The world’s richest man has some advice for the world’s second-richest man: Work harder.
Elon Musk says Jeff Bezos needs to spend more time working at his space company Blue Origin and “less time in the hot tub” if the Amazon founder hopes to gain an edge in the billionaire space race.
“He does not seem to be willing to spend mental energy getting into the details of engineering,” Musk said in a Financial Times interview published Wednesday. “The devil’s in the details.”
While Bezos has “reasonably good engineering aptitude,” added Musk, he “does take himself a bit too seriously.”
“In some ways, I’m trying to goad him into spending more time at Blue Origin so they make more progress. As a friend of mine says, he should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub,” the loudmouthed Musk added.
In contrast to Bezos’ supposedly lazy lifestyle, Musk claimed that he works for seven days and 80 to 90 hours each week overseeing projects at both Tesla and SpaceX.
Musk is currently worth about $252 billion compared to Bezos’ $195 billion, according to Forbes. Musk has teased Bezos about his net worth in the past, responding to the Amazon founder on Twitter in October with a silver medal emoji in an apparent reference to their rankings.
A spokesperson for Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk made the comments as he accepted the Financial Times’ person of the year award.
Elsewhere in the interview, Musk accused the National Transportation Safety Board — which has probed Tesla crashes, fires and “self-driving” features — of unfairly singling out his company.
“I felt they pursued press headlines over real safety. That’s obviously [something] I do not respect, nor should be respected,” Musk said.
The mogul also took shots at more traditional carmakers, accusing them of initially failing to take Tesla seriously and of being late to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon.
“For a long time, the rest of the auto industry was basically calling Tesla and me fools and frauds,” Musk said. “They were saying electric cars wouldn’t work, you can’t achieve the range and performance. And even if you did that, nobody would buy them.”
“We did Tesla essentially out of desperation, not because we thought it would be lucrative, but just to show that it could be done,” he added.
