Elon Musk took a foul-mouthed swipe at Jeff Bezos in praise for New Zealand rocket CEO, new book reveals
- Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck isn’t a billionaire and he didn’t attend college – but his company did beat the Amazon founder’s Blue Origin to orbit
- ‘It is impressive that they managed’ it, Musk told his biographer. ‘It’s f***ing hard. Bezos has spent a s***load of money, and he hasn’t made it’
“It is impressive that they managed to reach orbit,” Musk told his former biographer and journalist Ashlee Vance in a 2018 phone conversation about the California-based company Rocket Lab, according an excerpt published by Bloomberg. “It’s f***ing hard. Bezos has spent a s***load of money, and he hasn’t made it,” he said, according to the book.
The achievement of reaching orbit is even more impressive when you contrast Rocket Lab’s CEO, Peter Beck, with Musk and Bezos.
Beck, who hails from southern New Zealand, isn’t a billionaire and didn’t attend college. Instead of college, which Beck told Vance “never felt” right for him, he entered the dye-making trade “because it’s hard”. He worked at a dishwasher manufacturer and did research in a government lab early in his career, Vance wrote.
Beck founded Rocket Lab in 2006, which claims to be the first private company to complete a successful launch to space from the Southern Hemisphere with its 2009 launch of the Atea-1 rocket.
Helicopter catches falling rocket launched from New Zealand, then drops it
Neither Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, nor Musk responded to requests for comment.
Despite being known for being outspoken, Musk didn’t have much more to say about Rocket Lab and its founder during the 2018 phone call, Vance wrote. However, the Tesla CEO has talked a lot about Bezos and Blue Origin over the years, sometimes poking fun and sometimes being cordial.
Musk and Bezos’ space rivalry reportedly started at a dinner in 2004, when the two met to discuss how they both wanted to make reusable rockets.
“I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored,” Musk said, according to a book called The Space Barons.
Since then, the two’s space ambitions have led them to clash, including over a Nasa launch pad in 2013, and a patent for drone ships in 2014.
Rich men like Elon Musk were looked down on in ancient China. All except one
However, there have been some compliments exchanged too. In 2020, Bezos publicly wrote on Instagram that he was impressed by SpaceX’s test of its Starship rocket.
“Anybody who knows how hard this stuff is is impressed by today’s Starship test,” Bezos said. “Big congrats to the whole @SpaceX team. I’m confident they’ll be back at it soon.”
