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Elon Musk wants Jeff Bezos to know he’s No 1. Tesla Inc’s co-founder responded to a tweet from Bezos early on Monday with a silver medal emoji after the gap between the world’s two richest people increased last week through the surging valuation of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. His net worth is now US$222 billion, while Amazon.com Inc.’s Bezos is at US$190,8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The jab escalates the public spat between the two billionaires, who are both trying to revolutionise the space industry.

Bezos’s Blue Origin is challenging a US government contract with SpaceX to develop technology to land people on the moon again, while Musk has previously taken to Twitter to call Amazon’s founder a “copy cat” for his e-commerce firm’s space-focused ventures.

In a recent filing with US regulators, Amazon’s satellite subsidiary also accused Musk and his companies of flouting regulations with a general attitude that “rules are for other people.”

In his tweet late on Sunday, Bezos posted an image of a 1999 article from Barron’s that criticised Amazon and described it as one of many stories that predicted his company’s demise.

Musk, 50, added about US$9 billion to his fortune last Friday after an agreement with investors valued SpaceX in excess of US$100 billion, more than quadruple the size of Blue Origin, according to Bloomberg’s wealth index.

Musk still derives around three-quarters of his wealth from Tesla, which he co-founded in 2003 after making a fortune from the sale of e-commerce site PayPal to eBay Inc for US$1,5 billion. — Bloomberg