What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial on this channel, we cover everything related to stocks and investing. Perhaps the two most influential people in the world of technology and business today are jeff bezos and elon musk. Both men have built massive technology companies that are now worth more than one trillion dollars, and importantly, both men founded private space companies that hope to take humans deep into space. But despite their common interests, the two men are deeply competitive and appear to hate each other.

For the better part of the past decade, bezos was the richest man in the world and nobody thought he could ever be surpassed. But in the last two years, tesla stock price has massively outperformed amazon increasing 11 fold, while amazon didn't even double. This has allowed musk to surpass bezos as the world's richest fan by a large margin. Shortly after musk surpassed bezos on the billionaire leaderboard, he tweeted a reply to the amazon founder with a silver medal poking fun at the fact that he is now only number two in the world.

But in fact, bezos isn't even number two anymore with the relative underperformance of amazon's stock price. Over the past year, he has been pushed all the way down to number three. While musk's twitter antics may appear like harmless jokes, it's actually the symptom of a deep-seated rivalry between the two that can even be interpreted as outright hatred. It all has to do with the cutthroat competition between their two space companies, spacex and blue origin in this video, we'll look at the origins of this rivalry and who is most likely to come out on top, despite both being tech, billionaires, bezos and musk have had Very little personal interaction, their companies operate in different industries and are headquartered in different states, but by the early 2000s they were both rivals in the private space industry, musk founded spacex in 2002 with money he raised from the sale of paypal two years earlier, bezos started Blue origin, using his amazon money, making a private space company was something nobody had ever done before, so they were both pioneers in the space.

In fact, in the early 2000s they seemingly had a good relationship. They met with each other a few times to share advice about their space companies. Musk gave bezos some advice about the best types of rocket fuel to use for the most part, bezos ignored those suggestions by the 2010s. Both companies had real rockets and would have to start going head-to-head with each other to win government contracts.

This is when the rivalry started to heat up in 2013, nasa was listing. This elite's launch pad in florida called launch complex 39a. This launchpad was the site of the apollo spacecraft launches and would be an incredibly valuable asset for either spacex or blue origin. Both spacex and blue origin wanted to release the launch pad musk wanted spacex to have full control over it.

Bezos wanted to turn it into somewhat of a public launch pad. Anyone could use it if they paid blue origin. A fee nasa ultimately awarded the launch site to spacex, which they would use to launch their dragon space capsule by this point, spacex was clearly the leader in private space flight, as they already had conducted many successful launches. Bezos was furious about that decision.

He filed a complaint with the government saying that nasa showed favoritism by awarding the launch site to spacex. He argued that blue origin was a better option because they would turn it into a commercial spaceport available to all launch companies, while spacex would hog it for themselves. But at the time spacex was the only company that had reliable rockets, so even if blue origin could buy the launch site, spacex would be their only customer. The only thing that would change is that they would have to pay fees to blue origin and possibly get inferior access.

Musk replied to the lawsuit by pointing out that blue origin had not yet succeeded in creating reliable suborbital spacecraft, despite spending over 10 years in development. He said that if blue origin could build a viable rocket within the next five years, he would gladly allow them to use the launch site. But he also said the chances of this happening were less than the chances of finding unicorns in the flame duct. Within a few months, the government dismissed bezos complaints and spacex successfully acquired the site, as the years went on, blue origin fell further and further behind spacex, despite bezos having much more financial firepower than musk.

Even to this day, blue origin only has flown suborbital missions, which can be good for space tourism, but won't be taking anyone to mars. For the better part of the last decade, the company has been trying to develop their new glenn orbital rocket, but it's been delayed. Multiple times and is now not expected to fly until at least the fourth quarter of 2022 spacex, on the other hand, successfully launched its first orbital rocket in 2008 with their falcon 1.. It has been performing more and more advanced launches every year, so, at least in the context of orbital launches.

Musk is more than a decade ahead of bezos, but bezos wasn't about to give up just a couple years after his failed attempt to block spacex's acquisition of the 39a launch site, he tried to file a patent for the concept of reusable rockets. Both companies were actively pursuing this technology and it is the main way they plan to be far more cost effective than the disposable rockets of the past. If you were able to successfully patent this idea, spacex would have to pay blue origin royalties every time they launch a reusable rocket. This would give blue origin a huge advantage and allow them to start closing the gap with spacex's superior launch technology.

Of course, the idea that you could patent reusable rockets is absurd, because the concept is so broad. It would be like trying to patent the concept of a reusable airplane, spacex sued, to stop the patent and they easily won the case. This was yet another blow in bezos's ambitions to catch up to musk and in recent years, spacex's lead over bezos's company has continued to grow. In april of 2021, nasa awarded spacex a 2.9 billion contract to build a spaceship to bring american astronauts to the moon by 2024.

As part of the artemis program, they will use their existing starship technology to develop the lunar lander, because spacex had already developed the starship. They were the obvious favorite going into the selection process. Blue origin was also bidding for the same project, but knowing that they didn't have the capabilities to build a lunar rocket on their own. They partnered with lockheed martin and northrop grumman.

Perhaps the two biggest contractors in the defense establishment, despite the fact that spacex was bidding alone, nasa still awarded them the contract. This was a humiliating defeat for blue origin, who had been hoping to finally turn around their losing momentum in a desperate attempt to change the outcome. After the fact blue origin sued nasa saying they showed favoritism towards spacex in november of this year, a judge decided that the lawsuit was frivolous and threw it out. In response to blue origin, losing the judgment, elon musk tweeted, a meme saying quote, you have been judged unquote, which is in reference to the 2013 movie dread.

While bezos has pretty clearly been losing the space race to musk, he was at least the richest man in the world and many times richer than musk for most of the past decade. However, with the recent massive outperformance of tesla stock over amazon, musk has far surpassed. Bezos, in fact, the tesla ceo is almost 80 billion dollars richer at the time of recording this video, probably in large part because of tesla's success. Bezos wants to get into the electric vehicle business himself.

To this end, amazon invested more than one billion dollars to acquire a 20 stake in rival ev company rivien. This past november, rivie and ipod had a roughly 100 billion dollar valuation, making it more valuable than ford or gm, despite not having made any meaningful vehicle deliveries. Riven's valuation is considered by many to be a bubble and is, in large part, propped up by their high profile. Backing from amazon.

One of the rivian bears appears to be elon musk. He tweeted that a company should have to deliver at least one car per billion dollars of market cap rivien's, ceo rj scaring says he plans to produce 1 million vehicles per year by 2030.. This number seems highly optimistic as their initial vehicle deliveries have been delayed. Multiple times already, in fact, they're already facing something of a production hell as they are trying to produce just a few thousand cars tesla is on track to deliver about 900 000 cars in 2021 and with their berlin and austin plants, ramping up, they should be able To deliver well over 1 million in 2022 and while rivien is projected to burn piles of cash for the foreseeable future, tesla is already profitable.

While rivien has received a lot of hype from investors, the chances that they could ever catch up to tesla seem pretty remote. Bezos has been incredibly successful in building the most valuable e-commerce company in the world. He has been able to crush his competition for the past two decades, forcing countless brick and mortar retailers out of business, but with elon musk he has finally met a rival. He cannot overtake alright guys that wraps it up for this video.

What do you think of the bezos musk feud? Do you think bezos will ever reclaim his former title of world's richest man? Let us know in the comments section below, as always. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one wall, street millennial, signing out.