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- Elon Musk said Jeff Bezos "retired to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX."
- His tweet comes after Amazon's Kuiper filed a FCC protest letter about SpaceX's Starlink network.
- Bezos, Amazon's founder and executive chairman, stepped down as CEO in July.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Elon Musk on Friday took a jab at Jeff Bezos after an Amazon subsidiary protested against SpaceX's plans for more Starlink satellites.
SpaceX CEO Musk tweeted that Bezos, Amazon's founder and executive chairman, had "retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX." Musk misspelled Bezos' name as "Besos" in the tweet.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July.
-Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2021
Musk's tweet was in response to an article about Amazon's Kuiper, a satellite-internet subsidiary, on Wednesday filing a protest letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against SpaceX's plans to expand its Starlink network of internet satellites.
SpaceX's proposed plans for a second generation of Starlink would send nearly 30,000 satellites into orbit, adding to its 1,740 satellites already in space.
Kuiper said in the letter that SpaceX broke the rules by proposing two configurations for the satellite constellation, rather than just one. SpaceX had said that the second proposal was a backup, in case the FCC rejected the first.
"SpaceX's novel approach of applying for two mutually exclusive configurations is at odds with both the Commission's rules and public policy," Mariah Dodson Shuman, Kuiper's corporate counsel, wrote in the FCC letter.
The letter is not a lawsuit.
This isn't the first time one of Bezos' companies has argued against SpaceX.
Blue Origin, Bezos' rocket company, has filed a complaint against NASA and sued the agency over awarding SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to send humans to the moon. NASA has put SpaceX's contract on pause so it can assess the suit.
The two billionaires have been known for digging at one another in the past. Musk has called Bezos a copycat and mocked Blue Origin's space flights and moon lander.
After SpaceX won the NASA contract, Blue Origin posted infographics on its website that appeared to cherry pick comparison between its own Blue Moon lunar lander and SpaceX's "immensely complex and high risk" Starship, Insider's Morgan McFall-Johnsen reported.