‘Genius, Billionaire, Philanthropist’ what sense of an image comes to your mind when you hear these words. Let me guess is it a man in a red suit protecting the world. But no I am not talking about “IRON MAN”, in this real-world too there a lot of people who fit those 3 adjectives. Two of those people are “ELON MUSK” (CEO of SpaceX) and “JEFF BEZOS” (CEO of Amazon). Let’s do a comparative study of their skills, empire, social impact, and a little bit of their financials.
LET THE BATTLE BEGIN!!!
With a staggering net-worth of around 117 billion dollars Jeff is currently the richest man on earth , most of the chunk is from the evaluation of earnings from Amazon and all of its subsidiaries like Audible, Twitch , Wholefoods and many other. But its not just this, he has his hands in literally too many pots under the name of his venture capital vehicle “Bezos Expeditions”. It was one of the first investors in Google and his investment of $250000 in 1998 has exponentially increased to about $3.1B dollars in today’s market. Also during the series B financing of Uber’s IPO in 2011 , Jeff was one of the winners of round with investing as upto $37 million which has already outgrown itself 10X i.e it currently amounts to around $400m. He also purchased the whole of “The Washington post” for $250m in cash in 2013.This man may be no Warren Buffet but he sure does know how to place his hay in highest rewarding hens.
The whole pattern of investing and him being the CEO and Founder of Amazon shows that his main objective is to bring the whole world to your touch of the finger and making your phone the self sufficient agent. Lets imagine you want groceries and or appliances during this times where do you go ? Amazon groceries app! You want to read a book? Kindle! You just want someone to read you the whole book? Audible! Unfortunately need to reach somewhere urgently ? UBER!. New York times has perfectly personified him by saying he is “a brilliant but mysterious and coldblooded corporate titan”
Now on the social side of the things too the aforementioned ‘Bezos expedition’ has a good track record of donating generously to the NGO’s all across the world. But that is also because throughout the era of 2000’s he was seen as greedy and data-driven which was eventually affecting the corporate image of Amazon’s empire. The most recent social activity of him posting a picture on instagram regarding the case of #Blacklivesmatter where he openly gave the statement that he is of the thought of currently it’s time to stand for those who are oppressed and not to crib about #Alllivesmatter and ignore the main issue. This statement won a lot of hearts.
Now on the other side is Elon musk with the net-worth of 36.5 billion dollars and ranking as 31st richest man of the earth. Being the CEO of Tesla certainly has an advantage as it is valued currently at about $150B which is about $100B more than its competitor FORD as of recent stock prices. While SpaceX is a private company it most recently launched a flight with 2 astronauts in the space which ends the 9 year long drought of any flight going to international space station from U.S soils and it being a private company even makes it more remarkable and a feat achieved by few. The Boring Company is also a privately owned company with more than 80% equity in the name of Elon and around 4% to SpaceX. It currently has active construction or is planning future projects, in both the Los Angeles and Baltimore-Washington areas. They have also been selected to build a downtown-to-airport loop by a government program for high-speed transport in Chicago. With many more startups like “Neuralink” in field of complicated prosthetics and “OpenAI” in machine learning and AI GAMING. Elon has just revolutionized of what’s possible and what is not. Calling him an Entrepreneur is an understatement , he is the kind of Distinctive innovator that comes only one in a generation. The mission of colonizing Mars also seems plausible after seeing the strength of falcon aircraft. While the other people are busy making the life inside the house simpler he is the only one to be thinking and taking life to the other planets.
But as for his social life it is very doobsie and even sometimes fatal for the prices of his own company like the time he smoked weed on Joe roegan podcast and also when he tweeted “ Tesla’s stock price is too high” which again created a selling spree of the stock. And obviously everybody remembers the bullet-proof Car launch Faux-pas where the glass of the alleged unbreakable glass broke from a throw of ball. It’s a little hard to maintain a professional personality when your all tweets are some derivation of a meme.
THE UNEXPERT OPINION
According to me Jeff bezos is the better financial wizard if you consider that as the most important trait you want in the entrepreneur and he is in it for a very long haul. But to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson the god father of all scientific memes “He’s the only game in town. He’s the best thing we’ve had since Thomas Edison.” What he meant to say is Elon musk is playing a game in his own courtroom different from anybody else and shouldn’t be messed with.
–By Devansh Gandhi
Sources –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos