• Elon Musk has had a big year with Tesla and SpaceX soaring in value, supercharging his net worth.
• He helped Donald Trump win reelection and intends to transform the US government in 2025.
• Scroll down for seven charts showing how Musk's 2024 played out.

Elon Musk has had a year for the record books.

His businesses have taken off, with Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and Neuralink all touching new valuation highs. Their success has boosted Musk's net worth to above $450 billion for the first time, putting him over $200 billion ahead of the world's second-richest person, Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Musk has also become a power player in US politics after wielding his cash and clout to help win Donald Trump a second term in office. As one of the president-elect's closest advisors, he's now gearing up to overhaul the US government.

The situation seems worse at X, formerly Twitter, after Musk's $44 billion takeover and reshaping of the platform sparked an advertiser exodus.

Take a look at Musk's 2024 in charts (all data is accurate as of Friday, December 20):

1. Charging ahead

Tesla shares have shot up as much as 85% this year, driving the electric vehicle maker's market value above $1.4 trillion for the first time. They've since retreated but continue to trade near record levels.

The automaker has benefited from market buzz around artificial intelligence — which it's harnessing to develop self-driving cars and humanoid robots — plus a robust US economy and the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.

Investors are also betting that Musk's businesses will benefit from his close ties to Trump, which could translate into less stringent regulations, government subsidies, tariff exemptions, and more.

2. Reaching for the stars

SpaceX's valuation nearly doubled from $180 billion at the end of last year to $350 billion this month, based on the price paid by the company and its backers for employee shares in its latest tender offer.

Musk's rocket, spacecraft, and satellite communications company made several technological breakthroughs this year. For example, it plucked the first-stage booster of its new Starship out of the air using a massive pair of mechanical "chopsticks" in October.

3. Shifting fortunes

Musk's net worth slumped in the spring as Tesla stock tumbled, dropping below $170 billion at its nadir.

But it rebounded by over $300 billion to touch an unprecedented $486 billion on December 17, as Tesla hit fresh highs and SpaceX notched a $350 billion valuation.

4. Rise of the robots

Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, was only founded in July 2023.

Yet it notched a post-money valuation of $24 billion in May following its Series B funding round. That rose to $50 billion in November, reports say, meaning the maker of the Grok chatbot is worth roughly as much as Monster Beverage.

5. X marks the drop

It remains tricky to gauge the health of X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that Musk took private in 2022. One way is to use Fidelity's monthly estimates of the value of its stake in the business.

The mutual fund giant's figures imply that X's valuation has crashed since Musk's purchase. The tech billionaire laid off a large part of the company's workforce and relaxed content moderation in support of greater free speech, triggering an advertiser exodus that hammered the company's revenues.

Regardless, Musk recently posted on X that the platform has roughly 1 billion active users, although around 40% of them only log on during important world events.

6. Trump train

Musk was one of the biggest spenders in the US presidential election, deploying over $270 million to back Trump's race for president, run ads against Democrats, and promote conservative viewpoints.

His starring role in Trump's victory and emergence as one of the president-elect's closest advisors and a co-chief of the new Department of Government Efficiency suggests that his investment in the election has paid off.

7. Building brainpower

Neuralink, Musk's neurotechnology company, was valued at $8 billion this summer, up from about $2 billion three years earlier.

The developer of brain-computer interfaces wants to allow people with quadriplegia to control computers with their thoughts. Musk released footage this spring of the first patient to receive one of its brain implants.

• SpaceX employees worked grueling hours and gritty conditions in the company's early days.
• Elon Musk offered workers SpaceX stock options to poach top talent and keep them motivated.
• One expert said that for stocks to work, companies have to give employees chances to cash in.

Working at SpaceX in the company's earliest days was intense, but it may pay off for some hires.

Tough working conditions might tank some businesses, but not SpaceX. On December 11, Bloomberg reported that the Elon Musk-founded company was valued at $350 billion, making it the most valuable private startup worldwide.

The value comes after SpaceX and some of its approved investors struck a deal to buy up to $1.25 billion of employees' shares, offering $185 a share. Therein lies a partial key to SpaceX's overwhelming success.

Like many tech startups, SpaceX offered its early employees stock options as a financial incentive to keep them invested in the company's success — even when they were exposed to Musk's strict standards, his bouts of shouting when things went wrong, and his near-impossible timelines, space journalist Eric Berger reported.

