Here’s the cruel truth: Elon Musk Won. Jeff Bezos loses

It’s a story about Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and their epic battle against each other. This is the kind of thing that inspired my related, free ebooks: Jeff Bezos regrets nothing and Elon Musk has big plans. You can download both here.

Late Friday afternoon, while Musk and Bezos waited, the tea leaves were read, the verdict rendered and the winner declared.

It will be Musk’s SpaceX, not Bezos ‘Blue Origin, which will take astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, after SpaceX won a $ 2.89 billion NASA contract and Bezos’ company and struck others.

Musk, as Musk would, celebrated with a tweet: “NASA rules!, “adorned with rocket, heart and star emoji.

Bezos, as far as I could get it when I wrote it, has yet to respond – even after announcing his widely acclaimed 6,500-word shareholder letter from Amazon yesterday.

Musk and Bezos have been clashing in one over the years over the years, and have largely carried on social media – and it has developed beyond just a competition between their companies to become ‘a complete rival’, according to the words by Christian Davenport, a Washington Post reporter and author of The Space Barons.

Although Tesla is driving high, and while Bezos is preparing to retire from steering the giant company he started in a garage more than 25 years ago, there is something building the lunar lander, and what it could mean for the future of both companies. and both men – to say nothing of humanity itself – who look bigger and braver.

This is despite the fact that the size of the NASA contract is small compared to the net worth of each. They each gained and lost multiples of the amount on paper in a single day – many times.

Musk, who started SpaceX in 2002 when he was 29, was driven in part to explore space by realizing that rocket technology has not really made much progress in almost 40 years.

“For a Silicon Valley-based tech entrepreneur, it was amazing,” Davenport wrote in his book. “His company’s mantra was: Set daring, almost impossible goals and do not be deterred.”

Bezos, about seven years older, says he was first inspired by the memory of seeing the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, when he was just five.

Later, he cultivated his passion with a love of science fiction that led him to question the future of the human race and what was truly possible in space.

Their private space usually stretches back years, perhaps suppressed by the moment in 2013 when Musk Bezos outbid them to purchase NASA’s Launch Road 39A, from which Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle were launched.

Bezos responded, as Davenport reports, by buying Launch Complex 36, which was the site from which NASA’s unmanned missions to Mars and Venus were launched. Davenport also talks about a meeting between Bezos and Musk to discuss their rocket ambitions in 2004, did not go well.

Despite all their accomplishments, I think it is fair to point out that both Bezos and Musk regard their space ventures as the true keys to their legacy far into the future, and as the greatest contributions they will make to world history.

That’s why Bezos said it plans to continue investing $ 1 billion a year in Blue Origin by liquidating its Amazon stake. And all of Musk’s companies, according to author Tim Fernholz, Rocket Billionaires, is “explicitly intended to advance human civilization.”

Perhaps because they share this common goal, there is a degree to which the rivalry sometimes seems more like a friendly, almost big brother / little brother competition than a bloodbath.

I remember how Bezos congratulated Musk and SpaceX after a test of his Starship rocket at high altitude, which eventually exploded.

“Anyone who knows how difficult these things are is under the impression of today’s Starship Test,” Bezos posted on Instagram. “Congratulations to the entire @SpaceX team. I am confident that they will think about it again soon.”

Yet it cannot be denied that the return to the moon later this decade, possibly as soon as 2024, is the short-term space price that is likely to inspire humanity again, and serve as an even greater starting point for humans. , technology, and related companies.

The private space race may have just begun. But in this early, important, sensational match, they hit head to head, and Musk is clearly the winner.