A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.
But times have changed.
“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.
“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.
“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.
With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.
The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.
Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)
Mr. Trump complained that Amazon had an unfair deal with the Postal Service. There was also a legal battle over whether he had meddled in a $10 billion military cloud computing contract that many expected Amazon would win. The contract was awarded to Microsoft before it was canceled altogether.
Few if any corporate barons have had as much influence over an incoming presidential administration as Mr. Musk seems to have. He hitched himself to Mr. Trump’s campaign, becoming a key financial backer, and has become a near constant presence at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Mr. Trump named Mr. Musk a co-leader of what the president-elect has called the Department of Government Efficiency, giving him a broad mandate to find ways to slash federal spending and bureaucracy. Mr. Musk could have significant sway over how the federal government interacts with Mr. Bezos’ companies.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have also become travel companions. Over the weekend, they stood next to each other at the Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New York’s Madison Square Garden. And on Tuesday, Mr. Trump attended the test flight of Mr. Musk’s Starship rocket in Texas.
Representatives for Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The men have long been rivals, particularly in their space ambitions. Mr. Musk believes humanity should head to Mars, and through SpaceX, his privately held space company, he has become by far the leading launcher of rockets in the world.
Mr. Bezos founded Blue Origin more than two decades ago, and it has become his primary focus since he stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021. Blue Origin has launched several short commercial space trips, but has not yet put anything into orbit. In February, it said it planned to test a massive rocket, the New Glenn, by the end of the year.
Mr. Musk has repeatedly called Mr. Bezos a copycat, and the companies have filed legal challenges against each other. In a 2021 interview with The Financial Times, Mr. Musk needled Mr. Bezos’ management of Blue Origin.
“In some ways, I’m trying to goad him into spending more time at Blue Origin so they make more progress,” he said. “As a friend of mine says, he should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub.”
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