Bezos v Musk: who will be master of the universe?

Elon Musk’s recent bid for Twitter has edged him ahead again. But how will Jeff Bezos respond? Eleanor Steafel reports

Elon Musk is having a good month. He’s become Twitter’s largest shareholder, buying 9.2 per cent of the company and gaining a seat on its board of directors (all in the name of “unlocking free speech”, you understand). He’s also added hundreds of millions of dollars to his fortune after Twitter’s stock gained 35 per cent in the wake of his announcement. Meanwhile, experts have been predicting Tesla stock will triple by 2025. Really, though, there is only one bit of news that will matter to Musk this week. He’s ousted Jeff Bezos on Forbes’ annual Billionaires List.

It’s a rivalry that goes back a decade between two men with more money than seems decent and egos to match their bank balances. Musk, now worth $219billion (over £167billion) has been snapping at the Amazon boss’s heels since 2012, when he first made it on to the Forbes Billionaires List with a net worth of $2billion (£1.53billion). The gap between them was still relatively chunky as recently as 2018, when Bezos was designated the wealthiest person in the world, unseating Bill Gates with a registered net worth of $112billion (£86billion).

By 2020, Musk’s fortune was climbing (by then he was on about $27billion), but he was still trailing behind Bezos. By the end of that year, everything changed. He bought a huge chunk of Tesla stock, which boosted his net worth by $150billion and with that, the battle was on. In January 2021, Musk, with a net worth of $185billion, surpassed Bezos to become the richest person in the world. The Amazon founder reclaimed the top spot the following month, but didn’t hold on to the title for long. Musk won it back on September 27, 2021; Tesla stock had surged and Forbes announced his net worth had surpassed $200billion – over £149billion – making him once again the richest person in the world.

If the idea of the two richest men in the world squabbling in public sounds undignified to you, read no further. Unfortunately, for Bezos and Musk, enormous wealth doesn’t appear to have come with deep wells of humility. You know what they say, though – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Let’s weigh up who is really winning in the race to become the most powerful man on earth.

The great space race

As power battles go, this one is about as potent as they come. The rivalry over the performance of their respective rockets is bitter, personal and, it has to be said, slightly pathetic. But the all-important question of who is “winning” remains hard to call.

Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin are in a race to build an internet satellite service in space. SpaceX has, over the past couple of years, launched nearly 2,000 satellites. Amazon had a similar plan, but it has yet to get off the ground. It has, however, expended an awful lot of energy accusing SpaceX of defying regulations. SpaceX accused Amazon of attempting to delay its progress in order to make up for the company’s own failures. Amazon’s track record, Musk’s company said, “amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind”.

On Twitter, Musk added insult to injury, misspelling Bezos’s name and writing, “turns out Besos retired to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX”.

Musk is developing something called Starship, a reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to Mars. To date, SpaceX has sent three teams of astronauts to the International Space Station. Blue Origin has launched two suborbital missions into space. The first lasted just over 10 minutes.

It does sound, then, as if Musk might be pulling ahead in the space race – except for one small but salient point: Jeff, unlike Elon, has actually been to space. Who could forget the time he donned a blue onesie and headed for the Kármán Line alongside his brother Mark, an 82-year-old woman called Wally Funk and an 18-year-old student?

Musk did once put down a deposit for a trip on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but a VG flight wouldn’t go anything like the distance one of SpaceX’s capsules could travel. And yet, his feet have remained grounded. As one commentator put it: “Only Musk knows why he hasn’t gone to space, and he’s a hard person to reach.”

Media empires

Bezos once cited his decision for buying the Washington Post as being a case of “intuition and not analysis”. It didn’t matter that financially the business was floundering – it was “an important institution”. “When I’m 90,” he said, “it’s going to be one of the things I’m most proud of.” A regular white knight.

Between the Post (which he bought for $250million in cash) and various local titles, combined with the media side of Amazon, Bezos has a relatively robust media empire. Under his ownership, the Post doubled its web traffic in three years and became profitable. Amazon, meanwhile, might be thought of as an e-commerce giant, but it has also stealthily become a big media company. In 2020, analysis showed that if its media properties, Prime, Twitch and Music, were broken off into a separate media company, it would be valued at more than $500billion. This month, Amazon became the third-biggest digital advertising company, behind Facebook and Google, making $31billion in ad revenue in 2021.

But it’s hard to ignore the size and power of Twitter, which Musk has offered to buy for $41billion. In 2021, Twitter had 217 million daily active users worldwide. And yet it still trails behind Facebook. Meta, which owns Facebook, generated $118billion in revenue in 2021 from 1.93 billion daily users. Twitter earned $5.08 billion in revenue last year from its 217 million. If Musk were to take over and manage to grow the platform, he could find himself in possession of a hugely valuable asset.

The fleet of electric cars

For two men who are making it their life’s mission to shoot things into space (not really known for its eco credentials, space travel), they go a small way towards offsetting all that rocket fuel with the electric car sections of their business portfolios.

Tesla is the chief reason for Musk’s wealth. It became the most valuable car manufacturer in 2020, and in 2021 reached a market capitalisation of $1trillion – only the sixth company to do so in US history.

Rivian, meanwhile, which is backed by Amazon, might not have quite the status of Musk’s car, but it’s now one of the most valuable manufacturers in the world, far outdoing Ford and General Motors. Its first vehicle, a $73,000 pickup, began shipping in September. Amazon has committed to buying 100,000 delivery vehicles from Rivian by 2030.

The property portfolios

It should be one of the biggest signifiers of wealth, but this is a tricky one to call. Bezos without a doubt owns more property than Musk. His empire is apparently worth almost $600million. He’s bought 14 mansions in the past 23 years, and the latest, in Miami, is said to have set him back $78million. A clear winner, surely? Or is he…?

In what could be seen as the ultimate power move, Musk has sold all of his seven homes for $128million in a bid to “own no house”. Instead, he lives in a small rental home, believed to be worth $50,000, near SpaceX HQ in Boca Chica, Texas. His former partner Grimes has said he leads a minimalistic life and at times “lives below the poverty line”. I’m not sure which poverty line she’s referring to there. Still, a power move by any other name.

For Bezos and Musk, enormous wealth doesn’t come with deep wells of humility