The world’s wealthiest person Elon Musk claimed Thursday—without clear evidence—the planet’s third-richest person Jeff Bezos recommended people sell stakes in Musk’s companies ahead of the presidential election, the latest escalation in a yearslong rivalry between the two centibillionaires.
Donald Trump, left, speaks with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, center, and Bezos in 2017.
Musk claimed that “Bezos was telling everyone” the now President-elect Donald Trump would “for sure” lose the election, in an early morning post on his X social media platform.
Musk did not say who told him about Bezos’ alleged comments, who Bezos told this to or where Bezos purportedly made these statements.
Bezos supposedly recommended that people in turn “should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” said Musk, referring to Musk’s public, $1 trillion electric vehicle maker Tesla and private, $250 billion aerospace firm SpaceX, implying Musk’s very public support for Trump would hurt his companies’ valuations.
A Bezos spokesperson did not immediately return Forbes’ request for comment.
Musk, who claimed he “learned” this anecdote Wednesday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, has a history of sharing false or misleading claims. And Bezos’ public actions leading up to the election did not hint at any sort of anti-Trump sentiment - he was not one of the more than 80 billionaires publicly backing Vice President Kamala Harris, and he took the controversial step of reportedly killing his Washington Post newspaper’s endorsement of Harris a week before the election. Bezos, who said in July that Trump “showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire” in the July attempt on his life, called Trump’s victory this month an “extraordinary political comeback.”
Musk is by far the richest person in the world with a net worth of nearly $317 billion, about $100 billion more than the $217 billion man Bezos. The $2.1 trillion Amazon, which Bezos cofounded and still oversees as chairman, accounts for the majority of Bezos’ net worth, while Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX stakes account for a majority of his fortune.
One of the most memorable jabs in the billionaires’ extensive rivalry actually comes from Forbes’ billionaires list. “I’m sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B., along with a silver medal,” Musk told us in 2021 upon surpassing Bezos as world’s richest person. Much of the friction traces to the pair’s role in the private space race as Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin vie for government contracts. Bezos “should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub,” Musk told the Financial Times in 2021. Bezos has been less public in jabbing at the ever talkative Musk, but in 2019 challenged Musk’s long-standing dream to colonize Mars: “My friends who want to move to Mars? I say, ‘Do me a favor, go live on the top of Mount Everest for a year first, and see if you like it — because it’s a garden paradise compared to Mars.’”