Elon Musk says that Jeff Bezos retired from leading Amazon to “sue full-time lawsuits against SpaceX.” How the rivalry between the two billionaires began.
In the early years of the 21st century, two of the world’s most famous executives, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, developed a rivalry that would define some of their business for the next 17 years, Business Insider was quoted as saying by ZF.
The two executives fought against each other over the space ambitions they share – Musk runs SpaceX and Bezos owns Blue Origin – but the situation didn’t stop there: Musk called Bezos a “copier” because of the satellite program from Amazon and criticized the company’s business practices. Instead, Amazon and Blue Origin filed a series of lawsuits against the SpaceX concern, according to Mediafax.ro.
Musk and Bezos are some of the most powerful billionaires in the world. Bezos is currently the richest man in the world and has recently left the position of CEO of Amazon, becoming more and more involved in Blue Origin operations. Meanwhile, Musk is CEO for both Tesla and SpaceX.
Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, a company he listed on the stock exchange three years later. Thus, in the early 2000s, Amazon was far from the giant it is today, and it will take several years to launch the Prime streaming platform and the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure service.
But Bezos has always been interested in space. He told the Miami Herald in 1982, after graduating from high school as head of promotion, that he wanted to create colonies for millions of people in outer space. As a result of his ambitions to leave Earth, Bezos created Blue Origin in 2000, a startup focused on spaceflight.
During that time, Musk sold Zip2, a startup launched with his brother, Kimbal, to Compaq for about $ 300 million, working at the time on the PayPal payment system, which sold to eBay for $ 1.5 billion.
Musk raised about $ 160 million from the sale of PayPal, money he used to launch SpaceX in 2002.
“At first I didn’t let my friends invest because I thought they would lose their money. Instead, I would rather lose my own money “, it appears from an interview offered in 2018 by Musk.
In 2004, Blue Origin and SpaceX were still in their infancy – neither company had launched a launch.
But this could not stop the rivalry. Apparently, the discussion between Musk and Bezos did not end well when the two met to talk about future projects on the development of reusable missiles.
“I tried to give him the best advice I could, ignoring all of it,” Musk said after the meeting, according to Christian Davenport’s The Space Barons.
The rivalry continued in 2013. At the time, SpaceX was trying to gain exclusive access to a NASA launch pad. Blue Origin (along with United Launch Alliance, a rival to SpaceX) staged a formal protest to block access to Musk’s launch pad. Bezos thus proposed converting the ramp into a “space port open to all specialized companies”.
Musk called the move a “false blocking tactic” and used the opportunity to attack Blue Origin again. In the end, SpaceX won the rights to use the ramp.
More recently, Musk wrote on Twitter that “Bezos has retired to file full-time lawsuits against SpaceX.” The statement comes as an Amazon subsidiary filed a protest with the Federal Communications Commission over SpaceX’s satellite launch program.
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