The feud between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos has been going on for years now, and it all stems down from the competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos, a man who got used to winning over the past decade, has seen Blue Origin be out competed from top to bottom.
Knowing that he didn't have the time or knowledge to take on Tesla, Bezos began by investing in startups that competed against Elon Musk's vision of our future. For example, on February 7th 2019, Bezos helped a self-driving startup named Aurora secure 530 million dollars in funding. Just seven months later in September of 2019, Jeff Bezos invested an under-closed amount of money into one of Tesla's competitors called Rivian. Along with the investment, he also ordered 100,000 delivery vans that would be delivered by 2024.
This was clearly a foolish and emotional investment by Bezos. Tesla has far superior EV technology and also has a rumored van coming out within the next few years. Nonetheless, Bezos continued with his investment and at the time, it didn't seem like he had a plan to take on Tesla.
In June of 2020, Bezos's launch of Amazon's venture capital fund named "The Climate Pledge" revealed deeper ambitions. The description of the fund clearly demonstrated that Bezos was attempting to take on Tesla. Bezos specifically stated that the climate pledge fund will invest in transportation and logistics, energy generation, storage, and utilization. The exact same plan that Elon Musk has for Tesla.
Key things that happened this year is the the beginning of the transition of Tesla to a fully integrated sustainable energy company, where you have solar creating the energy, then the stationary battery pack, the power wall, and power pack storing the energy, and then that energy being used in an electric vehicle.
Bezos claims that the plan of the fund was to accelerate the path to zero carbon which is suspiciously similar to Tesla's goal to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energies. With this venture capital fund, Bezos would invest in companies all around the world. Essentially making an anti-Tesla portfolio by investing in Tesla's competitors.
Despite the ambitious goals, the fund only started with 2 billion dollars, which is far from Amazon's market cap of 1.5 trillion dollars. Bezos knew that he needed to go bigger which is where Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company comes into play.
After Zoox was caught stealing intellectual property from Tesla, Bezos saw an opportunity to acquire Zoox while the price was at a discount. Zoox had plans to not only create the self-driving software needed for autonomous vehicles, but also develop its own electric vehicle which was a perfect fit for Bezos's plan to take on Tesla.
This vehicle was the manifestation of future luxury as the vehicle had no steering wheel whatsoever and had a futuristic quad design with independent motors, independent batteries, and independent processing. Therefore, if any one of that quadrant of the car failed for some reason, the other three quadrants can still arrest the vehicle, Like a 747 with four engines.
As of today, it's still unclear whether Bezos plans to sell Zoox vehicles to the public, But it seems likely that he will start by using Zoox vehicles for Amazon's delivery service. Nonetheless, many speculate that Bezos plans to release a ride-sharing network similar to Lyft and Uber.
At the moment, it is too early to know who will emerge victorious. But we are intrigued by Amazon, which has an impressive track record of conquering and then taking control of new markets. After all, it has held a dominant position in online shopping, grocery delivery, and cloud computing. The challenge continues.
