Jeff Bezos shares old article predicting Amazon’s failure, Elon Musk hands him silver medal

(Image: AFP)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took to Twitter to share a 1999 magazine clipping that predicted the eventual downfall of the company.

An article titled ‘Amazon Bomb’ was published in Barron magazine said Amazon is “just another middleman” and the stock price of the company would come crashing down. It also predicted that the real winners of the internet boom would be “firms that sell their own products directly to consumers.”

Evidently, the article didn’t age well. Bezos shared the clipping saying that this was just one of the stories predicting Amazon’s failure. “Today, Amazon is one of the world’s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries,” he added.

Listen and be open, but don’t let anybody tell you who you are. This was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail. Today, Amazon is one of the world’s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries. pic.twitter.com/MgMsQHwqZl

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) October 11, 2021

While the tweet garnered over 64,000 likes and praises in the comment section, Space X founder and Bezos’ business rival Elon Musk wasn’t impressed. He responded to the tweet with a silver medal emoji.

In September, Musk became the world’s richest person with a fortune of over $200 billion surpassing Bezos, according to Forbes. Taking a celebratory crack, Musk had written in a short email to the publication that he would be “sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B., along with a silver medal.” Well, now he has!

The two billionaires have locked horns earlier when Musk responded to Amazon’s lawsuit saying that filing legal actions against his company is Jeff Bezos' full-time job.

This came after Amazon asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to dismiss SpaceX’s latest amendment to its Starlink satellite network, CNBC had reported.

“If lobbying and lawyers could get you to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto right now,” Musk had said in a tweet in response to a user on the microblogging platform.

The two technocrats who have been trying to launch long-range orbital rockets were competing for a coveted contract from the government to build a spaceship to deliver astronauts to the moon as early as 2024.