Elon Musk unleashed a brutal public execution on Jeff Bezos yesterday, branding the Amazon founder a “pathetic copycat” after news broke of Bezos’s surprise return from retirement to co-lead a $6.2 billion AI startup called Project Prometheus.
The Tesla and xAI CEO wasted no time, posting “Haha no way” followed by the single word “copy” and a cat emoji the moment Bloomberg revealed Bezos had personally committed billions to challenge real-world artificial intelligence dominance.
Project Prometheus promises revolutionary AI tools for engineering, manufacturing, aerospace, and automobiles, exactly the territory where Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer and xAI’s Grok models already reign supreme. Musk clearly saw the announcement as a direct assault.
Bezos has taken the co-CEO title alongside Vik Bajaj, former head of Google’s Verily life-sciences division, marking his first operational role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. The startup has already poached over a hundred elite researchers from OpenAI, Meta AI, and DeepMind.
Insiders say Bezos spent months secretly recruiting the same talent xAI had been courting. Several engineers reportedly accepted xAI offers before Bezos personally called and tripled their compensation packages overnight.
Musk’s followers instantly flooded Bezos’s rare X posts with cat emojis and laughing memes, turning the platform into a digital coliseum where the crowd overwhelmingly cheered for the South African-born billionaire.
Longtime SpaceX employees celebrated the roast privately, remembering how Blue Origin spent years copying Falcon 9 landing technology only to remain generations behind. Many see Prometheus as the same pattern repeating in artificial intelligence.
Tesla investors reacted positively, pushing the stock up four percent in after-hours trading on the belief that competition from a “copycat” only validates how far ahead Musk’s ecosystem already is.
Bezos has stayed silent so far, but sources close to him insist Project Prometheus is not competing directly with xAI but rather building complementary physical-world AI that no single company currently dominates.
Industry watchers note that Bezos’s personal wealth has grown faster than Musk’s in 2025 thanks to Amazon’s cloud and advertising empires, giving him fresh ammunition to fund decade-long moonshots without shareholder pressure.
The last time these two billionaires clashed publicly was 2021 when Blue Origin sued NASA over SpaceX’s lunar lander contract. Musk responded then by calling Bezos a “copycat” who should spend more time innovating than litigating.
Yesterday’s exchange felt far more personal. Musk’s final reply in the thread, “Come try to catch up, old man, the throne isn’t for rent,” drew over two million likes and signaled open warfare.
Several OpenAI researchers who rejected Bezos’s offers reportedly messaged Musk directly, thanking him for “keeping the mission pure” and pledging loyalty to xAI’s vision of understanding the universe instead of just chasing enterprise contracts.
Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, remains the largest customer of Nvidia GPUs, giving Bezos indirect leverage over the very chips that power both Tesla and xAI training clusters. Some fear retaliatory throttling could follow.
Prominent venture capitalists are already taking sides. Marc Andreessen publicly backed Musk, tweeting that “originals beat imitators every single time,” while others quietly invested fresh checks into Prometheus to avoid choosing one winner.
The clash has electrified Silicon Valley and beyond. Engineering students on X are now openly debating which billionaire they would rather work for, the man building the future or the man trying to copy it.
Musk ended the night with a single rocket emoji under his own post, a subtle reminder that while Bezos funds AI startups, SpaceX continues launching the majority of humanity’s payloads into orbit every week.
Prometheus may have $6.2 billion today, but xAI’s valuation crossed $50 billion last month on far less cash burn and actual shipped products like Grok-3 and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite.
Bezos’s return to the arena after years of yachts and space tourism has been framed by Musk as desperation rather than vision. The “old man” jab, in particular, stung because Bezos is only six years older.
Whatever the outcome, yesterday’s public humiliation has guaranteed that every future Prometheus announcement will be measured against Musk’s mockery and the internet will never let Bezos forget who threw the first punch.
Two of the richest humans alive have chosen artificial intelligence as their final battleground. The rest of the industry can only watch as decades of quiet rivalry explode into the most expensive and personal tech war ever waged.
