At 2:03 in the morning on January 16, 2025, a man with headphones listened in a control room on the Florida coast as his engineers celebrated the milestones of a just-launched rocket ("The seven engines at full power", "The vehicle has left the platform", "Mach 1"). At three minutes and 10 seconds, the main engines shut down, and the second stage set course for orbit. No one had ever achieved a complete success on a first flight, and on the side of the rocket, they had written a line from the movie Dumb and Dumber: "So you're telling me there's a chance". The first stage was lost on descent. It didn't matter. The man left the room with fists raised, greeted guests sipping pink champagne, and later took his fiancée for pancakes, fried eggs, and sausages at a restaurant in a worn-out shopping center next to a Pizza Hut. It was Jeff Bezos, and his New Glenn had just reached orbit on the first attempt.
That day, his great rival wrote to him on the X social network: "Congratulations on reaching orbit on the first attempt! @jeffbezos". Bezos thanked him and wished him luck with the Starship, which was flying that same day, and Elon Musk ended the exchange with a meme from Step Brothers where Will Ferrell's character asks John C. Reilly's character: "Are we best friends now?". They weren't, of course. And the Starship, which Musk had promised to have in orbit by 2022, would still take another 20 months to arrive.
It arrived this Monday. At 7:48 in the morning, local time, the largest rocket ever built took off from Starbase, SpaceX's company-town at the southern tip of Texas, on its fourteenth test flight. The rocket lost one of its six engines during ascent but still reached orbit at an altitude of about 275 kilometers, released 26 next-generation Starlink satellites, and, after just three hours of flight (10 were planned), landed in the Pacific Ocean amidst a huge fireball. Musk had already celebrated on X while the spacecraft was still in orbit: "First orbital flight of the Starship, a success!". By the way, the Falcon 1, SpaceX's first rocket, reached orbit on September 28, but in 2008, after three consecutive failures.
Few have followed this feud as closely as American journalist Christian Davenport (1973), who has covered the new space race for over a decade at The Washington Post and has just published in Spain, with translation by Jacinto Pariente, Musk vs Bezos. La historia secreta de la nueva (y billonaria) carrera espacial (Deusto), a chronicle as juicy as it is well-documented in which he admits that "numerous journalists, myself included," portrayed the rivalry as the fable of the tortoise and the hare. They had missed a detail, he writes: "Elon Musk never takes a nap".
The tortoise and the hare, however, were at each other's throats. "Two hugely successful magnates throwing punches," Davenport portrays them, in a "schoolyard brawl" that began in 2013 with the dispute over Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A, where Apollo 11 launched, and "degenerated into an undignified squabble over rocket size and speed." And with a clear provocateur. "Elon Musk loves to annoy everyone, but his favorite target is undoubtedly Jeff Bezos," he writes. "He has been hurling a string of insults at him for years, ranging from childish to vulgar, and even geeky."
What other fable have we misunderstood? Davenport ponders before answering, five days before SpaceX's megarocket flight. Many people, he explains, only started paying attention to Musk a few years ago when he entered politics as an ally of Donald Trump, "and I think if that's your introduction to Elon, it's not good because he can be rude, insulting, he steamrolls over people." His stint with DOGE "was not a success. I think even he admits that." But people have forgotten about the SpaceX of 15 years ago, the newcomer that Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman tried to push out of the business, and the Pentagon wanted nothing to do with. He even had to go to court to bid for military launches. "Without SpaceX, the United States has no capability to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station. That capability does not exist," the journalist states.
Now the newcomer is the giant, and it's thanks to public money. "Elon's real superpower is getting money out of the government," Bezos told his executives in 2016, as recounted in the book. Davenport doesn't dispute this. "SpaceX wouldn't exist without NASA and the Pentagon," he admits, and Musk himself acknowledged it, he recalls, when a NASA contract saved his skin, and he changed his password to ilovenasa. But in his view, no one has challenged him. Boeing's Starliner left two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station for nine months, and they had to be brought back by SpaceX, Blue Origin's rocket "exploded," and Amazon Leo has nothing like the over 10,000 Starlink satellites.
"So yes, in that regard, people feel that SpaceX is a de facto monopoly subsidized by the government, which is true," he concedes. "It's also true that the competition has not measured up, and I know for a fact that the United States government is desperate for other companies to step up because it doesn't want the entire national space program to be in the hands of this one company and this one man."
