‘Bezos Retired To File Lawsuits On SpaceX’ Elon Musk’s Words Add To ‘Battle Of Billionaire’

Elon Musk just intensified the ‘Space Battle of the Billionaires’ after calling out Jeff Bezos for filing lawsuits against his aerospace company SpaceX.

In early August, Bezos’ firm Blue Origin had sued NASA after losing a key government contract with the mission of taking astronauts to the Moon to Musk’s company, which caused a big delay for SpaceX’s project to continue. 

This past week, Bezos’ firm has knocked at the doors of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to rubbish SpaceX’s newly submitted plans to launch another cluster of satellites with the aim to strengthen Musk’s Starlink – a satellite internet service providing project.

While replying to a tweet with the above mentioned information, Musk added a cheeky remark on Twitter that is since making rounds on the internet that may have irked his billionaire rival a bit too much:

Turns out Besos retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2021

“Turns out Besos [sic] retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX …,” Musk wrote while replying to Christian Davenport, a space reporter for The Washington Post. 

Musk’s words may be a bit misleading to say the least as the recent complaint filed by Amazon is not a formal lawsuit but more of a complaint about the lack of clarity in SpaceX’s planning and process execution.

At the moment, Starlink is serving around 90,000 customers around the world with 1,740 low earth orbit satellites. However, SpaceX is in the works to launch a trache of 30,000 satellites to make the service a lot better than it is at the moment. 

Therefore, SpaceX are obligated to inform the FCC about where exactly in the orbit of the earth would they be placing these satellites. Bezos’ side argues that SpaceX is essentially trying to take approval for two very different orbital configurations which will allow them the convenience of choice at a later stage.

“SpaceX’s novel approach of applying for two mutually exclusive configurations is at odds with both the Commission’s rules and public policy and we urge the Commission to dismiss this amendment,” writes Mariah Dodson Shuman, corporate counsel for Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems.

This isn’t the first time Musk has spiced up his banter with Bezos on social media. Back in April, here’s how the Tesla inventor took another dig at his counterpart:

Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2021