue Origin, the aerospace manufacturer and suborbital space flight services company, discussed his vision for space and unveiled a moon lander design, called Blue Moon, in May.
During the presentation, he criticised the idea of populating Mars – the overarching goal of SpaceX, the aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company owned by Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla, the American maker of high-performance electric vehicles.
That dig at Musk’s expense was made live onstage, but other quarrels between the two men have occurred online, on platforms such as Twitter.
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Most of the sparring seems innocuous, but some of the battles between the space companies they founded have worked their way into courts and government agencies.
However, the relationship between Bezos and Musk was not always so tense.
“As time has gone on and these companies have been successful, ambitions have grown,” Ashlee Vance, the author of the 2015 biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, said.
“Musk and Bezos used to be cordial, but they’re vicious now.”
Check out how they got to this point.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 as Amazon’s success surged.
Musk, meanwhile, had founded X.com, an online bank, which in 2000 merged with Confinity, an American software company best known for creating PayPal, a worldwide online payments system.
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The merged company, which was renamed PayPal, was bought by the e-commerce company, eBay, for US$1.5 billion in 2002 and Musk used the money to launch SpaceX that same year.
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In 2004, the two men met for a friendly dinner and talked about rockets. Even then, though, there was an adversarial spirit. “I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored,” Musk said of his meeting with Bezos.
For about a decade, as each company experimented with rocket designs on private land in Texas, the two men largely kept their criticisms of one another out of the public eye.
Yet that changed in 2013, after Nasa, the US space agency, asked companies to submit ideas for how they might use the Launch Complex 39A launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The Apollo moon-landing and space-shuttle missions were launched from that historic site, but Nasa was no longer using it.
SpaceX told Nasa that it wanted to use the launch pad exclusively. But Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, a rival of SpaceX, filed a joint protest with the government. Musk dubbed the move a “phoney blocking tactic”.
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SpaceX later said it was open to sharing the site with Nasa and other private companies if necessary. By the end of 2013, Nasa agreed to lease the launch pad to SpaceX.
Another bitter battle came less than a year later, this time over drone ships. Such boats are autonomous, flat-decked and able to serve as landing pads for huge rocket boosters. The rocket segment can then be reused, saving millions of dollars.
Blue Origin filed a patent for the concept in 2010, which was granted in 2014.
Musk was not happy because drone ships are key to SpaceX’s plans to reuse boosters. SpaceX did not want to pay Bezos’ company to use a drone ship.
SpaceX petitioned to invalidate Blue Origin’s patent, stating that “the ‘rocket science’ claimed in the ... patent was, at best, ‘old hat’,” by 2009. The judge ruled mostly in SpaceX’s favour, and Blue Origin withdrew 13 of 15 claims in the patent.
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SpaceX had a point – the concept was even featured in the 1959 Soviet science-fiction film Nebo Zovyot, or The Sky Beckons.
Not long after SpaceX claimed victory, Musk and Bezos began clashing in public.
One thing I find very un-motivating is the kind of ‘Plan B’ argument, where the Earth gets destroyed, where you want to be somewhere else
In November 2015, Blue Origin landed its first reusable rocket, called the New Shepard.
“The rarest of beasts – a used rocket,” Bezos tweeted with a video.
Musk could not help himself and tweeted in response: “Not quite ‘rarest’. SpaceX Grasshopper rocket did 6 suborbital flights 3 years ago & is still around.”
Musk went even further with his one-upmanship. He added that it takes 100 times more energy to launch something into geostationary orbit – about 22,236 miles (38,785km) up – which is what SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket does, than into suborbital space (about 62 miles high), where Blue Origin’s New Shepard goes.
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In December 2015, SpaceX successfully landed its first orbital-class rocket booster on a drone ship. Bezos praised the company in a tweet ...
... but with an edge to it.
Bezos referred to Blue Origin’s accomplishments of landing New Shepard, when he said: “Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!”
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The two billionaires also occasionally drop snide remarks about one another during press interviews.
A few weeks after SpaceX’s rocket-booster landing, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones asked Musk about Bezos.
“Jeff who?” Musk responded.
Then during an event in March, Bezos was asked about his vision to have millions of people living and working in space colonies.
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Bezos seized the opportunity to have a dig at Musk – without naming him – over his rival’s vision of permanently settling on Mars. (Musk has described a Mars settlement as a backup plan for humanity in case anything tragic happens to the Earth.)
“One thing I find very un-motivating is the kind of ‘Plan B’ argument, where the Earth gets destroyed, where you want to be somewhere else. That I find very little … It doesn’t work for me,” Bezos said.
“We have sent robotic probes now to every planet in this solar system, and this is the best one. My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, ‘Do me a favour, 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’.”
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More friction has arisen as both entrepreneurs plan to launch large numbers of internet-providing satellites.
Since at least 2015, Musk has spoken about a plan to create a global network of nearly 12,000 such satellites, called Starlink.
Amazon announced in April 2019 that it plans to launch Project Kuiper: a similar network of about 3,200 internet-providing satellites. Musk confronted Bezos on Twitter with the message: “@JeffBezos copy ”.
But putting the word ‘Blue’ on a ball is questionable branding
Last month, Bezos unveiled a concept for the Blue Moon private moon lander. The spacecraft is being designed by Blue Origin in the hope of helping return Nasa astronauts to the moon for the first time in decades.
During his presentation, before Blue Moon’s unveiling, Bezos took a moment to indirectly criticise Musk’s Mars-settling plans yet again.
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Bezos described the moon as a more realistic near-term destination.
A slide in his presentation showed an image of Mars with the title “FAR, FAR AWAY”. The slide’s notes said: “Round-trip travel in the order of years” and “No real-time communication.”
When asked about Bezos’ Blue Moon debut, Musk said he welcomed the competition.
However, he added: “But putting the word ‘Blue’ on a ball is questionable branding.”
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Hours later, Musk took the joke further: He edited a screenshot of The New York Times article about the spacecraft to read “balls” instead of “moon”.
The tech moguls are now sparring over a lucrative US Air Force contract.
SpaceX recently sued the US government agency after it awarded Blue Origin part of a US$2.3 billion agreement for rocket development.
Yet, as they have done in the past, the men and the companies they founded are likely to rise above such disputes and continue their push to redesign space flight.
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SpaceX is currently working in southern Texas to develop Starship, an enormous, fully reusable Mars rocket system. For now, the company is testing concepts for the vehicle with a steel prototype called Starhopper.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin is working toward the 2021 debut of New Glenn, a partly reusable rocket that will put the company into tangible competition with SpaceX and other launch providers.
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- Rivalry between founders on the aerospace and space flight companies Blue Origin and SpaceX has seen them bicker on social media and take bitter disputes to court