Get your popcorn ready.
Jeff Bezos just made his first public comments about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in a bold way, surfacing a tweet from New York Times reporter Mike Forsythe highlighting Musk’s connections to China via Tesla, which has rising sales and is increasing production capacity in the country.
Bezos quote-tweeted Forsythe with his own comment: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?”
Twitter announced Monday that Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla chief, will buy the social media giant in cash for about $44 billion, or $54.20/share, a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1. The deal could take up to six months to finalize, Bloomberg reported.
Bezos’ tweet is the latest in a mini-feud between the world’s wealthiest people and space rivals that has developed on Twitter over the past several years. Most of the trash talk has come from Musk, who has frequently called out Bezos on Twitter over space satellites, lunar landers, and more, without much of a response.
Bezos seems more inclined to respond as of late. Earlier this month the Amazon founder responded to a tweet from Musk, who polled his followers about converting Twitter’s headquarters into a homeless shelter. Bezos, who stepped down as CEO last year but remains chairman at Amazon, retweeted Musk’s tweet and said, “or do a portion,” with a link to GeekWire’s coverage in 2020 of a homeless shelter attached to one of Amazon’s downtown Seattle office buildings.
Bezos made a big media acquisition of his own in 2013 when he bought The Washington Post for $250 million.
Update: In follow-up tweets, Bezos said his own answer to the question posed in his original tweet is “probably not” and also praised Musk for being “extremely good at navigating this kind of complexity.”
