Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are clashing again, this time over a turtle.
While both billionaires have long competed in space travel, Musk has been stealing the spotlight in recent days with plans to launch orbiting data centers, and a “self-growing city on the Moon,” though the latter might be seen as a fail since Elon initially wanted to go to Mars.
It looks like Bezos wants to remind the public about his own company Blue Origin, which also has plans for the Moon. On Monday, he tweeted an image of a giant tortoise. Musk was quick to dump on the image by making a poop joke. “Turtle heading?” he wrote, later adding: “When it’s coming out slowly, but ferociously.”
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Although Bezos didn’t say why he tweeted the turtle image, it’s likely a nod to the Tortoise and the Hare fable. Though Musk is making headlines today, Bezos is betting Blue Origin will ultimately win the space race.
The tortoise has also been featured on the company’s crest and Blue Origin space vehicles. In 2016, Bezos explained the crest, saying, “We believe slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, and we have to do everything one step at a time. Building a flying vehicle, you can’t cut any corners.”
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Blue Origin has its sights set on the Moon as well. Last year, his company jumped at the chance to steal business from SpaceX and build a moon lander for NASA.
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In contrast, Musk dismissed Moon trips as a “distraction” a year ago only to pivot this weekend. In a tweet after Bezos posted the tortoise image, Musk surprisingly conceded that Blue Origin “might land something on the Moon before SpaceX and that’s fine by me. I will be one of the first to congratulate them.
“However, what really matters for the future is being able to land millions of tons of equipment and people to build a self-growing city on the Moon. In this respect, perhaps we are be more the tortoise than the hare for now,” Musk added.
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I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I’m currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country’s technology sector.
Since 2020, I’ve covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I’ve combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink’s cellular service.
I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. Earlier this year, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.
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