Jeff Bezos posted a rare tweet advising fellow billionaire Elon Musk on how to convert Twitter’s headquarters into a homeless shelter.
The Tesla CEO, who recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder with a 9.2 per cent stake, set up a poll on Saturday asking followers if the company’s San Francisco offices should be repurposed because, as “no one shows up anyways”.
Mr Musk has since deleted the poll, but not before 90 per cent of respondents expressed support for the idea and Mr Bezos chimed in to suggest Twitter follow Amazon’s lead by combining the the office with a shelter system.
“Or do portion,” the Blue Origin CEO retweeted, sharing an article from Geek Wire that profiled how the tech company had combined an 8-floor homeless shelter with their Seattle head offices.
“Worked out great and makes it easy for employees who want to volunteer,” he added.
Mr Musk responded to the suggestion with a one-lined: “Great idea.”
The pair have jockeyed for the top-billionaire spot for years, with Mr Musk overtaking the Amazon founder back in January 2021 as the richest person in the world, a title Mr Bezos had clung to since getting knighted with it back in October 2017.
According to the Forbes’ real-time billionaire list, Mr Musk’s net worth is currently $274bn, making his tech rival’s value just shy of $100bn less.
Though this recent tweet exchange might suggest otherwise, this rivalry hasn’t always been so amicable.
Back in October 2021, the Tesla chief responded to a tweet of Mr Bezos’ with a giant silver medal emoji, a trolling that seemed to be in response to the fact that he had left his rival even further behind as the world’s richest person after a major surge in the value of his other company, SpaceX.
And providing further proof that money, even incomprehensible amounts, can’t buy you everything, specifically gracious winning in this case, was another instance where the SpaceX co-founder felt the need to mock his less wealthy billionaire.
When he first passed Mr Bezos as the richest person, Mr Musk took it upon himself to write in an email to Forbes that he’d like to send his runner-up a giant silver medal.
“I’m sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B, along with a silver medal,” Mr Musk wrote to Forbes in September 2021.
Outside of the pocketbook flex, the pair are also engaged in a kind of unofficial billionaire space race, competing for government contracts with Nasa, taking each other to court, and, unsurprisingly, taking each other to the court of public opinion - Twitter - over their respective rocket launches.
Back in November, Mr Bezos’ Blue Origin space company lost a lawsuit against Nasa over a multi-billion dollar contract awarded to Mr Musk’s SpaceX, which led to a very public boasting by the latter on Twitter.
