‘Copycat’: Elon Musk Mocks Jeff Bezos After Amazon Founder Returns As CEO Of AI Startup

Elon Musk took a swipe at Jeff Bezos on Monday after the Amazon founder returned to an operational role to lead a major new AI venture. Quote-tweeting a post announcing the move, Musk wrote, using emojis,

“Haha no way, Copycat,” reviving the long-running rivalry between the two billionaires.

The remarks came after tech reporter Sawyer Merritt shared details of Bezos’s new company, Project Prometheus, which has reportedly raised $6.2 billion in funding and already hired close to 100 staff, including researchers from Meta, OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

According to a New York Times report, Project Prometheus will focus on applying AI to engineering and manufacturing, with ambitions in areas such as computers, aerospace and automobiles, sectors where Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are leading players. Bezos will serve as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a noted Silicon Valley researcher who previously worked with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the experimental X lab and later co-founded Verily.

Bezos’s decision marks his first formal operational role since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in July 2021. In the interim, he has focused on Blue Origin and his ownership of The Washington Post, while also drawing attention for high-profile personal events, including his recent wedding in Venice.

Haha no way 😂

Copy 🐈 https://t.co/TG8UMrWwQr

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2025

The NYT report noted that Bezos has drawn closer to the Trump administration in recent months, attending the president’s inauguration in January and pushing a pro-business shift in the editorial direction of The Washington Post.

Project Prometheus enters an AI landscape dominated by companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. Unlike generative AI models trained on text, the new startup reportedly aims to build systems that learn from real-world experimentation, with the goal of accelerating breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and engineering.