This is obnoxiously wealthy people handling the situations like you'd expect (and yet, in a very unhealthy way). My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [2] [3], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success). Being "relentless" (Bezos) is what you do, being obsessed (Musk) is who you are. Bezos is going to chill on his mega yacht with the new lady friend while Musk is overseeing construction of Starship SNs in the Texas desert.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/behind-amazon-hq2-fiasco-jeff... (Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk)
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/20/elon-musks-ex-wife-on-secret... (Elon Musk’s ex-wife on secret to getting rich: ‘Be obsessed’)
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-St... (Answer at top of page by Justine Musk)
My perspective, having watched multiple interviews of Elon and Bezos, is that Musk is just really passionate about tech. He's an engineer at heart, that's why he's directly involved in the development of the tech, which is central to all of his businesses. He's also a risk taker and a pioneer, he's not afraid of taking big risky bets on unproven technologies, he seems to actually enjoy doing that, and proving people wrong.
Bezos, on the other hand, is passionate about business and making money. He would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. Once he sees that something is going to be financially successful, he tries to copy it. Amazon is successful because it has good execution, economies of scale and competitive pricing, but it wasn't the first online retailer, or the first cloud provider, etc.
I don't know if I would invest in Blue Origin. Personally, I think Rocket Lab is a much more interesting company (that is already trading on public markets). It's being led by someone who is genuinely passionate about space and has a proven orbital launch vehicle. I wish I could invest in SpaceX, but IMO Rocket Lab is the next best thing to invest in, a mini SpaceX.
You can say a lot of bad things about Jeff Bezos, but confidently claiming that he lacks vision and interest in tech and blindly copies whatever works is...bold.
Who was this "first cloud provider" if it wasn't Amazon?
The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.
In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...
2) 99% of this story is fake.
Tons of people also say Musk is a massive fraud who takes credit for others' work and is simply a cutthroat businessman like Edison without any technical expertise. Your posts sound the same. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html
Bezos and Musk are, in my opinion, clearly very good at both technology and business.
The main claim made in there seems to be that Bezos wanted Amazon employees to switch to a more dogfooded API/service-oriented approach, with clear interfaces between different teams and areas of concern rather than internal private channels, to enable future renting out of hardware and services to customers, and that after he issued that edict people scrambled to implement it. Maybe Bezos originally came to that decision in part or wholly due to suggestions from others, but, either way, I've seen several people say he indeed did do something like that.
He used to program. He has a degree in "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" from Princeton. Amazon had a ton of spare resources they could rent out. He's a pretty smart guy and is known for thinking about the long-term. It's not a massive stretch to say it's possible he could've made a decision like that back in 2002, when he had less on his plate than he does now.
I only know this because he graduated from the same high school as me (20 years before me), and I did some googling one day. He was the class valedictorian, and while his entire speech isn't transcribed anywhere I know of, The Miami Herald quoted sentences from various high school valedictorian speeches as part of a graduation article, and Jeff Bezos has a few sentences in there.
The Miami Herald archives for 1982 don't seem to be loading for me, but a CNBC article [0] has it quoted.
> ″[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Herald’s article says.
> ″‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’” he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”
It's interesting to me how he was saying this in 1982 but instead went down the path of banking and then eventually Amazon. Yeah Blue Origin was founded in 2000, but like everyone else here is quipping, what has it actually accomplished? I have no basis for this, but I feel like his goals were: 1) Become the richest person in the world. 2) Use my money to lead humanity to space. He doesn't seem to be as good at goal 2 as goal 1.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-c...
This is just as uncharitable to Amazon as all those trashing Musk for his extracurricular Twitter activities are in dismissing his technical credibility.
AWS was absolutely revolutionary with EC2 and S3 and Amazon was the first in every meaningful way here.
However, Bezos would not start a rocket company if he wasn't passionate about space. As the saying goes, the best way to make a million dollars in aerospace is to start with a billion.
And the best placed individual is the POTUS whoever he/she might be.
I freely admit to being biased on this point, but this doesn’t read like a description of Kamala Harris.
Dislike Musk if you want, but Tesla clearly was successful in convincing the world EV were better and that increase the speed of transition to EVs. That is likely more then the waste majority of people ever did for reducing CO2.
> Also Musk will not make much money from SpaceX because like everything he's involved in the margins are terrible (molecules and atoms don't make money).
SpaceX is making amazing margin on rocket launches. They want make much money from launch because its a pretty small market.
We don't yet know anything about margins for Starlink, but your claim that it won make much money is quite bold and against most analyst opinion.
> His net worth has balooned because of his ability to sell an ever improving vision of the future and constantly moving the goalposts, but solving climate change is becoming a crowded trade socially speaking.
Tesla stock isn't where it is because they are 'solving climate change' but because how large the company is, how fast they are growing, what their automotive margin are and the many future prospects they have.
Musk looks tough on twitter, but he can't speak and his social incompetence shows a lot.
The POTUS (whoever he/she is) and the first person on Mars (whoever he/she is) would outframe him just like JFK and Neil Armstron outframed whoever was the guy running NASA at the time.
He'd be left with a very low margin business , more probably heavily in the red, like the Apollo program was.
It's a hard business and many companies have failed. What makes Blue Origin relatively unique is that Bezos has billions more dollars and can keep trying. I hope he does, I think we would be better off in a world where SpaceX has an innovative competitor who vigorously competes with them. The legacy companies like ULA, I don't know if they can reorient themselves to actually compete with SpaceX.