“I’m sending a giant statue of the digit ‘2’ to Jeffrey B., along with a silver medal,” Musk told Forbes in an email.
Forbes reported Musk regained his spot on top of its list of the richest people in the world on Monday. While doing so, he also became the third person to ever be worth $200 billion.
The two billionaires have swapped places for the title of the world’s wealthiest person for months as their stocks have fluctuated. According to Bloomberg’s billionaires’ index, Musk is currently worth $213 billion, compared to Bezos’ fortune of $197 billion.
Before Musk briefly displaced him as the richest person in the world in January, Bezos had held the title since 2017. In 2018, Bezos became the world’s richest man in recent history with a net worth above $150 billion, and he became the first person to have a net worth over $200 billion in August of 2020.
Musk and Bezos have also recently taken their competition beyond Earth’s limits. With their respective space ventures, Bezos beat out Musk when he flew on a craft from his company Blue Origin to suborbital space on a ten-minute journey in July. (British billionaire Richard Branson beat Bezos into space by mere weeks with his own rocket trip.)
“If lobbying [and] lawyers could get [you] to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto [right now],” Musk tweeted about the suit.
Musk remarked again on Twitter, saying Bezos “retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.”
However, there have been rare moments of pleasantries between the two regarding their space ambitions. Musk wished Bezos good luck on Twitter ahead of Blue Origin’s July launch, and Bezos returned the kind words after SpaceX’s journey two weeks ago, tweeting: “Another step toward a future where space is accessible to all of us.”
