They both want a planet. Musk wants to take over Mars. Bezos wants to take over Earth.

Actually if you pay a little attention to Bezos, it's clear that his focus has been outer space at least since he was a college student. IMO Amazon was an opportunity that Bezos saw while Blue Origin is the fulfillment of his lifelong dream.

So if it’s his dream when does he start actually focusing on it?

About 9 years ago when they started development of the BE-4. Up until then Blue Origin was mainly a think tank and research project.

I've been quite dismissive of Blue Origin in the past, their pace of development seemed so sluggish compared to SpaceX, but I think that was somewhat unfair. It seems Bezos only really started pouring money into the project a few years ago though. BE-34 does seem to be behind schedule, or at least the launch vehicles are by a year or two, but that's par for the course for big rockets.

Well, it a money burning venture, by making amazon bigger and bigger he is contributing to blue origin.

He funds blue origin with more than a billion $ every year from the sales of his own amazon stock. Without amazon filling his pockets he can't finance blue origin.

He puts more of his money in blue origin every year than the amount amazon will pay for zoox

What do you mean? Prior to COVID I thought Bezos had his full attention on Blue Origin

Bezos builds self regulating machines that use humans, Musk’s imagination stops at exploiting human labor efficiently and there lies a gap I think.

> The Autonomous Driving hype train is slowing down, so this is the perfect opportunity for this move.

Zoox in particular was a LARP of an autonomous driving company. Until any of these companies start manufacturing, they’re literally LARPing. At least Tesla shipped an actual product.

Tangentially, it seems like calling people LARPers has very rapidly become a universally-used cliche. Has anyone else noticed that? I've seen it used for months, sparingly, but in the last couple of weeks it's everywhere (I've seen it literally three times this morning, on different fora about vastly different topics).

It’s particularly applicable to startups that burn through a bunch of cash and then exit for a pittance.

Sure, I wasn't trying to make any point about your comment. I just thought it was a really fascinating example of how language spreads and evolves,slowly at first then all at once. Please excuse the musing haha

You point is interesting how speech patterns catch on and become the phrase 'du jour'. I think the internet has changed that dynamic, it used to be only withing people you saw face to face. Now we're exposed to a much wider range of people and styles.

Anyhow, I haven't seen the trend of calling out an entity as being a LARPer. But I have to admit, it's kind of funny. It does make me giggle :)

It has mostly hit the internet mind-brain because of tacticool cops larping has gun toting heros.