Elon Musk has been spending a lot of time with Donald Trump, accompanying the president-elect to a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden and to the SpaceX launch facility just this week. Musk has also been dining at Mar-a-Lago pretty much every night. The place has become something of a live ranking board among those who want to influence the incoming president. Musk, who has begun to call himself the “First Buddy,” thinks he has the inside track:
Musk’s unsourced intel caused Jeff Bezos — a very rare poster on X — to reply to the contrary. “Nope,” he wrote in the comments. “100% not true.”
Musk and Bezos — the richest and third-richest men in the world, who are both fixated on getting humanity off of it — have had a simmering rivalry for close to two decades now. But with Bezos’s Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX fighting for lucrative NASA contracts, the stakes have never been higher.
There is reason to doubt Musk on this one — after all, Bezos personally intervened at the Washington Post to kill its endorsement of Kamala Harris, which did not seem like the behavior of someone who was convinced Trump would lose. And Musk, despite his proximity to Trump, has had a few misses in recent days. He backed Howard Lutnick for treasury secretary and supported Rick Scott for Senate majority leader, neither of which panned out.
