Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were at the time of “dear love” on the table

Recently, a rare photo of a “fateful” meeting between two richest men on the planet, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk 17 years ago caused a “storm” on Twitter.

The photo was shared by Trung Phan, a writer for the Hustle business site, on Twitter earlier this month. In the photo, Bezos and Musk are smiling, having a meal at the same restaurant. Phan said the photo was taken in 2004, when both men ‘ambitions to explore the space were starting to heat up.

Musk then responded to the photo posted by Phan with the tweet: “Well, it’s hard to believe that 17 years have passed.” The meeting is widely believed to be the start of a future rivalry between the two billionaires and their space companies – SpaceX and Blue Origin.

While Bezos has not publicly mentioned the meeting, Musk described the couple’s meeting with Christian Davenport, author of the book “The Space Barons”. Musk likened what Bezos is doing to rockets as “a dog barking at the wrong tree” (an idiom for misunderstanding a problem, leading to a false act of action). In addition, he revealed that SpaceX has been testing some of the ideas that Bezos proposed but they are “stupid”.

“I did my best to give good advice, but he ignored him,” Musk added.

Their rivalry intensified in 2013, when Elon Musk’s SpaceX group won over Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company for taking over the Center’s historic 39A rocket launcher. The Kennedy Universe – the starting point of many outer space missions.

A few years later, they again argued over who was the first to launch a reusable rocket into space. In 2015, Bezos proudly showed off on Twitter about the successful launch and landing of the New Shepard rocket, calling it the “rarest beast”. However, Musk has sarcasmically commented below, “Not quite ‘the rarest’.” According to him, SpaceX’s Grasshopper rocket made up to six such flights three years ago.

In a 2016 interview, when asked about his ability to compete with billionaires like Bezos in the space rocket industry, Musk shrugged and replied, “Who is Jeff?”

In 2019, Amazon announced plans to launch 3,236 small satellites into space to provide high-speed Internet in the world. This project has many things in common with another project implemented by SpaceX since late 2017. They launched rockets carrying Starlink satellites with the ambition to cover the global Internet. When he learned of Amazon’s plans, Musk did not hesitate to tag Bezos on posts and call the Amazon boss “an imitator”.

Last year, Musk once again referred to Bezos as an “imitator,” with a link to an article about Amazon’s announcement of the acquisition of self-driving car startup Zoox.

For his part, Bezos has also made non-direct criticism of Musk’s goal of sending humans to Mars. Their two companies also compete in many areas, from patents, contracts with NASA and access to launchers.

Over the past few months, the two billionaires have also vied for the title of the richest person in the world. Right now, Bezos is No. 1 with a net worth of $ 181 billion, while Musk is closely behind with $ 170 billion.