Jeff Bezos is pushing back against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s claim the Amazon founder predicted President-elect Trump would lose the 2024 presidential election.
“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in the early hours of Thursday morning.
“Nope. 100% not true,” Bezos replied.
“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Musk responded, with a laughing emoji.
Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote in the election and received heavy backing from Musk, whom the president-elect has tapped to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with Vivek Ramaswamy in his second term.
Musk’s cozy relationship with Trump has given investors further confidence in the success of Musk’s companies, particularly Tesla and SpaceX, which has billions in government contracts. Tesla shares have surged nearly 57% over the past month.
Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, did not endorse either presidential candidate this year and sparked a revolt from staffers and subscribers of the newspaper after he halted the editorial board’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, establishing a new policy of not issuing endorsements for presidential candidates.
Following the election, Bezos congratulated Trump on X for “an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”
Musk is the world’s richest person with an estimated net worth of $316.2 billion, according to Forbes. Bezos is third on the outlet’s real-time billionaires list with a fortune of $217.4 billion. However, Bezos has been in the top spot several times over the years, most recently in March when he briefly overtook Musk.
Bezos and Musk are also rivals in the space race, where their respective aerospace companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, compete in space travel and exploration. Amazon, with the help of Blue Origin, is also planning to launch a satellite broadband service, Project Kuiper, to compete with Musk’s Starlink.