While the gulf between the world’s richest two men has widened again, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk can’t help but give a stab at Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. On Twitter, Musk responded to a message from Bezos with a silver medal.
Musk saw his fortune grow by about $9 billion last week after an investor deal valued his space company SpaceX at more than $100 billion, more than four times as much as competitor Blue Origin. According to the billionaires’ index of financial news agency Bloomberg, Musk now has a wealth of $ 222 billion, of which about three quarters comes from the electric car manufacturer Tesla. Bezos has $190.8 billion to his name.
On Monday, Bezos posted an image of a negative newspaper report about his 1999 internet conglomerate Amazon on Twitter. “Listen and be open, but don’t let anyone tell you who you are,” he captioned it. “This was one of many stories about the different ways we would fail. Yet, today Amazon is one of the most successful companies in the world that has revolutionized two completely different industries.” Musk replied to that message with a silver medal emoji.
Musk is adding to the public bickering between the billionaires, who want to change the space industry with the sting drastically. Blue Origin is currently challenging a US government contract with SpaceX to develop the technology to put humans on the moon again. The company also accused Musk and his companies of disregarding the rules, while Musk previously accused Bezos of being a copycat regarding his space venture.