On Monday, November 4, Tesla stock was trading at $243. It closed yesterday at $321. The election of Donald Trump increased its value by a third in a week, adding $245 billion to its market value.
Elon Musk made about $50 billion from that jump, because he owns a fifth of Tesla shares. That’s double what Musk personally paid to buy Twitter – now X – two years ago.
It’s a sign of the value financial markets have assigned to proximity to Trump, who Musk joined on the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday.
It’s also the kind of closeness that journalists have The Washington Post The fear that Jeff Bezos sought when he blocked the newspaper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris before the election.
This decision – no cost mail At least 250,000 subscribers and tens of millions in revenue — highlighting the role of Blue Origin, the long-struggling rocket company in Bezos’ sprawling empire. He also highlighted his decades-long struggle to compete in space with Musk’s SpaceX, whose success Bezos has had to watch in the wake of Blue Origin’s systemic inaction.
“Every day SpaceX is accelerating further away from Blue Origin,” said Eric Berger, a longtime chronicler of the new space race between Musk and Bezos, and author of SpaceX. Re-entry. “They’re still trying to do the things SpaceX did in 2010.”
The rivalry between Musk and Bezos is one of the longest running in technology. It’s been riddled with bullets. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. Musk followed suit at SpaceX in 2002.
The pair met in 2004 for a dinner, which Musk later recalled in stunned terms. “We talked about missile structures,” he said. The Washington Post Journalist Christian Davenport. Musk recalls that he thought Bezos was following “the wrong evolutionary path.” “I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored.”
“I asked Elon if he thought Bezos was a good engineer a few years ago,” Berger added. “He said no.”
Bezos was still busy running Amazon in 2004. Blue Origin was a pet project that he funded out of respect for the long-gone space age that he hoped to revive.
SpaceX was not a side project for Musk. It was his life’s mission. He made $200 million selling his stake in PayPal in 2002. He invested half of it in SpaceX: enough to finance a bunch of rocket launches. One must succeed before the company runs out of money.
If that happens, SpaceX will win contracts from NASA to deliver payloads into space, contracts that could fund the company as it develops more powerful rockets, new spacecraft, and, over time, the Starlink satellite system that is now the envy of people. . the world.
“They started around the same time, and they had very different paths,” said Ashley Vance, another space expert and author of a biography of Musk, of the two companies. “Blue Origin has this slogan: ‘One step at a time, fierce.’ They’ve lost the ‘fierce’ part.
While leading Amazon, Bezos criticized the company for adopting a “day two” mentality. Bezos decreed that it’s always day one at Amazon, meaning the company — now worth $2.2 trillion — had to always act like a startup, and never move to maximizing margins at the expense of customer satisfaction.
Blue Origin did not have the luxury of making that choice. In many ways, she is still stuck on Day Zero.
Bezos has taken on greater oversight of Blue Origin since relinquishing day-to-day control of Amazon in 2021, which is one of the main reasons he has moved away from the megalith he built. He has since said he wants Blue Origin to become “the most decisive company in the world.”
“Good luck,” Berger said, thinking about that goal. “SpaceX He is The most decisive company in the world because Elon has a meeting and makes a decision and that’s it. “Elon had much more experience, and his instincts were right on a lot of the big issues.”
Musk probably realized before anyone else — before Bezos, NASA, the Russians, the Europeans, and the Chinese — that rockets would have to become reusable to make spaceflight commercially viable. This idea has been dismissed as unacceptable by aviation experts for years.
Now everyone is trying to build their own reusable rocket, as SpaceX did with the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Spaceship, all of which can reenter Earth’s atmosphere, each more powerful than the last.
Bezos has not yet launched his company’s orbital rocket, New Glenn.
It’s a decade behind schedule, a fact Musk anticipated with relish in 2013 when he, not Bezos, secured the lease for Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Cape Canaveral Base in Florida, the location from which Apollo 11 flew to the moon.
Bezos tried to secure it for Blue Origin, but even then SpaceX was the most qualified bidder. Musk promised at the time to “gladly meet Blue Origin’s needs” if Bezos’ company “somehow showed up in the next five years with a NASA human-rated vehicle that could dock with the space station, which is what Pad 39A did.” You’re supposed to.”
“Honestly, I think we’re more likely to spot unicorns dancing in the flame channel,” he added in his usual drawl.
He has not traveled to New Glen since, Berger notes Re-entry. SpaceX has, in that time, done 175 launches and counting.
“Jeff is obviously a smart guy, and he can obviously talk about these things in depth,” Ashley Vance told The Daily Beast, but “Elon is there all the time at the plant, and Jeff checks in periodically.”
Vance described SpaceX’s success as “hard to put into words… This is a company that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and now it’s taking over the entire world on every front.”
This fact may not be clear to much of the public. Bezos has had notable success, flying in 2021 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft as it crossed the 62-mile Kármán line — the recognized limit of space — before returning to Earth.
(Musk has not joined one of his company’s flights; he is waiting to travel to Mars.)
The scale of Musk’s success in space is often overlooked by critics concerned about his controversial and selfish management of X, the platform on which most journalists still spend their lives. Most of the social media company’s value has been wiped out since he bought it, much to the dismay of investors and banks who invested $18 billion of the $44 billion purchase price.
But his place in the new space race is unquestionable. The rocket company that Jeff Bezos wants to run already exists. It is owned by one of the only two men in the world richer than him.
