On Monday, Nov. 4, Tesla stock traded at $243. Yesterday it closed at $321. Donald Trump’s election increased its value by a third in a week, adding $245 billion to its market capitalization.
Elon Musk made nearly $50bn from that leap, as he owns a fifth of Tesla’s stock. That’s about twice as much as Musk paid to buy Twitter—now X—two years ago.
It’s a sign of the value financial markets have assigned to proximity to Trump, whom Musk joined on the phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday.
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It’s also the kind of proximity that journalists at The Washington Post fear Jeff Bezos sought when he held back the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris prior to the election.
That decision—which cost The Post at least 250,000 in subscribers and tens of millions in revenue—has thrown light on the role of Blue Origin, the long-faltering rocket company in Bezos’ sprawling empire. It has also emphasized his decades-long struggle to compete in space with Musk’s SpaceX, the company Bezos has had to watch succeed in the wake of Blue Origin’s methodical inaction.
“Every day SpaceX is accelerating further away from Blue Origin,” said Eric Berger, a long-time chronicler of the new space race between Musk and Bezos, and the author of Reentry. “They’re still trying to do things SpaceX did in 2010.”
The Musk-Bezos rivalry is one of the longest running in tech. It has been pockmarked with potshots. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. Musk followed with SpaceX in 2002.
The pair met in 2004 for a dinner Musk later recalled in withering terms. “We talked about rocket architectures,” he told Washington Post journalist Christian Davenport. Musk thought Bezos was pursuing “the wrong evolutionary path,” he recalled. “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 preoccupied with running Amazon in 2004. Blue Origin was a pet project he funded out of a reverence for a long-gone space age he hoped to revive.
SpaceX wasn’t a side project for Musk. It was his life’s mission. He had made $200 million from selling his share of PayPal in 2002. He put half of it into SpaceX: enough money to fund a handful of rocket launches. One would have to succeed before the company ran out his cash.
If one did, SpaceX stood to win contracts from NASA to deliver payloads into space—contracts that could fund the company as it developed more powerful rockets, new spacecrafts and, in time, a system of satellites (Starlink) that is now the envy of the world.
“They started almost at the same time, and just had these totally different trajectories,” said Ashlee Vance, another authority on space and the author of a biography on Musk, of the two companies. “Blue Origin has this motto: ‘step-by-step, ferociously.’ They’ve been missing the ‘ferociously’ part.”
While leading Amazon, Bezos famously railed against the company adopting a “Day Two” mindset. It’s always Day One at Amazon, Bezos decreed, meaning the company—now worth $2.2 trillion—had to always act like a start-up, never transition into maximizing margins at the expense of customer satisfaction.
Blue Origin hasn’t had the luxury of making that choice. It is, in many ways, still stuck on Day Zero.
Bezos has taken on greater oversight of Blue Origin since ceding day-to-day control of Amazon in 2021—it’s one of the main reasons he stepped away from the megalith he built. He has since said he wants Blue Origin to become “the world’s most decisive company.”
“Good luck,” said Berger, reflecting on that aim. “SpaceX is the world’s most decisive company because Elon has a meeting and makes a decision and that’s it. Elon has had a lot more experience, and his intuition has been right on a lot of the big issues.”
Musk realized perhaps before anyone else—before Bezos, NASA, the Russians, the Europeans, the Chinese—that rockets had to become reusable to make space flight commercially viable. That idea was dismissed as untenable by aerospace experts for years.
Now everyone is trying to build a reusable rocket of their own, as SpaceX has with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Spaceship, all of which can re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, each of them more powerful than the last.
Bezos has yet to launch his company’s orbital rocket, New Glenn.
He is a decade behind schedule, a fact Musk anticipated in relish in 2013 when he, not Bezos, was given the lease to launchpad 39A at NASA’s Cape Canaveral base in Florida—the spot from which Apollo 11 flew to the Moon.
Bezos tried to secure it for Blue Origin, but even then SpaceX was the more qualified bidder. Musk promised at the time to “gladly accommodate (Blue Origin’s) needs” if Bezos’ company did “somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the space station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do.”
“Frankly,” he added, with customary bite, “I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.”
New Glenn has not flown since, as Berger points out in Reentry. SpaceX has, in that time, had 175 launches and counting.
“Jeff is evidently a brilliant guy—he can clearly talk about this stuff at depth,” Ashlee Vance told the Daily Beast, but “Elon’s there all the time in the factory, whereas Jeff would periodically check in.”
Vance described SpaceX’s success as “hard to put into words… This is a company that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and they are now completely lapping the entire world on every front.”
That fact may not be apparent to the public at large. Bezos has had one notable success, flying in 2021 on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard spacecraft as it crossed the 62-mile Kármán line—the recognized boundary of space—before returning to Earth.
Musk has not crewed one of his company’s flights. He is waiting to fly to Mars.
The scale of Musk’s success in space is often ignored by critics concerned by his controversial and egocentric 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, to the chagrin of the investors and banks that put in $18 billion of the $44 billion purchase price.
But his standing is unimpeachable in the new space race. The rocket company Bezos wants to run already exists. Unfortunately for him, it’s owned by one of the only two men in the world who are richer than he is.
