On Monday, November 4, Tesla stock was trading at $243. Yesterday it closed at $321. Donald TrumpThe election of . increased its value by a third in a week, adding $245 billion to its market capitalization.

Elon Musk made about $50 billion from the jump, as it owns a fifth of Tesla’s shares. That’s about twice as much as Musk personally paid to buy Twitter – now X – two years ago.

It’s a sign of the value financial markets place on proximity to Trump, whom Musk joined on the phone call with the Ukrainian president. Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday.

This is also the kind of proximity that journalists from The Washington Post fear Jeff Bezos wanted when he prevented the newspaper’s editorial board from approving Kamala Harris before the elections.

This decision, which cost The post office at least 250,000 subscribers and tens of millions in revenue — has highlighted the role of Blue Origin, the long-faltering rocket company in Bezos’ sprawling empire. It also underscored his decades-long struggle to compete in space with Musk’s SpaceX, the company Bezos had to see succeed in the wake of Blue Origin’s methodical inaction.

“Every day, SpaceX is moving away from Blue Origin,” said Eric Berger, a longtime chronicler of the new space race between Musk and Bezos, and author of Back to school. “They’re still trying to do what SpaceX did in 2010.”

The Musk-Bezos rivalry is one of the oldest in technology. He was peppered with gunfire. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. Musk followed with SpaceX in 2002.

The two men met in 2004 for a dinner that Musk later recalled in scathing terms. “We talked about rocket architectures,” he said. Washington Post journalist Christian Davenport. Musk believed Bezos was pursuing “the wrong evolutionary path,” he recalled. “In fact, I did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored.”

“I asked Elon if he thought Bezos was a good engineer a few years ago,” Berger added. “He said no.”

Bezos was still concerned about running Amazon in 2004. Blue Origin was a pet project that he funded out of respect for a long-gone space age that he hoped to revive.

SpaceX was not a side project for Musk. It was his life’s mission. He made $200 million selling his stake in PayPal in 2002. He invested half of it in SpaceX: enough money to finance a handful of rocket launches. It would be necessary to succeed before the company runs out of cash.

If that were the case, SpaceX would be likely to win contracts from NASA to deliver payloads to space – contracts that could fund the company as it develops more powerful rockets, new spacecraft and, ultimately, a satellite system (Starlink) that is now the envy of the world.

“They started almost at the same time, and had completely different trajectories,” Ashlee Vance, another space authority and author of a biography on Musk, said of the two companies. “Blue Origin has this motto: “step by step, fiercely”. They missed the “ferociously” part.

While leading Amazon, Bezos spoke out against the company adopting a “day two” mindset. It’s always day one at Amazon, Bezos decreed, which means the company, now worth $2.2 trillion, must always act like a start-up, never seeking to maximize its margins at the expense of customer satisfaction.

Blue Origin did not have the luxury of making this choice. In many ways, he’s still stuck at Day Zero.

Bezos has taken on greater oversight of Blue Origin since ceding day-to-day control of Amazon in 2021 — it’s one of the main reasons he stepped away from the megalith he built. He has since said he wants Blue Origin to become “the most decisive company in the world.”

“Good luck,” Berger said, reflecting on that goal. “SpaceX East the most decisive business in the world because Elon has a meeting and makes a decision and that’s it. Elon has much more experience and his intuition has been right on many big problems.

Musk understood perhaps before anyone else – before Bezos, NASA, the Russians, the Europeans, the Chinese – that rockets had to be reusable to make spaceflight commercially viable. This idea was dismissed for years as untenable by aerospace experts.

Now everyone is trying to build their own reusable rocket, as SpaceX did with Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Spaceship, all of which can re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, each more powerful than the last.

Bezos has yet to launch his company’s orbital rocket, New Glenn.

It’s a decade behind schedule, a fact Musk happily anticipated in 2013 when he, not Bezos, was awarded the lease for Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Cape Canaveral base in Florida, l The place from where Apollo 11 flew to the Moon.

Bezos tried to get it for Blue Origin, but even then SpaceX was the most qualified bidder. Musk promised at the time to “willingly respond to (Blue Origin’s) needs” if Bezos’ company “somehow presents itself within the next five years with a vehicle qualified to Blue Origin’s standards.” “NASA’s human evaluation and can dock with the space station, which is what Pad 39A offers.” is supposed to do.

“Frankly,” he added with the usual bite, “I think we’re more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame pipe.”

New Glenn hasn’t flown since, as Berger points out in Back to school. SpaceX has, during this period, carried out 175 launches and counting.

“Jeff is obviously a brilliant guy — he can clearly talk about these things in depth,” Ashlee Vance told the Daily Beast, but “Elon is there in the factory all the time, whereas Jeff would check in periodically.”

Vance described SpaceX’s success as “hard to put into words… This is a company that didn’t exist 20 years ago, and now it’s completely overtaking the entire world on every front.”

This fact may not be obvious to much of the public. Bezos had notable success flying in 2021 aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft as it crossed the 62-mile Kármán Line – the recognized boundary of space – before returning to Earth.

(Musk did not pilot one of his company’s flights. He is waiting to fly to Mars.)

The scale of Musk’s success in the space is often overlooked by critics concerned about his controversial and self-centered management of X, the platform on which most journalists still spend their lives. Most of the social media company’s value has been erased since he bought it, much to the chagrin of investors and banks who put up $18 billion of the $44 billion purchase price of dollars.

But its position is impeccable in the new space race. The rocket company that Jeff Bezos wants to operate already exists. It belongs to one of only two men in the world richer than him.