Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been vying for the unofficial title of world's richest person for years. Now, with Donald Trump back in the White House, they're competing to see who can win — or at least not lose — the president-elect's favor.
Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who is helping lead a Trump-sanctioned effort to get new Department of Government Efficiency off the field, claimed on his social media platforms on Thursday that he “found out tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would definitely lose, so he had to sell all his Tesla and “SpaceX stock should be sold.”
Bezos clapped back. “No. Not 100% true,” he said express reaction On X, the social media platform Musk owns. A representative for Bezos declined further comment, pointing to Bezos' post.
Musk responded to Bezos, “Okay, then, I'm right,” followed by crying with laughter emoji.
Musk is at number 1 in Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegs His net worth is $331 billion; Bezos is at second place in this list with a wealth of $226 billion.
In late October, the Bezos-owned Washington Post — which was set to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president — controversially broke with tradition by deciding who would have its opinion editor. not support a candidate.
Although the founder of Amazon defended Describing the decision as “principled”, critics condemned the move as an attempt to avoid angering Trump if he is elected. Famous former Washington Post editor Marty Baron criticized the decision as “cowardly”, while several prominent journalists at the paper resigned. National Public Radio later reported even more. 200,000 WaPo readers Had canceled his membership.
Since then, Trump's victory has thrust Musk further into the spotlight, with the technology entrepreneur teaming up with businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to create a temporary agency that has been charged with making the cuts. Wasteful federal spending.
“Not since the era of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper giant who fueled FDR's rise nearly a century ago, has a private citizen simultaneously exerted such an outsized influence on so many aspects of American life, the nation's culture, Its media is pulling its economy. And now this politics is at the mercy of their will.” time magazine said a feature story about Musk on Thursday. “Standing next to him, even Trump might seem almost in awe, less a partner than a boss to the man for whom the planet and its challenges are not too big.”
Time also offered a checklist of what the publication described as Musk's career goals, ranging from becoming the world's richest man and designing a brain chip implant to defeating Trump if elected. But Musk objected to that framing.
“To be clear, I haven't given any media interviews and it's not really my checklist. I'm trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the potential lifespan of consciousness,” he said. Said On social media.