The two richest men in the world are pinching each other.

The richest man's "battle for space" is becoming more and more fierce. on September 1, US time, Tesla, Inc. and Musk, founder of SpaceX, suddenly openly "angered" Amazon.Com Inc and Blue Origin founder Bezos: "suing SpaceX has become Bezos's full-time job." The cause of Musk's anger is that Bezos's company has sued SpaceX crazily this year, an average of once every 16 days. Bezos's latest fortune is $200.1 billion (1.2928 trillion yuan), ahead of Musk's $190.7 billion (1.232 trillion yuan), according to Forbes real-time data.

Due to their close wealth and fluctuations in the share prices of their companies, they often take turns to become the richest man in the world.

Behind the two trillion richest people staging a "war of words" is a trillion-level "space business war". Musk's SpaceX and Bezos's blue origins are tit-for-tat in space travel, satellite Internet and other trillions of tracks, both grabbing the track's starting advantage.

The key to this "space business war" may be the Artemis moon landing program of the United States, which cost more than $86 billion (about 555.6 billion yuan). Now NASA has chosen SpaceX. Therefore, Bezos directly sued NASA and SpaceX in a fit of anger.

Musk "angered" Bezos.

Tesla, Inc. and Musk, founder of SpaceX, suddenly denounced Amazon.Com Inc founder Bezos on social media on Sept. 1, US time: "suing SpaceX has become Bezos's full-time job."

The tweet is a continuation of Musk's previous "anger", which he said publicly earlier that Bezos retired to take a full-time job-suing SpaceX.

According to SpaceX statistics, over the past year, companies such as Amazon.Com Inc and Blue Origin, owned by Bezos, have complained about Musk's SpaceX every 16 days on average, which has become the biggest bottleneck and trouble for the latter's development.

Obviously, it was two commercial space exploration companies that made the two richest men at loggerheads: SpaceX and Blue Origin. The most recent lawsuit began on Aug. 13, when Blue Origin sued NASA in the Federal claims Court, protesting that NASA had offered a $2.9 billion contract to Musk's SpaceX to support SpaceX's Starship program and to help build a manned landing system for the Artemis moon landing project in the United States.

Then, on August 25, Amazon.Com Inc's subsidiary complained again to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about SpaceX, urging FCC to reject SpaceX's second-generation star chain (Starlink) amendment, on the grounds that SpaceX's amendment had two different deployment schemes and did not fully address the technical design in every major detail such as height, inclination, and even the total number of satellites. Violates FCC's rule that the application should be "complete and without details of internal inconsistencies".

In the face of Bezos's continuous shelling, Musk and SpaceX began to fight back. On August 31, SpaceX submitted a rebuttal letter to FCC, denouncing Amazon.Com Inc as trying to "tactically delay" the progress of Starlink, a tool that Amazon.Com Inc has always liked to use regulatory and legal procedures to hinder competitors to make up for his own failure to make progress.

Then, on September 1, Musk publicly "angered" Bezos on social media.

In addition, Musk and Bezos have been catching up with each other on the global rich list so far this year. In March, Musk's fortune rose to $185 billion, surpassing Bezos to become the richest man in the world. Subsequently, Amazon.Com Inc's share price soared all the way, Bezos once again surpassed Musk and held the position of the richest man in the world. According to Forbes real-time data, Bezos' latest fortune is $201.3 billion, ahead of Musk's $190.5 billion, a delicate gap.

The "battle for space" of the two trillion richest people

Purely in terms of wealth figures, Musk and Bezos are neck and neck in the "business war" on Earth, and the key areas of the future competition between the two may be above space.

As early as 2000, Bezos set his sights on commercial space exploration and created Blue Origin. In 2002, Musk also invested heavily in founding SpaceX. Today, both companies have a say in space exploration and have become areas of direct competition between the two richest men.

The first is commercial space travel. Not long ago, Blue Origin, which was personally endorsed by Bezos, made its first manned space trip, which opened an important beginning of suborbital commercial space tourism of blue origin and opened the business of commercial space travel. The cost of travel is as high as $28 million.

