Jeff Bezos denies Elon Musk’s Donald Trump bombshell: ‘100% not true’
Elon Musk has reignited a feud between two of the richest people on the planet after hearing a rumour about Donald Trump.
Jeff Bezos has emphatically denied he forecasted a Donald Trump US election defeat after Elon Musk took aim at the Amazon founder on Thursday.
Musk, who endorsed Trump for president and energetically supported his campaign by turning his considerable resources into securing votes in key states, claimed Bezos had predicted a Trump loss to Kamala Harris.
“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that Donald Trump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Musk tweeted.
“Nope. 100% not true,” Bezos replied directly to Musk’s tweet.
The current richest (Musk) and third-richest (Bezos) men on the planet have a chequered history, largely because of their duelling companies Space X (Musk) and Blue Origin (Bezos).
But to varying degrees both were also embroiled in the recent battle for the presidency - Musk without fear or favour in his support of Trump and Bezos most publicly when he was accused of stopping the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing Harris.
That step, which received a barrage of criticism, obviously wasn’t enough to reshape Musk’s view of his longtime rival.
Not Musk’s only billionaire on billionaire battle
The Tesla founder has always been most sensitive to opponents of his electric car company - most famously Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.
The Musk-Gates feud began in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, during which Gates pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward helping to develop a vaccine while the Tesla boss was promising to provide ventilators to overwhelmed hospitals.
In the summer of 2020, Gates criticised Musk for his comments which appeared to downplay the severity of the virus.
“Elon’s positioning is to maintain a high level of outrageous comments,” Gates told CNBC at the time.
“He’s not much involved in vaccines. He makes a great electric car. And his rockets work well. So he’s allowed to say these things. I hope that he doesn’t confuse areas he’s not involved in too much.”
Musk responded on social media by jokingly writing “Billy G is not my lover” and “The rumour that Bill Gates & I are lovers is completely untrue.”
Musk defended himself by noting that he had helped in the production of a machine used by CureVac, a vaccine maker that counts Gates as one of its investors.
In 2022, Gates confirmed to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson that he shorted Tesla stock — or bet that the stock price would dip.
Musk posted screenshots of text messages that he exchanged with Gates who sought to gauge the Tesla mogul’s interest in further efforts to combat climate change.
“Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change,” Musk wrote to Gates. Gates told Isaacson in 2022: “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”
- with the New York Post
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