Elon Musk is a known mischief-monger on microblogging website Twitter, with some of his tweets yielding immense results for the Tesla CEO, both good and bad.?
A recent one, has the potential to be right up there, though there has been no response from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos yet.
That¡¯s right, Elon Musk took a dig at the world¡¯s richest billionaire Jeff Bezos on Twitter recently. The tweet he put out was in response to Amazon acquiring self-driving-taxi company Zoox for $1.2 billion.
In his tweet, Musk called Bezos a copycat, apparently for acquiring stakes in an autonomous-taxi company, a long standing vision of Musk¡¯s own electric vehicle giant Tesla Inc.
With its investment, Amazon has marked a major step forward in the autonomous ride sharing circle. Zoox is a California-based autonomous vehicle company that started in 2014 with a vision of ¡°purpose-built, zero-emissions vehicles designed for autonomous ride-hailing,¡± as per the company.
Amazon will be using Zoox¡¯s advances in autonomous driving technology to automate its own delivery fleet.The company has already invested in a huge fleet of electric vehicles to cut down its carbon footprint as a part of its ¡®¡¯Climate Pledge¡± to be a carbon neutral company by 2040.
Zoox¡¯s development makes it a direct rival to Tesla, which has since long envisioned a fleet of autonomous Teslas roaming around a city for ride bookings. So it was inevitable for the two to clash at some point, and they did, back in 2019.
When Musk claimed in 2019 that Tesla¡¯s autonomous cars will be able to run without human interaction by mid-2020, Zoox co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jesse Levinson disregarded the claims in a jiffy at the Business Insider's 2019 IGNITION conference.
As quoted in a report by Business Insider, he said "They don't have enough sensors or computers to do that given any remotely known technology that exists that humans have ever created," Levinson said at the conference, adding "they're great cars" and that the Tesla Autopilot system "on the freeway is, I think, the best out there ... I think if he focused on that aspect it would be better received."
And he turned out to be right, at least until now. Tesla¡¯s electric cars, even in their complete autonomous mode, require a human to be sitting behind the wheel. This is partly because of the regulations around autonomous vehicles and of course, that the autonomous system still can¡¯t be trusted completely.
Musk¡¯s jibe at Bezos for funding his competitor might be a mark of fear but in all probability, he meant it to be nothing but fun. So the recent tweet by the tech billionaire should be taken lightly, and nothing else.