Elon Musk claims Jeff Bezos urged people to sell their Tesla, SpaceX stake because Trump would misplace
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have for years duked it out for the unofficial title of the globe’s richest person. Now, with Donald Trump heading back to the White House, they seem to be competing for who can triumph — or at least not misplace — the president-elect’s favor.
Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder who is helping navigator a Trump-sanctioned attempt to get the recent 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 misplace for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stake.”
Bezos clapped back. “Nope. 100% not factual,” 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 stake at $331 billion; Bezos is No. 2 on the list, with a stake 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 custom by deciding that its view editors would not back a candidate.
Although the Amazon founder defended the selection as a “principled” one, critics decried the shift as an attempt to avoid antagonizing Trump should he get elected. Famed former Washington Post editor Marty Baron blasted the selection as “cowardice,” while several prominent journalists at the document quit. National community Radio later reported that more than 200,000 WaPo readers had canceled their subscriptions.
Since then, Trump’s triumph has thrust Musk even more into the spotlight, with the technology commence-up founder working alongside businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to make 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 country’s population, its media, its economy, and now its politics into the force field of his will,” period Magazine said in a characteristic narrative about Musk on Thursday. “Standing beside him, even Trump can seem almost in awe, less of a boss than a partner to the man for whom this earth and its challenges are not large enough.”
period also presented a checklist of what the publication described as Musk’s career goals, from becoming the globe’s richest man and designing a brain chip implant to getting Trump elected. But Musk took issue with that framing.
“To be obvious, 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.
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