Tesla CEO Elon Musk took a dig at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Twitter Friday, shortly after the Seattle tech giant was reported to have acquired the self-driving-taxi company Zoox for $1.2 billion.
Musk took to Twitter branding Bezos a copycat and using a yellow cat icon instead of the word proper.
.@JeffBezos is a copy 🐈 haha https://t.co/plR7uupqBG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 26, 2020
The comment triggered a bunch of hilarious reactions from Musk’s army of subscribers, with one posting an imaginary dialogue between the two rival entrepreneurs:
"Bezos: Hey man can I copy your homework? - Sure, just make sure you change it up a lil' bit", one wrote laughingly.
"Maybe you should copy him and turn a profit?”, another asked, while many more suggested memes would speak louder than words:
Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: pic.twitter.com/viLI0Ra1Ba
— Occupy Mars➐ (@Archie_slays) June 26, 2020
@elonmusk and @jeffbezos walk into a bar, the bar collapseswith in itself because of all the BDE. Creates a black hole and ends the universe as we know it. pic.twitter.com/SoZXEE1XIV
— scottpidity (@scottpidity) June 26, 2020
— Dimitri (@Greekgodx) June 26, 2020
Amazon's acquisition is seen as a commercial move that will put the company at a more leveled playing field with Tesla in the self-driving arena, although Zoox has been oriented at ride-hailing, unlike Tesla, whose products go directly to customers.
Tesla and Zoox are known to have exchanged jabs before. When in 2019, Musk said that by mid-2020, his company's self-driving cars would be fully operational without human interaction, Zoox co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jesse Levinson told Business Insider's 2019 IGNITION conference there was no chance of that coming true.
"They don't have enough sensors or computers to do that given any remotely known technology that exists that humans have ever created", Levinson said at the conference, adding "they're great cars" and that the Tesla autopilot system "on the freeway is, I think, the best out there ... I think if he focused on that aspect it would be better received".
