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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

"Envy" makes it sound like it's bad or sinful. But it just makes total sense to me. Bezos is trying to start a rocket company and this other rocket company is more successful. Of course you want to try to hire away executives from SpaceX, of course you want to compete for the same contracts they are getting.

It's a hard business and many companies have failed. What makes Blue Origin relatively unique is that Bezos has billions more dollars and can keep trying. I hope he does, I think we would be better off in a world where SpaceX has an innovative competitor who vigorously competes with them. The legacy companies like ULA, I don't know if they can reorient themselves to actually compete with SpaceX.

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I don't agree, although that is a charitable interpretation. Bezos was also "envious" [1] of Tesla's tax breaks from jurisdictions courting new gigafactories, which is why he demanded a road show to court breaks for HQ2.

This is obnoxiously wealthy people handling the situations like you'd expect (and yet, in a very unhealthy way). My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [2] [3], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success). Being "relentless" (Bezos) is what you do, being obsessed (Musk) is who you are. Bezos is going to chill on his mega yacht with the new lady friend while Musk is overseeing construction of Starship SNs in the Texas desert.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/behind-amazon-hq2-fiasco-jeff... (Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk)

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/20/elon-musks-ex-wife-on-secret... (Elon Musk’s ex-wife on secret to getting rich: ‘Be obsessed’)

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-St... (Answer at top of page by Justine Musk)

> My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [1], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success).

My perspective, having watched multiple interviews of Elon and Bezos, is that Musk is just really passionate about tech. He's an engineer at heart, that's why he's directly involved in the development of the tech, which is central to all of his businesses. He's also a risk taker and a pioneer, he's not afraid of taking big risky bets on unproven technologies, he seems to actually enjoy doing that, and proving people wrong.

Bezos, on the other hand, is passionate about business and making money. He would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. Once he sees that something is going to be financially successful, he tries to copy it. Amazon is successful because it has good execution, economies of scale and competitive pricing, but it wasn't the first online retailer, or the first cloud provider, etc.

I don't know if I would invest in Blue Origin. Personally, I think Rocket Lab is a much more interesting company (that is already trading on public markets). It's being led by someone who is genuinely passionate about space and has a proven orbital launch vehicle. I wish I could invest in SpaceX, but IMO Rocket Lab is the next best thing to invest in, a mini SpaceX.

> [Bezos] would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works.

You can say a lot of bad things about Jeff Bezos, but confidently claiming that he lacks vision and interest in tech and blindly copies whatever works is...bold.

Who was this "first cloud provider" if it wasn't Amazon?

What kind of 'vision' and tech leadership did Bezos bring to AWS? Arguably none whatsoever.

I recommend reading Steve Yegge's (in)famous "Platforms Rant". https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.

I never saw a corroborating, or adding more detail source for Yegge's post, and I wonder if this wasn't Bezos himself talking. I think someone put him up to it.

This uncorroborated story is not 'conventional understanding'. It doesn't even demonstrate any link to AWS vision or architecture. Service oriented architectures existed years before this mythical memo and AWS didn't exist until years later. This memo reads like a Steve Jobs parody - just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.

> just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.

In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...

The mandate Yegge alludes to in the “platforms rant” is to adopt a service-oriented architecture, not to build a cloud services provider.

Bezos' API mandate declaration in 2002 shows remarkable vision and leadership.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

1) No it doesn't.

2) 99% of this story is fake.

How do you know? Did you work at Amazon at the time? What's with this reflexively hostile posting style?

Tons of people also say Musk is a massive fraud who takes credit for others' work and is simply a cutthroat businessman like Edison without any technical expertise. Your posts sound the same. http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

Bezos and Musk are, in my opinion, clearly very good at both technology and business.

Did you read the linked story? How does demonstrate any tech vision or leadership for AWS by Bezos? Do you just blindly believe all of the claims (that don't even relate to AWS vision/tech leadership) made in the story? Do you honestly believe Bezos - the business leader and highest level manager of Amazon, who has an enormous amount on his plate, who has no technical background, is coming up with all of these high level architectural and tech decisions, instead of, say, the highly qualified and experienced engineers at Amazon? You seem to think billionaires are some kind of superheroes from fantasy land instead of actual human beings. You have to be a naive child to believe half of the claims about Bezos made in this story.

I did read it. I have no idea how much of it is true. But it seems fairly likely that enough of it is true to suggest that Bezos has a good mind for both technology and business.

The main claim made in there seems to be that Bezos wanted Amazon employees to switch to a more dogfooded API/service-oriented approach, with clear interfaces between different teams and areas of concern rather than internal private channels, to enable future renting out of hardware and services to customers, and that after he issued that edict people scrambled to implement it. Maybe Bezos originally came to that decision in part or wholly due to suggestions from others, but, either way, I've seen several people say he indeed did do something like that.

He used to program. He has a degree in "Electrical Engineering and Computer Science" from Princeton. Amazon had a ton of spare resources they could rent out. He's a pretty smart guy and is known for thinking about the long-term. It's not a massive stretch to say it's possible he could've made a decision like that back in 2002, when he had less on his plate than he does now.

How would you know?

Bezos has actually been preaching the same stuff about space as Musk since high school. Needing to get humanity off of earth and wanting to be the one to do it, etc etc.

I only know this because he graduated from the same high school as me (20 years before me), and I did some googling one day. He was the class valedictorian, and while his entire speech isn't transcribed anywhere I know of, The Miami Herald quoted sentences from various high school valedictorian speeches as part of a graduation article, and Jeff Bezos has a few sentences in there.

The Miami Herald archives for 1982 don't seem to be loading for me, but a CNBC article [0] has it quoted.

> ″[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Herald’s article says.

> ″‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’” he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”

It's interesting to me how he was saying this in 1982 but instead went down the path of banking and then eventually Amazon. Yeah Blue Origin was founded in 2000, but like everyone else here is quipping, what has it actually accomplished? I have no basis for this, but I feel like his goals were: 1) Become the richest person in the world. 2) Use my money to lead humanity to space. He doesn't seem to be as good at goal 2 as goal 1.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-c...

> or the first cloud provider, etc.

This is just as uncharitable to Amazon as all those trashing Musk for his extracurricular Twitter activities are in dismissing his technical credibility.

AWS was absolutely revolutionary with EC2 and S3 and Amazon was the first in every meaningful way here.

Yes Bezos is definitely passionate about business, and certainly as a business Amazon is 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude above Tesla or SpaceX.

However, Bezos would not start a rocket company if he wasn't passionate about space. As the saying goes, the best way to make a million dollars in aerospace is to start with a billion.

Airline. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_branson_452106

This makes sense to me also, Bezos came out of finance to start Amazon, Musk always was an engineer.

Yeah I think he's got "envy" as much as one of us would have envy for SpaceX. I'd love to be on the inside of SpaceX working for them and launching things to space. I'm sure Jeff would love to be the guy in Elons shoes just cause that stuff is so cool

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