At the same time, SpaceX also announced its first commercial space mission, "Inspiration4" (civilian space mission), which plans to carry four tourists into space for a three-day trip around the Earth. In 2022, startup AxiomSpace, with the help of SpaceX, will also launch its first private mission to the International Space Station at a freight cost of up to $55 million per person. By 2023, SpaceX also plans to use the upcoming Starship to help Japanese billionaire Maezawa fulfill his dream of flying around the moon.

The imagination of the concept of commercial space travel is very huge, and most of the rich people in the world are looking forward to space travel. Bezos once said publicly, "seeing the earth from space has changed you." It has also changed your relationship with this planet and with mankind. " This may be one of the reasons why the rich are keen on space.

UBS estimates that by 2030, the market for space travel could reach $3 billion a year, and in the long run, the market for long-distance space travel could be worth more than $20 billion (129.6 billion yuan). In addition, Morgan Stanley predicts that the revenue of the global space industry will grow from the current $350 billion to $1 trillion or more by 2040.

In addition to space travel, the second area of Musk's space battle with Bezos is the satellite Internet.

According to the latest statement from SpaceX, Musk's Star chain program is providing satellite broadband testing services to more than 100000 customers in 14 countries around the world through more than 1700 satellites and has more than 500000 order / deposit accounts worldwide. In addition to the nearly 12000 satellites that have been licensed, the "Star chain" project is seeking permission to launch 30, 000 satellites, build a "star chain" network and provide satellite Internet services, and more than 1000 satellites have been successfully launched so far.

Bezos'"Kuiper Project" and "Star chain" also provide satellite Internet services. Last year, it was approved to deploy 3236 satellites in low-Earth orbit at a minimum altitude of 590km above the ground, but so far, the Kuiper project has not yet begun to produce or launch satellites, and the company says it will not launch satellites until at least 2023.

Obviously, the gap between the two is obvious, which makes Bezos very anxious to file a lawsuit against SpaceX. Musk has repeatedly publicly criticized Bezos, accusing Amazon.Com Inc of trying to "cripple the Star chain project" and advising Blue Origin to spend more money on technology research and development and equipment hardware, rather than frequently suing and hiring legal counsel.

What makes Bezos and Musk pinch each other fiercely is that the imaginative space of satellite Internet is huge. According to public data, the annual output value of the global satellite Internet industry is about 300 billion US dollars in 2019, and the agency estimates that the global satellite Internet output value will reach 560 billion to 850 billion US dollars by 2025.

A more crucial war.

As we all know, in the aerospace track, government purchase orders have always been the most critical business. So NASA and the Department of Defense have always been big customers of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

At present, NASA is ambitious to promote the Artemis project, the core theme is to return to the moon, take into account the deep space, landing on Mars. SpaceX, Blue Origin No one wants to lose this project, the competition is very fierce.

In April, NASA said it chose SpaceX's starship as the designated lunar landing equipment for the Artemis lunar landing program. The main reason for the elimination of Blue Origin is that the price gap between the two is too wide, with SpaceX's offer of US $2.9 billion and Blue Origin's offer of US $6 billion.

This result, obviously Bezos could not accept, angrily sued NASA and SpaceX to court.

What makes Bezos so angry is that the Artemis moon landing program in the United States is almost the largest space program of NASA since the beginning of this century. It is estimated that by the end of fiscal year 2025, NASA may spend as much as $86 billion on the Artemis project.

According to data, in September 2020, NASA published the outline of the Artemis plan, which plans to launch the Artemis 1 mission in 2021 to conduct unmanned in-orbit flight tests; by 2023, the Artemis 2 mission will conduct manned flight tests In 2024, Artemis 3 will officially launch a mission to the moon, when it will carry the Orion spacecraft and the lunar lander, send astronauts to the lunar surface, and eventually land on Mars.

This is the greatest opportunity for Musk's SpaceX and Bezos's blue origin, and may directly determine the outcome of this "space battle".