Bill Gates Says Elon Musk's Reasoning on Mars and Electric Cars Is Flawed

The kids are fighting again.

Going Overboard

Microsoft co-founer and philanthropist Bill Gates has a complicated relationship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

In his hotly-anticipated upcoming book titled "Elon Musk," serial biographer Walter Isaacson details how Gates became disillusioned with Musk's ongoing efforts to colonize Mars and leave a doomed Earth behind.

"I’m not a Mars person," Gates told Isaacson, according to an excerpt of the book published by CNBC. "He’s overboard on Mars."

"I let him explain his Mars thinking to me, which is kind of bizarre thinking," he added. "It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down and, you know, be alive after we all kill each other."

Another area where the two clearly have irreconcilable differences is in their view of electric vehicles, with Gates apparently lecturing Musk about the tenability of the electric semi-trucks that Tesla is betting big on.

"I showed him the numbers," Gates told Isaacson. "It’s an area where I clearly knew something that he didn’t."

Who Shorted

The mercurial CEO has a well-documented hatred for short sellers who bet against the EV maker, so when it turned out that Gates himself made a $1.5 billion bet that Tesla would go down in value, Musk was furious.

"I apologized to him," Gates told Isaacson. "Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally."

For his part, Musk resorted to schoolyard tactics. In April 2022, he tweeted a cruel dig comparing Gates to the "pregnant man" emoji, adding the caption "in case u need to lose a boner fast."

Leaked messages between the two, later confirmed by Musk himself, revealed that Gates still had a half-billion dollar position against Tesla.

"At this point, I am convinced that he is categorically insane (and an asshole to the core)," Musk later texted Isaacson. "I did actually want to like him (sigh)."

The two men have butted heads on a number of occasions, from fighting over Musk spreading COVID-19 misinformation on X-formerly-Twitter, to Gates buying a Porsche Taycan instead of a Tesla.

Meanwhile, Gates has historically chosen the high road, giving Musk credit where credit is due.

"You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior," Gates said at a 2022 dinner in Washington, DC, as quoted by Isaacson, "but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has."

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