Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have reignited their long-running feud after the X owner claimed the Amazon founder advised friends to sell their Tesla shares because Donald Trump was going to lose the presidential election.
Posting on X Musk—the CEO of the EV-maker—wrote: “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.”
Bezos quickly returned: “Nope. 100% not true.”
Musk replied sincerely or sarcastically: “Well, then, I stand corrected,” with a crying laughing face.
The links between this year’s presidential election outcome and the relative prosperity of Musk-owned entities are clear.
Firstly, the Tesla CEO personally pumped tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s presidential campaign—earning himself a newly-created government division as a result.
A close personal relationship also seems to be forming between President-elect Trump and X owner Musk, with the world’s richest man even appearing in Trump’s family photo on election night.
Trump is also throwing his weight behind some of Musk’s business endeavors, traveling to Texas this week to watch a Space X rocket launch.
And while the former president also previously held negative views on electric vehicles (saying EV drivers are “[destroying] our once great USA” and should “rot in hell), he changed his tune following Musk’s endorsement.
“I’m for electric cars, I have to be because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Trump told supporters on the campaign trail.
At a later rally, he added: “I’ve driven them, and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
The Republican candidate’s backing led to a huge rally in Tesla stock following the election: In the week following, the company’s share price soared approximately 40% and is up 53% for the month at the time of writing.
While the stakes were high for Musk—who admitted he would have been “f*cked” if Trump had lost the election—the bet has paid off.
Meanwhile, other business leaders were mindful of backing one candidate or the other—conscious that if they spoke out against a victorious Trump, it could bode badly for them during his term.
Bezos did not endorse either Vice President Harris or President-elect Trump personally or via his businesses.
While he faced backlash after blocking his newspaper, The Washington Post, from publishing its historic endorsement of one candidate or the other, he doubled down: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election.
“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
This isn’t the first time the pair—and space exploration rivals—have butted heads.
Indeed, the rivalry goes so deep that Amazon shareholders cited it in a competition lawsuit.
In 2022, Amazon announced the biggest rocket deal in the history of the commercial space sector.
Amazon was offering contracts for Project Kuiper, which was a chance to launch low-Earth orbit satellites that would be used for internet services.
Amazon confirmed it would invest $10 billion in the project and promptly signed up three contractors—the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin; European company Arianespace; and Blue Origin, a private venture founded by Bezos himself.
But missing from the lineup was Musk-founded SpaceX, which has reportedly already launched approximately 5,000 internet satellites since 2019 for its own rival service, Starlink.
Amazon shareholders blamed Musk and Bezos’s rivalry for this decision, and according to CNBC, executives had “excluded the most obvious and affordable launch provider, SpaceX, from its procurement process because of Bezos’s personal rivalry with Musk.”
Musk also previously taunted Bezos that he had “retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX” and later jibed that the Amazon founder can’t “sue [his] way to the moon.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
