SPECULATIVE: a Musk - Bezos joint venture

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Those two certainly have little love for each others, their Kuiper and Starlink satellite-Internet projects clashes head-on.

This said,
Put together, their fortunes must be already 20 times the annual NASA budget ($400 billion vs a "paltry" $20 billion)

And their long term objectives are mostly similar: mankind-expansion-into-spaaaaace

So I was wondering, could they set up "joint ventures" to consolidate even further their cash flows ? up to some trillion of dollars ? That solar system expansion will be insanely expensive, to put it midly...

Hence I was thinking about

Amazon selling Starlink subscriptions, or Tesla cars, or Tesla car batteries

And in reverse,

Bezos taking a licence from Tesla and building electric cars

Thought ?
 
Those two certainly have little love for each others, their Kuiper and Starlink satellite-Internet projects clashes head-on.

This said,
Put together, their fortunes must be already 20 times the annual NASA budget ($400 billion vs a "paltry" $20 billion)

And their long term objectives are mostly similar: mankind-expansion-into-spaaaaace

So I was wondering, could they set up "joint ventures" to consolidate even further their cash flows ? up to some trillion of dollars ? That solar system expansion will be insanely expensive, to put it midly...

Hence I was thinking about

Amazon selling Starlink subscriptions, or Tesla cars, or Tesla car batteries

And in reverse,

Bezos taking a licence from Tesla and building electric cars

Thought ?

You'd need to first of all get their goals to align more, see Musk is focused on Mars with "space" other than that as as side-line, nice-to-have thing. Bezos on the other hand has mostly avoided focusing on one aspect OTHER than trying to find a method of reducing the cost of surface to orbit travel. "Space" is his goal not any single planet or destination. Unfortunately that and the personality conflicts have probably soured any chance of a chance of a combined effort which is a shame.
(Though being honest even with their fortunes combined you still need to ensure you make a profit and that engenders certain competition aspects that are not at all helping the REST of the conflict :) At this point in time I would not be surprised to hear that if Bezos actually decided to get even more side-tracked and build electric cars he'd likely name the "Edison" :) )

My hope would be some early discussion that would lead to what amounts to a reusable Falcon-9 booster coupled with a BO-designed high-energy fully reusable upper stage and a jointly produced reusable crew/cargo module. That would be a major shift and be able to service the current and projected launch market with plenty of expand-ability and adaptability to adjust as demand rose.
Of course the downside is it that while this serves Bezos's aim of reducing GTO costs and increasing access it in no way serves Musk's goal and ambitions of getting to Mars as soon as possible and avoiding getting 'side-tracked' by lesser goals. So we'd have the seeds of a future conflict inherent in the system from the beginning...

Randy
 
For example, you could settle your stepmother on Pluto or Ultima Thulé or Sedna - or Omuamua... :p
 

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