The CEO of Rivian, RJ Scaringe, has taken a swipe at Elon Musk by saying that ignoring the Tesla mogul and trusting Jeff Bezos was one of his best business decisions.
The entrepreneur revealed in an interview with GQ that his key to success is ignoring Musk and trusting Amazon boss Bezos.
Scaringe first set up his electric vehicle company at the age of 26 and has had to face a lot of comments from Musk over the years.
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In 2021, Rivian began manufacturing the R1T electric pickup truck, but when production slowed down to just over one truck per day, Musk took his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to mock Scaringe, saying: “Prototypes are trivial compared to scaling production and supply chain.”
In a separate tweet, he also said: “There have been hundreds of automotive startups, both electric and combustion, but Tesla is the only American carmaker to reach high-volume production and positive cash flow in the past 100 years.”
Now, Scaringe has taken a shot back at Musk in an interview, remarking in an interview: “Making bombastic statements is always a faster way to get a lot of coverage, a lot of clicks, but we don’t have a shortage of demand; we have a lot of people really excited. In fact, our biggest customer complaint today is that we’re not building vehicles fast enough.
“If you’re a race-car driver, and you spend all your time looking at the cars, the left and the right, you’re going to run into the wall. When you play the game that we’re playing, we need to focus on the products we’re building.”
Taking advice from billionaire Bezos, Scaringe added: “I think he connects with entrepreneurs and people who have an appetite and a tolerance for high risk, and that’s certainly me.”
Amazon have close ties with Rivian after investing $700 million in the company and even ordered 100,000 electric vans in 2019.
They were also instrumental in helping Rivian to grow as Scaringe recalls how they encouraged him to think about his business like a game of chess.
He went on to say: “Our objective is to sell many millions of cars a year. But you can’t press a button and go from zero to 5 million cars or 10 million cars a year.
“It takes a lot of buildup. It’s a complex, multidimensional 20-year chess game.”
There’s no word yet on whether Musk will be firing back.