In his new book "Reentry," Berger shares current and former employees' accounts of working 36-hour days, sleeping under their desks, urinating in buckets, dodging rattlesnakes, and injuring themselves on the job.

Stock options are a toss-up. They don't always end up being valuable. SpaceX was proving its value early, though.

"Even as far back as 2010, you could see that that had real value if you stayed there," Berger told Business Insider.

How equity pushes employees

Offering stock options is a common strategy, especially for early-stage companies that don't have much cash for salaries, said Jorge Martin, head of the employee-equity plan provider North American branch of JP Morgan Workplace Solutions.

"When they are working these grinding hours, when they are traveling all over the world, when they're under high pressure," Martin said, "then all of that is worth it when you have an equity grant that can grow as the company grows and as the company succeeds."

Martin said he's occasionally seen startup employees become millionaires off their equity.

The promise of those stock options gave SpaceX a competitive edge in recruiting top engineering talent. In the scramble for new hires fresh out of college in the 2010s, SpaceX, Berger said, often competed with Blue Origin, a similarly ambitious rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos.

"They would poach people back and forth," Berger said.

Cashing in on company equity

Workers can turn shares into cash when a company gets sold or goes public — which SpaceX has not done — or when it does a "tender offer," allowing employees to sell their shares to other investors.

Blue Origin has a stock ownership program too, Berger said, but it's "considered virtually worthless because Bezos is probably never going to sell a significant chunk of the company. So those shares can never really be sold."

SpaceX, meanwhile, has given its employees multiple opportunities to cash in on their shares, including through the deal it struck this month.

Musk's Mars vision helped

SpaceX offered some of its early employees more than stock. Some truly believed in Musk's plans to build a human settlement on Mars.

Unlike a regimented job at NASA or a legacy aerospace corporation, a gig at SpaceX meant working hands-on with multiple ambitious rockets, spaceships, or engines — back to back or simultaneously.

"You're going to work super hard, but you're also going to get to work on cutting-edge stuff, stuff that's actually going to fly," Berger said. "After a few years there with that on your résumé, you can basically write your ticket anywhere in the industry you want to go."

For some employees, Berger found, the stock was icing on the cake.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

• Broadcom's stock surged in recent weeks, pushing the company's market value over $1 trillion.
• Broadcom is crucial for companies seeking alternatives to Nvidia's AI chip dominance.
• Custom AI chips are gaining traction, enhancing tech firms' bargaining power, analysts say.

The rise of AI, and the computing power it requires, is bringing all kinds of previously under-the-radar companies into the limelight. This week it's Broadcom.

Broadcom's stock has soared since late last week, catapulting the company into the $1 trillion market cap club. The boost came from a blockbuster earnings report in which custom AI chip revenue grew 220% compared to last year.

In addition to selling lots of parts and components for data centers, Broadcom designs and sells ASICs, or application-specific integrated circuits — an industry acronym meaning custom chips.

Designers of custom AI chips, chief among them Broadcom and Marvell, are headed into a growth phase, according to Morgan Stanley.

Custom chips are picking up speed

The biggest players in AI buy a lot of chips from Nvidia, the $3 trillion giant with an estimated 90% of market share of advanced AI chips.

Heavily relying on one supplier isn't a comfortable position for any company, though, and many large Nvidia customers are also developing their own chips. Most tech companies don't have large teams of silicon and hardware experts in house. Of the companies they might turn to design them a custom chip, Broadcom is the leader.

Though multi-purpose chips like Nvidia's and AMD's graphics processing units are likely to maintain the largest share of the AI chip market in the long-term, custom chips are growing fast.

Morgan Stanley analysts this week forecast the market for ASICs to nearly double to $22 billion next year.

Much of that growth is attributable to Amazon Web Services' Trainium AI chip, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. Then there are Google's in-house AI chips, known as TPUs, which Broadcom helps make.

In terms of actual value of chips in use, Amazon and Google dominate. But OpenAI, Apple, and TikTok parent company ByteDance are all reportedly developing chips with Broadcom, too.

ASICs bring bargaining power

Custom chips can offer more value, in terms of the performance you get for the cost, according to Morgan Stanley's research.

ASICs can also be designed to perfectly match unique internal workloads for tech companies, accord to the bank's analysts. The better these custom chips get, the more bargaining power they may provide when tech companies are negotiating with Nvidia over buying GPUs. But this will take time, the analysts wrote.

