Reuters
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, took to Twitter to needle Jeff Bezos—again.
The cause this time? On Thursday, a judge struck down a lawsuit Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, had filed against NASA, over claims that the space agency improperly awarded a $2.9 billion contract entirely to Musk’s firm SpaceX.
Musk posted a meme celebrating the loss: “You have been judged,” it read.
CNBC first reported on Thursday’s decision. The full opinion remains sealed for the time being.
The billionaires’ space feud traces to last spring, when NASA handed the lunar lander contract to SpaceX. Blue Origin and another firm, Dynetics, had sought at least a piece of the award.
Blue Origin tried to appeal to the Government Accountability Office, though its complaints were shot down. The GAO’s managing associate general counsel for procurement law said that “SpaceX submitted the lowest-priced proposal with the highest rating, and... the offers submitted by Blue Origin and Dynetics were significantly higher in price.”
Bezos then offered to waive $2 billion in fees to NASA, an effort that also fell flat.
When the company ultimately filed its lawsuit in August, Musk was clearly irked by Bezos’ apparent hypocrisy; the Amazon founder had previously lamented in an interview that space development is slower in the modern era because “losers” sue the federal government.
“Iron(y)man,” Musk tweeted.
Subsequently, in October, Musk found an opportunity to virally dunk on Bezos again. As shares of Musk’s electric car business, Tesla, skyrocketed, he extended his lead over Bezos as the world's richest man.
Bezos posted a tweet boasting of Amazon’s ascent in the face of critics “telling us all the ways we were going to fail.”
Musk responded with a single emoji: a silver medal.