Jeff Bezos posts picture of old article predicting Amazon 'failure', Elon Musk replies with 'silver medal'

Bezos posted an old article about Amazon which predicted its inevitable failure, and Elon Musk couldn’t resist the opportunity

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos posted an old article titled ‘Amazon.bomb’ which predicted the company’s eventual failure and said, “listen and be open, but don’t let anybody tell you who you are.” While Twitter found this to be an inspirational post, Bezos’ space race rival Elon Musk chose to go another way.

Musk, who recently piped Bezos to become the richest person in the world again as per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, couldn’t resist the opportunity and responded to the tweet with just an emoticon — a silver medal. Musk had reportedly told Forbes in an email that he would send Bezos a silver medal for becoming the second-richest person in the world.

The article published by Barron's did not age well as Amazon is among the biggest companies in the world 22 years later, with a market capitalisation of over $1 trillion.

Bezos’ tweet, with a picture from a 1999 article from American magazine Barron, said, “Listen and be open, but don’t let anybody tell you who you are. This was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail. Today, Amazon is one of the world’s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries.”

This jibe is only the most recent in a long-winded tussle between the two billionaires, who have jostled for the ‘world’s richest person’ tag for months. Bezos had briefly taken the spot back from Musk in February.

Bezos’ space company Blue Origin sued SpaceX, by way of NASA over a $2.9 billion astronaut lunar lander contract the space agency awarded Musk’s company. The SpaceX boss said that Bezos can’t “sue his way to the moon, no matter how good the lawyers are”.

Earlier this year, responding to a story by The Washington Post critical of Tesla and Musk’s management, the billionaire had responded by saying, “give my regards to your puppet master”, taking a swipe at Bezos, who owns the publication.

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