Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have for years duked it out for the unofficial title of the world’s richest person. Now, with Donald Trump heading back to the White House, they seem to be competing for who can win — or at least not lose — the president-elect’s favor.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder who is helping lead a Trump-sanctioned effort to get the new Department of Government Efficiency off the ground, claimed on his social media platform Thursday that he had “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 clapped back. “Nope. 100% not true,” he responded on X, the social media platform Musk owns. A representative for Bezos declined further comment, pointing to Bezos’ post.
Musk responded to Bezos, “Well, then, I stand corrected,” followed by a crying with laughter emoji.
Musk ranks No. 1 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which pegs his net worth at $331 billion; Bezos is No. 2 on the list, with a net worth of $226 billion.
In late October, the Bezos-owned Washington Post — which had been set to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president — controversially broke from tradition by deciding that its opinion editors would not support a candidate.
Although the Amazon founder defended the decision as a “principled” one, critics decried the move as an effort to avoid antagonizing Trump should he get elected. Famed former Washington Post editor Marty Baron blasted the decision as “cowardice,” while several prominent journalists at the paper quit. National Public Radio later reported that more than 200,000 WaPo readers had canceled their subscriptions.
Since then, Trump’s win has thrust Musk even more into the spotlight, with the technology entrepreneur working alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to create a temporary agency charged with chopping wasteful federal spending.
“Not since the age of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who greased FDR’s ascent nearly a century ago, has a private citizen loomed so large over so many facets of American life at once, pulling the nation’s culture, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will,” Time Magazine said in a feature story about Musk on Thursday. “Standing beside him, even Trump can seem almost in awe, less of a boss than a companion to the man for whom this planet and its challenges are not big enough.”
Time also presented a checklist of what the publication described as Musk’s career goals, from becoming the world’s richest man and designing a brain chip implant to getting Trump elected. But Musk took issue with that framing.
“To be clear, I have not done any media interviews and this is not actually my checklist. I am trying to make life multiplanetary to maximize the probable lifespan of consciousness,” he said on social media.