And, much less immediately, to that fanboy’s archnemesis Elon Musk.
When the Amazon founder this summer season turned the primary American entrepreneur to
hurl himself to the edge of space on his personal personal firm’s rocket, Rivian vehicles shuttled Bezos and his fellow astronauts to and from the West Texas launch web site.
The Rivian shuttles throughout the broadly publicized occasion have been, in fact, strategic product placement by Bezos for his handpicked contender to tackle Tesla. On the time, Rivian was nonetheless a non-public firm with no precise merchandise available on the market. However Amazon had made a giant wager on Rivian in 2019, taking a 20% stake within the firm. The famously (or notoriously) calculating Bezos was bringing two of his pet initiatives — Blue Origin and Rivian — onto the worldwide stage on the similar time.
The cherry on prime: It was additionally a giant center finger to Musk.
Bezos and Musk spent a lot of the previous yr
yo-yoing between the titles of Richest and Second Richest individual on the earth. Their feud goes again years, centered on their competing house journey ambitions. Bezos’ Blue Origin has been
fighting NASA over the company’s determination to contract with Musk’s SpaceX to construct a lunar lander meant to take people again to the moon.
To this point, all of Blue Origin’s efforts to struggle NASA’s determination have fallen flat.
However Rivian’s blockbuster IPO — the strongest debut by a US firm since Fb listed its shares in 2012 — offers Bezos one thing of a win within the ongoing proxy battle he is preventing with Musk.
Two years in the past, Amazon led an funding of $700 million in Rivian and introduced it was ordering 100,000 of its electrical vans. On the time, the EV area was crowded with upstart manufacturers corresponding to Nikola, Lordstown and Fisker, all of which have been vying to place themselves as the subsequent large factor. Since then, Rivian has emerged because the heavyweight (helped as a lot by investments from Amazon and Ford as by severe
regulatory investigations into would-be rivals Nikola
and Lordstown).
Rivian may also thank Musk for fomenting the EV hype that traders have been getting drunk on for the previous few years. Many analysts say Tesla, with a market cap of round $1 trillion, is
wildly overvalued, but it surely retains on climbing. FOMO is a strong pressure on Wall Avenue, and people who missed out on Tesla a decade in the past could also be attempting to make up for it by shopping for Rivian, a 12-year-old startup that hasn’t but delivered any merchandise to clients and one way or the other is price greater than
Ford (F) and
GM (GM).
Whether or not Rivian can reside as much as the hype is anybody’s guess. For an investor, it is a consolation to know that Rivian has the backing of somebody with pockets as deep and grudges as bitter as Bezos’.
Investing is at all times dangerous. However one factor we are able to rely on is that uber-rich males will actually purchase whole corporations to spite their enemies moderately than go to remedy.
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