Musk trolls Bezos as he widens his lead as world’s richest man

Musk (pic) trolled Bezos by replying to his tweet with a silver medal emoji reminding the latter of his second place in the current list of the world’s richest. — Reuters

The rift between the two of the richest men on earth continues to grow after SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk again took to Twitter and remind Jeff Bezos that the gap between the two of them is growing.

Musk’s wealth increased rapidly over the last few days, after a secondary sale by investors valued SpaceX at more than US$100bil (RM417.20bil). This further increased Musk’s total wealth by US$10.6bil (RM44.20bil) to US$222bil (RM925.85bil).

Bezos, the former founder and CEO of Amazon, sits in second place with US$191.6bil (RM799.06bil).

Last Sunday, Bezos tweeted a photo of a front page of Barron’s newspaper from 1999 that dubbed Amazon as “Amazon.bomb”, shadowing that the business model is going to be a complete failure. Bezos sent out the tweet along with an inspirational message.

However, Musk replied to the tweet with a silver medal emoji reminding Bezos of his second place in the current list of the world’s richest.

Musk has increased his wealth by more than US$52bil (RM216.86bil) in 2021. Tesla, his publicly listed company has gone up 13% year-to-date after a low start to the year.

The tussle between the two is not just about the net worth. Both Musk and Bezos have their own space-tourism plans lined up and both have started to make space tourism a reality, launching multiple space-shuttles in the last quarter of the year.

Recently, the billionaire-duo locked horns about a Nasa contract that was awarded to Musk’s SpaceX. – dpa