Bezos and Musk: Launched into Rivalry
At Doodle, we value collaboration and work to bring people together. We also think healthy competition can contribute to great innovations in life. In this series, we explore some of the most exciting technology rivalries in history.
If you’ve been following this series, you know there are the visionaries we admire from centuries ago, and the are the visionaries you can follow on social media these days. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin, and Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX, are two brilliant minds and sometimes presented as competitors, especially when it comes to Space Race. But are they really competing and how can we choose our favorite?
From books to…everything
After quitting his job at a hedge fund, Jeff Bezos, a Princeton graduate in computer science and electrical engineering, started Amazon.com in his garage (seems like a popular space for starting a tech empire) in 1994. Twenty years later, Amazon.com is the world’s largest eCommerce company and Jeff himself as of mid-2018, is the world’s wealthiest man. What is perhaps more impressive than the wealth itself is that Jeff’s vision has changed the way we see commerce, forever. Our online shopping experience, which we take for granted these days, was heavily influenced by Bezos’s ideas, and the very scope of what we can get online has been also expanding with Amazon’s projects. From books to shoes to our beloved Kindles to movies, etc. You can definitely thank Bezos for giving your sleepless nights some meaning (that is, shopping for things you might not really need).
From a video game about space to space itself
Elon Musk made his first millions at the age of 28, when he sold his first enterprise, Zip2, to Compaq. Musk’s career in computer science, however, had started much earlier: he sold the code for his computer game, Blastar, for 500 USD when he was just 12 years old. Little Elon came a long way: from Blastar to Zip2 to PayPal to Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX. Until last year, Tesla’s subsidiary company, SolarCity, was the largest residential solar lease provider in the US, while The Boring Company, Musk’s most recent project, aims to create a system of underground tunnels, which will probably start in Chicago. In an interview about his open source AI project, Musk said “It’s not about competing, it’s about increasing the probability that the future will be good.” This is what all of Musk’s greatest and greenest projects aim for, and it is fascinating to see them unfold.
The Space Race
So Jeff Bezos has revolutionized the way we buy things, and Elon Musk is very much focused on the way we produce and consume energy. They both are very keen to explore the infinite: space.
One of Musk’s projects is to — take a seat if you need to — colonize Mars. It’s definitely not a short-term goal Elon has in mind, but it’s one of the goals behind his SpaceX company that has already been launching operational rockets. Space exploration has been Bezos’ passion for decades, and in 2000, two years before SpaceX, he established Blue Origin, his aerospace manufacturer. Blue Origin has also launched its suborbital space vehicles successfully, which could be seen as direct competition to SpaceX.
However, while Musk has expressed his excitement for a new space race, O’Keefe Dietrich, the Head of Public Relations at Blue Origin, doesn’t necessarily see competition here: “Space is a big place. It’s not a zero-sum market.” It may not be a zero-sum game, especially because the focus of Blue Origin has been launching commercial flights to space and colonizing the Moon (and not Mars), yet both companies are manufacturing what are considered reusable launch vehicles and can compete for the same contracts with NASA.
There are more players participating in the Space Race, but SpaceX and Blue Origin are the most interesting to follow. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have been compared and contrasted by many, in various respects, and, well, it’s for you to decide whether those comparisons are fair. Only the future will show how their most grandiose plans will unfold, either escalating the rivalry into a new level, or maybe even revealing the winner. The future, due to both Bezos’ and Musk’ projects, seems closer than ever.
A space race, unlike Blastar, is no game. Not to say games can’t be good rivalry. In fact, that’s what we’re going to explore in our upcoming piece in this series, so stay tuned.
By Justina Poskeviciute
Justina is an awesome writer living in Budapest.
