How space travel dreams sparked Jeff Bezos’ long feud with Elon Musk
- 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
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.
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.
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.