Inside the Musk/Bezos space race

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. The space race used to be waged between countries, like the US and Russia. Now the race to control outer space is being waged between two tech billionaires and their companies. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Bezos is of course famous for creating Amazon, buying the Washington Post and founding the cloud computing company, Amazon Web Services. Elon Musk is famous for being the CEO of Tesla, buying Twitter and turning it into X and founding Starlink, which manufactures and launches satellites. Musk was also appointed by President Donald Trump to run Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency. Bezos and Musk each want to colonize the moon and turn space into a supply chain for Earth. My guest, journalist Josh Tyrangiel, writes that the two men hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind's understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they've previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.

Accomplishing the visions of either man would rely on creating giant data centers in space. Tyrangiel is a staff writer at the Atlantic and wrote the November cover story titled Choose Your Overlord, Musk versus Bezos. In the piece, he describes their visions for colonizing outer space, the technology they're developing, and what it would mean to turn parts of the moon into businesses. The rivalry between Bezos and Musk is so powerful, Tyrangiel says, their only real competition is with each other. Tyrangiel is a former Washington Post columnist where he covered AI. He also led the global newsrooms at Bloomberg, Vice and Time Magazine. His latest book, AI for Good, is about people finding ways to use AI that are fixing problems, not causing them.

Josh Tyrangiel, welcome to Fresh Air.

These space colonization efforts are being led by billionaires and their businesses. I know Bezos and Musk love the idea of space exploration, and they're taking big financial risks, but they also stand to make huge profits and have great power.

Their investors stand to lose money or profit too. But what does it mean that something with such big implications for the future of mankind and for the future of our planet and outer space, that these efforts are being led by private enterprise and not the US government?

Josh Tyrangiel (2:50)

It's a great question, and it really goes to the heart of this very strange moment we're in, and space is a part of it, right? So in the early 2000s, the United States government made a policy decision, which basically opened up space to commercial development. There was a notion that the government itself was slow, expensive, its development processes for rockets, for satellites, for all sorts of things were just not going to be competitive with private enterprise. And so we invited these private enterprises in, and at that point, it was really hard to know what the outcome would be. Jeff Bezos, in 2001, started Blue Origin, but many people described it to me as much more of a think tank or a science experiment for its first decade. SpaceX was almost founded impetuously. It was a pirate ship, as one person described it to me. And really, they didn't know what their plan was other than to launch things into space. The Commercial Space Act allowed all of this activity to happen, and even people who are really critical of Bezos and Musk believe that it was the right call, believe that the degree of space activity we have, economic activity, research activity, would never have been achieved without opening this up.

At the same time, without governance over it, what you get is a situation where one or two people properly capitalized can first take over a market. So it's sort of stunning how successful Elon Musk has been in space. I mean, one stat that just floored me is that in 2025, SpaceX launched about 80 percent of the things in orbit, 80 percent. And its next closest competitor was not Jeff Bezos.

It was the government of China. So you have an individual controlling a company, and essentially he has supra national capabilities. And what we discovered is that when you outsource that capability to an individual, you're at the mercy of their whims. And so as far back as the early 2000s, I had sources talk to me about this notion within the Air Force of people calling it the mercurial billionaire problem. And they could foresee that down the road, if one person or a handful of people had properly capitalized their space businesses, there was nothing preventing them from doing what they wanted to do. We briefly saw an example of this when President Trump and Elon Musk were sort of post-Doge feuding, and Musk said that he was no longer going to produce the rocket that could take Americans to the International Space Station. And he was going to cancel flights. And if he did that, we would have no way to get Americans to the space station domestically. What we would have had to do was pay $80 million to a Russian rocket to put an American on it to get it to the space station.