Elon Musk, 50, has appeared to add fuel to the fire with his space race rival Jeff Bezos, 57, after he went about “goading” the Amazon founder in a recent interview. Speaking to the Financial Times, the Tesla CEO even said Mr Bezos “does take himself a bit too seriously”.
He said: “In some ways, I’m trying to goad him into spending more time at Blue Origin so they make more progress.”
He added: “As a friend of mine says, ‘He should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub’.”
However, the SpaceX founder did bring himself to compliment his rival by saying Bezos has “reasonably good engineering aptitude”.
Mr Musk went on to claim “the devil’s in the details” and suggested the Amazon founder “does not seem to be willing to spend mental energy getting into the details of engineering”.
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In contrast, Musk pointed out he works between 80 and 90 hours per week on both SpaceX and Tesla.
But tussles between Mr Musk, who was named as both Time magazine’s person of the year in 2021, have become more and more common.
SpaceX took a major scalp in the space race by launching the first all-civilian space mission in September.
Earlier this year, Musk’s SpaceX also beat Bezos’ Blue Origin to a $2.9billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander with the agency’s Artemis programme in April.
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But Musk also highlighted how he had overcome opposition in the car industry.
He said: “For a long time, the rest of the auto industry was basically calling Tesla and me fools and frauds.
“They were saying electric cars wouldn’t work, you can’t achieve the range and performance. And even if you did that, nobody would buy them.”
Musk added: “We did Tesla essentially out of desperation, not because we thought it would be lucrative, but just to show that it could be done.”