Mumbai, India (CU)_ Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, have been clashing openly for years, but few people are aware that the two competitors had dined together in 2004. A picture from the meeting is now trending in social media grounds, catching the attention of Elon Musk in Twitter.
Although Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos are not business competitors in the same field, where Musk owns electric vehicles business and Bezos owns e-commerce business, their space ambitions are similar. Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos in the year 2000, which was two years ahead of Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX.
According to the reports, Blue Origin and SpaceX have challenged each other in recent years over launch-pad lease opportunities, landing-pad patents, and other issues. In the meantime, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have had a few spats about their rockets and different opinions on space exploration policies. However, both businesses were only in their budding stage in 2004. When Mr Musk and Mr Bezos met for dinner, it was one of their few in-person encounters. Also back then, the relationship between the two was tense.
According to news sources, following the meeting, Elon Musk had said, “I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored”. Earlier this month, the photograph from the meeting was posted on Twitter, and Elon Musk saw it on Sunday. In response to the picture which spotted the two billionaires of the world together at a dinner table, he wrote, “Wow, hard to believe that was 17 years ago!” On the grounds of social media, the viral picture has garnered thousands of likes and comments.
A Twitter user wrote, “Guy in the back has no idea he’s got 2 absolute legends sitting next to him”. Another user commented, “While SpaceX vs Blue Origin makes for good headlines and interesting compare/contrasts they have different goals and space is big enough for both. I don’t think they’re competitors in the traditional sense”. In January, Elon Musk surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s wealthiest individual before the Amazon CEO regained the honor.
