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Uh oh, is Elon Musk buying Amazon?

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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 13: Elon Musk arrives at the 10th Annual Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on April 13, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Photo by Steve Granitz/FilmMagic

When we already have too much Elon Musk in our newsfeed, stories have spread online that the Tesla owner and freshly minted Trump advisor bought online retail giant Amazon. It’s not true. However, a feud between Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos might help explain the speculation.

According to Snopes, the story that Musk, the world’s richest man, has added Amazon to his portfolio seemingly started on a YouTube channel called Elon Musk Rewind, which has since been taken down. Before that, though, the long-running channel had hundreds of thousands of followers and regularly posted Musk content, so to some, the story seemed reasonable.

The video announcing the Amazon news was titled, “Elon Musk Just BOUGHT Amazon & Ends All Competition!” That YouTube post was shared thousands of times online, and, as these things go, many more clickbait posts showed Musk holding an Amazon contract like the one below.

via pe/X

All combined, Musk bought Twitter (now X) two years ago and has long sparred with his billionaire rival. So the announcement he’d acquired another internet monolith seemed, on the one hand, not so unreasonable. But Musk’s photo with the Amazon contract proved to be AI-generated, the YouTube video and channel subsequently and inexplicably disappeared, no legitimate news sources have reported the acquisition, and, at this point, falsely claiming Musk has purchased other major companies — including CNN — is an entire online fake news genre of its own.

The rich guys are fighting, though

With that settled, “Dark Maga” Musk news — the proposed head of an entirely new government agency, the “Department of Government Efficiency,” in the second Trump administration, and known for regularly firing rockets into space with SpaceX — rarely needs an accelerant to go viral.

So, possibly adding fuel to the Amazon flame, Musk did pick a fight with Bezos when he said Bezos told others to sell their SpaceX and Tesla stock because Trump would lose, and as a result, because Musk supported Trump, Tesla stock would tank. See below:

via Elon Musk/X

Bezos — who also owns The Washington Post, was already in some political hot water for reportedly nixing a planned Kamala Harris endorsement from the outlet — chimed in on Musk’s post, clarifying, “This is 100% not true.” And graciously, Musk commented, “Well then, I stand corrected.”

Amazon and Trump aside, in the context of Musk and Bezos, we’d like to steer the conversation to what Senator Bernie Sanders has to say about the two tabloid-friendly oligarchs here:

via Bernie Sanders/X

Finally, there is some actual legal news to share about Musk and Bezos. Since Musk took over X, ad revenue has declined on the platform. Musk has named Twitch — which Bezos also owns in a lawsuit, along with several other companies — for illegally conspiring to bring down X.

In August, X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared this post about the legal action below. “The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars,” Yaccarino said. Musk put it more plainly when he said, in a post of his own, “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war.”

via Linda Yaccarino/X
via Elon Musk/X

Boycott or not, multiple reports say that post-Trump win, some advertisers have returned to X, and Musk’s Tesla stock has surged, adding $70 billion – with a “b” — to Musk’s bottom line, according to some estimates. So maybe Musk’s Trump support was a business decision and not based on policy, after all. Oh, will our corporate overlords ever stop fighting? Who knows. Musk and Bezos are locked in a space race, and as far as we’re concerned, both men can colonize Mars on their own, and that day can’t come soon enough.

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