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Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: The Rivalry of the Century (that we are all benefitting from)
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have shared an extremely public rivalry throughout the past few years, aiming to one-up each other in space exploration and self-driving cars. The two men, who own the top two positions on Forbes’ Billionaires List, are chomping at the bit to get ahead of one another, and the competition that lies within the Tesla and Amazon CEOs gives the people of Earth all something to benefit from: longevity and innovation.
The two most powerful men in the world in their respective sectors, Bezos being at the helm of the most dominating company in the e-commerce world, and Musk surging forward the acceleration to sustainable energy with Tesla. There is a lot of money, a lot of power, and a lot of reputation at stake, and the rivalry between the two men is mostly comprised of healthy competition to out-do the other. However, the two men share a similarity in their strategy to help humankind move forward, and it lies within their aerospace companies: Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin. But it isn’t a competition that has always been healthy and in good spirits. It has often resulted in name-calling and Twitter contradictions, showing that even the two richest men in the world can share a very public rivalry while benefitting the rest of us.
In past years, Musk has been the more successful entrepreneur in the space exploration and self-driving vehicle front, of course. His two companies being Tesla, the largest car company in the world in terms of market cap, and SpaceX, which has been launching satellites for global internet service with Starlink and sending astronauts to the International Space Station on several missions. It is no secret that Musk has an astounding lead over Bezos in those sectors, and he doesn’t have any intention of selling consumer goods, even though he would encourage competition in that market after calling Amazon a monopoly.
Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2020
But Musk’s lead must leave a small portion of Bezos feeling left out. Musk undoubtedly receives more recognition and more kudos for his work, and he should. He’s made legacy automakers change their strategies moving forward, forcing them to work on all-electric powertrains, and SpaceX has made the possibility of human space travel possible again. Bezos, being the extremely successful person that he is, must thrive off of competition and the work that it takes to make things more efficient and better than anyone else.
In the early 2000s, both Musk and Bezos were struggling entrepreneurs who worked to grow their entities into the world’s biggest and most successful companies. Bezos, who once held an office in a shady part of Seattle above a Chinese food restaurant, had a desk that wasn’t level, and an uneven canvas on the wall that said “amazon.com” in blue spraypaint. He drove a run-of-the-mill sedan and shared an incredible joy for his work, which was then just an online bookstore.
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Jeff Bezos reveals Rivian’s plans to produce electric vans for Amazon
Meanwhile, Musk was fresh out of his sizeable sale of PayPal. He reinvested his money into Tesla, and he was sleeping on the floor of his office building. Showering at the YMCA in Los Angeles, Musk and his brother Kimbal were also subjected to startup life’s genuine struggle: long hours, less-than-luxurious living conditions, and minimal pay.
Fast forward a few years, and the two men are among the most powerful people on Earth thanks to their influence on their respective sectors. But what is really driving things forward between the two men is the competition they share with one another. The constant need to outperform the other person is evident, and the two men’s based opinions constantly encourage the other one to work a little harder.
In the end, the personal rivalry has benefitted us all. SpaceX and Blue Origin are both doing things to accelerate the possibility of normalized space travel. Amazon is making consumer goods easy to obtain, and Tesla is making electric cars fun, fast, and affordable.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
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Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