In addition to Broadcom, Silicon Valley neighbor Marvell is making gains in the ASICs market, along with Asia-based players Alchip Technologies and Mediatek, they added in a note to investors.

Analysts don't expect custom chips to ever fully replace Nvidia GPUs, but without them, cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google would have much less bargaining power against Nvidia.

"Over the long term, if they execute well, cloud service providers may enjoy greater bargaining power in AI semi procurement with their own custom silicon," the Morgan Stanley analysts explained.

Nvidia's big R&D budget

This may not be all bad news for Nvidia. A $22 billion ASICs market is smaller than Nvidia's revenue for just one quarter.

Nvidia's R&D budget is massive, and many analysts are confident in its ability to stay at the bleeding edge of AI computing.

And as Nvidia rolls out new, more advanced GPUs, its older offerings get cheaper and potentially more competitive with ASICs.

"We believe the cadence of ASICs needs to accelerate to stay competitive to GPUs," the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.

Still, Broadcom and chip manufacturers on the supply chain rung beneath, such as TSMC, are likely to get a boost every time a giant cloud company orders up another custom AI chip.

• Palantir CEO Alex Karp joked the software giant was like a "cult" — minus the sex and drugs.
• He says Palantirians tend to be "snobby" about their intellect and aren't easily persuaded by orders.
• "My success has been getting Palantirians to believe that my ideas are theirs," Karp says.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp acknowledged that working at the company can feel a bit like a "cult. Employees share a like-minded drive that can occasionally raise eyebrows from those outside, he said.

"It's a rare cult with no sex and very little drugs — and we're not poisoning anyone," he joked during an interview with investor Stanley Druckenmiller. Karp spoke about his coming book, "The Technological Republic."

Cofounder Peter Thiel is an "artist" when it comes to appointing leaders, Karp said, and attracting top engineering talent has always been the company's strong suit.

The founding team started by calling their smartest friends, and the talent pool quickly compounded. Early employees tended to be "very high-mission, very high rigor, very low pay, very high-equity — we lived together," Karp said. "It just was a really cool vibe, and there was nothing like it."

The company was "hated" by the outside venture capital world, Karp said — but it was a welcome dynamic that reminded him of his childhood. Karp's parents were unusual, but it was a happy home. (He's previously described them as hippies who took him to protests.) And if outsiders considered his parents "freaks," Karp said, that just made them "even happier."

Today, Palantirians are "snobby" when it comes to intellect — though not about where they went to school, Karp said. They're also "not convinced by orders." The culture is one of low authority that prizes self-starters.

"My success has been getting Palantirians to believe that my ideas are theirs," Karp said, adding that lateral hiring can be difficult at the company, where respect is hard-earned.

It's also a relatively small team of 3,600 employees, and Karp doesn't harbor ambitions of massively scaling the head count — thanks in no small part to AI, which has meant "you can power whole industries with 100 people," he said.

Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Palantir has had an explosive year, with its stock up around 350% so far this year. In a recent earnings call, Karp attributed the company's growth to an AI revolution and said its success had silenced longtime critics.

• Elon Musk is almost $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos and worth more than Costco.
• His net worth hit $447 billion after Tesla stock jumped and SpaceX's valuation rose to $350 billion.
• Just five years ago, Musk was worth about $25 billion, and Tesla was valued below $100 billion.

Elon Musk is nearly $200 billion richer than Jeff Bezos, and personally worth more than Costco, after adding $63 billion to his fortune in a single day.

His net worth surged to $447 billion on Wednesday, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after Tesla stock jumped 6% and SpaceX's valuation leaped to $350 billion based on employee share sales.

Musk's fortune has ballooned by $218 billion this year — a sum that exceeds the net worth of every other person on the rich list except Amazon's Bezos ($249 billion) and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg ($224 billion).

Musk is now more than twice as wealthy as Oracle's Larry Ellison ($198 billion), and more than three times as rich as Warren Buffett ($144 billion).

His one-day gain — the largest in the index's history — rivals the total wealth of Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao, ranked 23rd with a $63.2 billion fortune. It also helped to lift the combined wealth of the 500 richest people on the planet to above $10 trillion for the first time, Bloomberg said.

Musk is now worth more on paper than the vast majority of US public companies, including Costco ($442 billion), Home Depot ($419 billion), and Netflix ($400 billion).

