The Biggest Billionaire Feuds

Billionaires. They're just like us. Not really. However, despite their incredible wealth, they always have time to get into petty spats or to publicly denigrate each other. And with the recent proliferation of social media, some use their platform to fire off hot takes on the topical issue of the day. 

Elon Musk, everyone's favorite severely online CEO of Tesla, Inc. and SpaceX, has no filter on Twitter. Example: "The coronavirus panic is dumb," he tweeted during a possible pandemic. Another gem: "Coachella should postpone itself until it stops sucking," he tweeted. Never change, Elon. And then there's Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO and richest man in the world. In January 2019, Business Insider estimated the online retail giant founder was earning slightly more than minimum wage at the time, hauling in approximately $149,353 per minute. Does he get dental with that? Anyway, as a result of his fantastical wealth, many to view him as the avatar for the American dream, but just as many to see him as Lex Luthor come to life. Feuds come quickly for Bezos.

This much money can cause quite a few enemies, so whether they are trading barbs with each other, staring down a hostile Congress, or using their enormous wealth and power to crush things they don't like, here are some of the recent and biggest billionaire feuds.

Senator Bernie Sanders loves to rail against billionaires, but there is one specific target who he describes as one of the "faces of greed:" Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (est. $116.9 billion). And there's no love lost between the two, either. In 2016, the Bezos-owned The Washington Post infamously published sixteen negative stories on Sanders in sixteen hours (via FAIR).

While there are countless stories of alleged worker mistreatment and employee deaths in Amazon's more than 100 fulfillment centers across the country, Sanders relentlessly hammers the tech CEO for these conditions and failing to pay his workers a livable wage. "Count to ten. In those ten seconds, Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, just made more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year. An entire year," the Senator tweeted in 2018. As a result, Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign led all candidates in donations from Amazon employees.

That same year, Sanders introduced the "Stop BEZOS Act," a bill "that would require large employers such as Amazon.com and Walmart to pay the government for food stamps, public housing, Medicaid and other federal assistance received by their workers" (via The Washington Post). Less than two months later, Amazon announced that it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its (non-contract) workers in the United States (via The New York Times). 

Former Microsoft CEO and Los Clippers owner Steve Ballmer (est. $56.9 billion) entered a very public feud with Madison Square Garden Company CEO and New York Knicks owner James Dolan (est. $2 billion) over the most sports billionaire of things — a new stadium (via Fox Business).

Here's the rundown: Ballmer is proposing a new stadium for the Los Angeles Clippers in Inglewood, Calif., to serve as the future home of the franchise once the team's lease at the Staples Center is up in 2024. The problem for Dolan? The new stadium would be located a mile from the Forum, an indoor arena owned by his Madison Square Garden Company that would directly compete with the Forum for concert and event revenue. So how did Dolan respond? He "filed lawsuits against the city" and even bankrolled a failed mayoral bid to block the construction. 

"We're on a path where we think we can build the arena, whatever happens in the litigation," Ballmer told ESPN in October 2019. "You want to hit us in the nose? OK! We'll keep moving. You can't knock us down! I'm not sure they understand what they've gotten themselves into, from my perspective in the sense that we'll just keep going." Per the New York Daily News, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver attempted to "pitch a compromise" and "broker a meeting" between the two billionaires, but it didn't happen.

On Oct. 23, 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (est. $63.4 billion) testified before the House Financial Services Committee, where members of Congress asked the tech giant about a variety of topics including political advertising. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically grilled Zuckerberg about the lack of fact-checking of the political ads by his company. "Well, congresswoman, I think lying is bad," Zuckerberg answered (via ArsTechnica). "I think if you're gonna lie, that would be bad." However, he added that the public should determine for themselves if politicians are lying or not. Spoiler: That didn't go well.

In an open letter published to The New York Times, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who penned the Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network, blasted Zuckerberg for failing to take down blatantly false political advertisements. "Right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son," Sorkin wrote. "Every square inch of that is a lie and it's under your logo. That's not defending free speech, Mark, that's assaulting truth."

Zuckerberg fired back with a monologue from another Sorkin movie⁠ — 1995's The American President. "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours," Zuckerberg wrote, in part, on his official Facebook page.

Forgive us for another Elon Musk slide, but the Tesla founder with the combative personality has never met a feud he didn't like. Feuds are his thing. Do you remember the youth soccer team that was trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand? Well, after Vernon Unsworth, a British cave diver who helped with the rescue, called Musk's attempted involvement a "PR stunt," Musk seemingly referenced Unsworth as a "pedo guy" in a since-deleted tweet. He later doubled down in "off the record" emails to Buzzfeed that Unsworth moved to Thailand to take "a child bride," He also threatened Unsworth to sue him. Unsworth did just that, but Musk won the defamation suit since his initial tweet didn't mention Unsworth by name.

In one of Musk's wilder feuds, the brother of notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar vowed to "take down" Musk for allegedly stealing his idea for a "toy flamethrower" (via Telegraph). Roberto Escobar claimed that a Tesla engineer visited the Escobar compound in 2017 where he shared "the Escobar brothers' stories of burning cash to keep warm." Somehow, this supposedly led to the creation of a product from Musk's The Boring Company.  

Responding to an Apple News article that laid Escobar's plan to sue, Musk tweeted, "It's Not a Flamethrower, Mr. Escobar." To get around custom agencies (and we assume to troll Escobar), Musk rebranded his product. "Apparently, some customs agencies are saying they won't allow shipment of anything called a 'Flamethrower,'" he tweeted. "To solve this, we are renaming it 'Not a Flamethrower.'"