Davenport has dealt with Musk up close. In June 2017, at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne (California), he found, he writes, "an attentive, generous, and even vulnerable person" who confessed to him that every time a rocket explodes, he is "devastated." What broke afterwards when he turned his X account into "a torrent of unrestrained aggressiveness"? "I don't know," he replies. Alone, the first few times he interviewed him, he seemed "very thoughtful, smart, and pensive," a guy who on TV "is sometimes not a great interviewee" because he remains silent before answering and it's almost as if he doesn't hear the interrupting person, "lost in his own head." "If challenged, pressured, or if he feels the person hasn't done their homework, he can be combative." Davenport adds: "If he feels attacked, I think he hits back," and, without wanting to psychoanalyze him too much, I do believe it's a result of a very tough childhood where he was bullied and beaten. And that pattern is seen throughout his entire career: if he feels cornered, he will strike back."
It worked against the military-industrial complex and perhaps that's why, he suspects, he has become more combative over the years. "To a certain extent, it has worked for his companies. I don't know if it has necessarily worked for his public image." And Musk is today, "in many ways," the face of a space program that has always been seen "as an instrument of peaceful exploration, as a sanctuary, as a tool of diplomacy," and there, he warns, there are "some inherent conflicts and some problems."
Before accepting to lead Blue Origin, Dave Limp asked Bezos, with whom he had worked for years at Amazon, a single question: "Is this a hobby for you or a business?" It bothered him "a little," Bezos confessed to the author. Davenport has his answer: "I think for a long time Blue Origin was a hobby for Jeff." While still leading Amazon, he worked at Blue Origin one day a week (Wednesdays) and some Saturdays, "and SpaceX was giving them a good beating." Limp's question, he believes, "laid bare the central tension" that has weighed down the company during its first two decades. Twenty months after the pancakes, the New Glenn remains grounded since it exploded on its Cape Canaveral platform on May 28, during an engine test. Blue Origin swears it will fly before the end of the year.
The book closes in May of last year. In February 2026, SpaceX absorbed xAI, Musk's artificial intelligence company, with the stated purpose of building data centers in orbit. Bezos admits that Prometheus, his new AI company, takes "the bulk" of his time. Is space the new Cloud or is AI an excuse to fund the Starship? "There are many skeptics of AI data centers in orbit," Davenport acknowledges.
But he recalls that SpaceX operates more than 10,000 satellites "and so far, knock on wood, there have been no collisions," because they move away on their own from space debris, other satellites, and even Chinese satellites that, as reported, "tend to harass them." And the two magnates agree. "Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may not be the most popular people in the world right now, but if both, each on their own, come to the conclusion that the key to AI, or one of the keys to powering this transformative technology, is to place data centers in space, I think at least it's something we should pay attention to, and perhaps also view it skeptically, yes." For now, SpaceX's COO, Gwynne Shotwell, plans to use the Starship to launch "AI computing satellites" in 2027.
Regarding Starlink and the war, Davenport writes almost in passing that the Pentagon "was not entirely aware of the consequences of allowing such power to fall into private hands." In June 2025, amid a fight with Trump, Musk threatened to withdraw the Dragon, his astronaut capsule. "I think it was reckless, and it caused a ripple effect in NASA and the Pentagon," says Davenport, because they discovered how much they depended on him. Jim Bridenstine, NASA's administrator during Trump's first term, made it clear, he recalls, that he would not treat Musk "like a celebrity, like a superstar" and that SpaceX would be just another contractor for him, one "spending taxpayers' money." Davenport adds his own, demanding accountability while also seeking competition "so that such a large part of the national enterprise is not solely in one person's hands." "I think, going forward, they will award a contract to another company even if that other company lacks experience, even if it's more expensive, just to have an alternative that competes with SpaceX."
And Europe, or the Miura 5 from the Spanish company PLD Space, which won't fly until 2027? Is there room in this race for someone who isn't a billionaire or the Chinese Communist Party? Davenport believes so, because the space barons "have shown that it can be done" and others are already following suit. And because the next revolution, after landing rockets, lies in satellites that maneuver and refuel in orbit and in lunar infrastructure. "If we are going to build a base on the Moon, and someday go to Mars, there is no way that Elon and SpaceX can do it alone," he concludes. "They can't."