His wealth is largely made up of his roughly 13% stake and some contested stock options in Tesla, and his 42% slice of SpaceX. Musk's other businesses include xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and X Corp, formerly Twitter.

Tesla shares have surged more than 70% this year to $425 at Wednesday's close, valuing the company at nearly $1.4 trillion. That figure comfortably exceeds the roughly $1 trillion market value of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and approaches the $1.6 trillion value of Zuckerberg's Meta.

The electric vehicle maker's shares have soared as investors bet it will harness artificial intelligence in revolutionary products such as self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

Musk's prominent role in Donald Trump's campaign, and his emergence as a close advisor to the president-elect who's tasked him with streamlining the US government, have also fueled optimism around his companies.

SpaceX is now valued at $350 billion based on the latest price paid by the company and its backers to buy shares from employees, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The Starlink owner's valuation was previously $210 billion after a secondary share sale in June.

It's worth underscoring how dramatic Musk's wealth jump has been. He was worth less than $170 billion as recently as April, and only about $25 billion five years ago — around 1/18 of his net worth now.

Tesla was worth less than $100 billion during the Covid crash of 2020, or about 1/14 of its valuation today.

• Oracle shares are set for their best year since 1999 after a 75% surge.
• The enterprise-computing stock has benefited from strong demand for cloud and AI infrastructure.
• Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison's personal fortune has surged .

Oracle has surged 75% since January, putting the stock on track for its best year since a tripling in 1999 during the dot-com boom.

The enterprise-computing giant's share price has jumped from a low of about $60 in late 2022 to about $180, boosting Oracle's market value from below $165 billion to north of $500 billion.

It's now worth almost as much as Exxon Mobil ($518 billion), and more valuable than Mastercard ($489 billion), Costco ($431 billion), or Netflix ($379 billion).

Oracle's soaring stock price has boosted the net worth of Larry Ellison, who cofounded the company and is chief technology officer. His holding of more than 40% puts him second on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list worth $227 billion, second only to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $330 billion.

Oracle provides all manner of software and hardware for businesses, but its cloud applications and infrastructure are fueling its growth as companies such as Tesla that are training large language models pay up for processing power.

The company was founded in 1977 but is still growing at a good clip. Net income jumped by 23% to $10.5 billion in the year ended May, fueled by 12% sales growth in the cloud services and license support division, which generated nearly 75% of its revenues.

Oracle signed the largest sales contracts in its history last year as it tapped into "enormous demand" for training LLMs, CEO Safra Catz said in the fourth-quarter earnings release. She said the client list included OpenAI and its flagship ChatGPT model, which kickstarted the AI boom.

Catz also predicted revenue growth would accelerate from 6% to double digits this financial year. That's partly because Oracle is working with Microsoft and Google to interconnect their respective clouds, which Ellison said would help to "turbocharge our cloud database growth."

Oracle has flown under the radar this year compared to Nvidia. The chipmaker's stock has tripled in the past year and it now rivals Apple as the world's most valuable company. Yet Oracle is still headed for its best annual stock performance in a quarter of a century — and its bosses are promising there's more to come.

• The world's 10 biggest wealth gainers have grown $790 billion richer in 2024.
• Elon Musk leads the list with a $257 billion gain that has boosted his net worth to $486 billion.
• Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Jensen Huang are all up more than $70 billion.

Ten people have grown their personal fortunes by a combined $790 billion this year — a figure larger than the market value of Walmart ($767 billion).

The biggest wealth gainers of 2024 include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The buzz around artificial intelligence, a solid outlook for the US economy, and market expectations about Donald Trump's second term in office have boosted their companies' stock prices, benefiting them as major shareholders.

Here are the 10 greatest wealth builders this year as of the market close on Tuesday, December 17.

1. Elon Musk

Year-to-date wealth gain: $257 billion

Net worth: $486 billion

Source of wealth gain: Tesla and SpaceX stock

Elon Musk is the CEO of automaker Tesla and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX. He's also the owner of X, the social network previously known as Twitter, along with Neuralink, xAI, and The Boring Company.

Musk's $257 billion wealth gain this year exceeds the total net worth of Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person on the planet. The serial entrepreneur could soon become the first individual to amass a $500 billion fortune.

2. Mark Zuckerberg

Year-to-date wealth gain: $90.9 billion

Net worth: $219 billion

Source of wealth gain: Meta stock

Mark Zuckerberg is the cofounder and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.

