Billionaire Elon Musk has named three tech titans he believes are the smartest people he ever met. On the “Verdict with Ted Cruz” podcast, the Republican senator asked the Tesla CEO to choose the CEO he most admired or the smartest person he ever met.
Musk praised Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and first CEO and Google co-founder Larry Page as the sharpest people he knew.
The entrepreneur praised the Amazon CEO, saying, “Jeff Bezos has done a lot of difficult and significant things.”
The compliment came despite their well-documented 20-year rivalry, which is mostly focused on their conflicting space aspirations at Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin.
The dynamic between Bezos and Musk has evolved recently, with the Tesla CEO sharing several memes from the comedy movie “Step Brothers,” suggesting a reconciliation between the two tech titans.
“Larry Ellison is very smart. I will say Larry Ellison is one of the smartest people,” Musk added. The SpaceX CEO shares a long-standing bond with Ellison, who committed $1 billion to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter while serving on the Tesla board from 2018 to 2022.
Often referred to as “very close friends,” Ellison reportedly assisted Musk in obtaining expensive Nvidia GPUs to develop artificial intelligence.
Musk then complimented Google co-founder Larry Page, adding he believed a person’s achievements could be used to evaluate their IQ. “To some degree, smart is as smart does,” he said.
The most recent Bloomberg Billionaires Index values Bezos, Ellison, and Page, at $218 billion, $169 billion, and $149 billion, respectively.
Musk, despite losing billions of dollars, with 30 per cent of his fortune wiped out in the last ten weeks, remains at the top of Bloomberg’s list.
In January, Musk, one of the most influential people in the Trump administration, called the Amazon CEO a “copycat” and made fun of Blue Origin’s lunar landing plan. The two have also argued over who first attempted the rocket booster landing.