Meta stock has soared 75% this year as investors wager Zuckerberg's big bets on AI and the metaverse will pay off in the years ahead. Zuckerberg has added about $90 billion to his net worth as a result, propelling him into third place on Bloomberg's rich list.

3. Jeff Bezos

Year-to-date wealth gain: $72.9 billion

Net worth: $250 billion

Source of wealth gain: Amazon stock

Jeff Bezos is Amazon's founder, executive chairman, and former CEO.

Amazon shares have leaped 52% this year as investors bet the online retailer can harness AI to supercharge its sales and leverage Amazon Web Services to become a key provider of cloud infrastructure to AI companies.

4. Larry Ellison

Year-to-date wealth gain: $70.4 billion

Net worth: $193 billion

Source of wealth gain: Oracle and Tesla stock

Larry Ellison is the cofounder, executive chairman, and chief technology officer of Oracle, one of the largest enterprise software companies.

Oracle stock has jumped 61% this year as the company has emerged as a key provider of cloud data centers for AI businesses, fueling a $70 billion increase in Ellison's net worth.

Ellison purchased more than 1.5% of Tesla prior to joining its board in December 2018, making him the electric-vehicle maker's second-largest individual shareholder after Musk. He's believed to have retained his stake, now worth upward of $20 billion, since resigning as a director in 2022.

5. Jensen Huang

Year-to-date wealth gain: $70 billion

Net worth: $114 billion

Source of wealth gain: Nvidia stock

Jensen Huang is the founder and CEO of Nvidia, the graphics chip maker that has emerged as a critical seller of "picks and shovels" to the AI gold rush.

Nvidia's stock has surged 163% this year, making it one of the world's most valuable companies with a $3.2 trillion market value and lifting Huang's net worth by $70 billion.

6. Michael Dell

Year-to-date wealth gain: $48.9 billion

Net worth: $127 billion

Source of wealth gain: Dell Technologies stock

Michael Dell is the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, the maker of PCs, printers, and other computing equipment.

Dell shares have soared 55% this year as the company has shifted its focus toward AI-powered devices and servers.

7. Larry Page

Year-to-date wealth gain: $47.4 billion

Net worth: $174 billion

Source of wealth gain: Alphabet stock

Larry Page cofounded Google in 1998 and was the company's CEO until 2001 and again between 2011 and 2015 after Google was restructured as a subsidiary of Alphabet.

Alphabet shares have surged 40% this year as investors wager the search-and-advertising titan can dominate AI. The stock jump has fueled a $47 billion rise in Page's net worth.

8. Jim Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $45.1 billion

Net worth: $118 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Jim Walton is the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and, like his siblings, one of the retailer's largest shareholders with an 11%-plus stake.

Walmart stock has climbed 82% this year, fueled by resilient consumer spending in the face of historic inflation and soaring interest rates in recent years. The surge led to Walton amassing a $100 billion fortune for the first time in September.

9. Alice Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $44.4 billion

Net worth: $114 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Alice Walton is the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

She overtook L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers in August to become the world's richest woman.

10. Rob Walton

Year-to-date wealth gain: $43.8 billion

Net worth: $115 billion

Source of wealth gain: Walmart stock

Rob Walton is the eldest son of Sam Walton and an heir to the Walmart fortune.

He and his siblings owe a big chunk of their wealth to their father, who handed them each a 20% stake in the family business over 70 years ago instead of having them inherit his fortune upon his death, in turn avoiding paying billions of dollars in estate taxes.

• Elon Musk's net worth keeps rising.
• Musk's net worth topped $400 billion on Wednesday, making him the first person to reach that mark.
• The billionaire had already gotten $155 billion richer this year, fueled by a rise in Tesla shares.

Elon Musk just keeps getting richer. And now, he's the first-ever person to hit the $400 billion mark.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO's net worth skyrocketed to $439.2 billion on Wednesday — an increase of about $50 billion in just one day, according to Bloomberg figures.

The jump comes after an insider share sale at SpaceX boosted the space exploration company to a $350 billion valuation, making it the most valuable private startup in the world. Musk is believed to own about 42% of the firm, NBC News reported.

Prior to the massive boost on Wednesday, Musk's net worth had already soared by an unmatched $155 billion this year, placing him at $384 billion as of market close on Tuesday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The index, which has not yet been publicly updated to reflect the latest jump, on Tuesday showed Musk $140 billion ahead of the world's second richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who's worth $244 billion.

The jump comes after the world's richest person broke his wealth record of about $340 billion in late November, which had stood for just over three years.

Musk's soaring wealth also piggybacks on the postelection rally for Tesla stock. Tesla's stock has soared nearly 71% so far this year. Its market cap is $1.23 trillion.

The stock has surged since Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election, as investors wagered the electric vehicle maker would benefit from Musk's close ties to the president-elect.

Mark Malek, Siebert's chief investment officer, previously told BI that "some sort of premium has been placed on the stock as a result of Musk's very public involvement in Trump's campaign."

Tesla could continue to make further gains. Analysts at Bank of America said in a note last week that a recent visit to the Austin factory gave them "increased confidence that TSLA is well-positioned to grow in 2025+ with its core EV business … launch of its robotaxi offering, and longer-term from its investments in Optimus."

Tesla is now significantly more valuable than Warren Buffett's conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, which has a market cap of just under $1 trillion.

Musk has a stake of about 13% in Tesla. His latest $439.2 billion net worth is nearly $100 billion higher than the market cap of Salesforce, valued at $344 billion.

Earlier this month, a Delaware judge slapped down Musk's mega pay package from Tesla for the second time. The company said it will appeal the ruling.

Update: December 11, 2024 — This story was updated with Elon Musk's latest net worth, which topped $400 billion.

• Elon Musk reignited his long-running feud with Jeff Bezos in an X post on Thursday.
• Musk said Bezos told people they should sell Tesla and SpaceX stock because Donald Trump would lose.
• Bezos said Musk's claim was "100% not true," to which Musk replied, "I stand corrected."

Elon Musk has taken aim at Jeff Bezos once more, reigniting the war of words between two of the world's richest people.

In an X post on Thursday, Musk said Bezos had told people to dump their shares in his companies because Donald Trump was bound to lose the presidential election.

Hours later, Bezos replied that the claim was "100% not true." That prompted Musk to write, "Well, then, I stand corrected," followed by a crying-with-laughter emoji.

Business Insider was unable to confirm the veracity of Musk's post.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, spent more than $130 million supporting Trump's reelection bid. He stumped for Trump onstage at campaign rallies and warned on X that America would "fall to tyranny" if the former president wasn't reelected.

Since the election, Musk has been spending time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Florida resort, and has been appointed by the president-elect to co-lead a "Department of Government Efficiency" to reduce wasteful spending.

He said on X on Wednesday that he'd had little input on the president-elect's cabinet picks.

Musk's post about Bezos suggested that the Amazon founder and executive chairman expected Musk's close ties to Trump to mean Tesla and SpaceX would take a hit if Trump lost the election.

Tesla shares soared 44% between November 4 — the day before the election — and November 11, suggesting investors saw the automaker benefiting from a Trump win. SpaceX isn't publicly listed, but its shares are traded on private markets.

Tech and wealth rivals

Musk and Bezos are worth more than $500 billion combined, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

They hold leadership roles at Tesla and Amazon, two of the world's most valuable companies. They're rivals in areas such as artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and self-driving cars, and they both run space companies that compete for government contracts.

As a result, any personal animosity that Musk holds toward Bezos could be significant. He's previously labeled Bezos a copycat, trolled him for being No. 2 on the rich list, complained about his lawsuits against SpaceX, and posted: "Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!"

Thomas Roulet, a professor of organizational sociology and leadership at the University of Cambridge, told BI in an email: "We can definitely expect Elon Musk to exploit his proximity to the Trump administration, especially in areas where he faces direct competition from other tech firms and when regulations can make or break economic success — self-driving cars, for example."

"This message about Bezos is a way to give himself an excuse to legitimately do so, by saying that 'Bezos started it,'" Roulet added.

Bezos has voiced skepticism at Musk's vision of colonizing Mars and once suggested that Musk's takeover of Twitter, now X, could complicate things for Tesla in China.

Musk has clashed with other tech leaders, including Bill Gates. He took umbrage at the Microsoft cofounder for shorting Tesla stock, questioning why Gates would bet against a clean-energy company while ringing the alarm on the climate crisis.

Amazon, Tesla and representatives for Trump didn't respond to requests for comment.

November 22, 2024: This story has been updated to include Bezos' response to Musk's Thursday X post, and Musk's response to Bezos.