Revealed: The secret notes of Blue Origin leaders trying to catch SpaceX

Subtract 100 years and Bezos would have taken his financial background and applied it to found Amazon in 1895 as a garage sale then scale it as far & fast as possible until it was a flea market operator on steroids, crushing all competition, giving Sears Roebuck the same threat only a century earlier.

By 1900 Bezos would have had enough money to indulge his imagination in an approach to powered flight, with the engineering luxury of no requirment for it to perform financially for the forseeable future, but who knows how much time he dedicates to spending in the garage himself any more, or what they're doing in there most of the time anyway.

Musk would have taken his financial background and in 1902 began progress toward his version of a flying machine, perhaps launching one before the Wright Brothers achieved theirs. If one person could do the work of two, maybe that would happen.

While that was going on then Musk would build a single EV prototype "on the side" in his garage that was considered state-of-the-art in 1904 even though not entirely perfected. Then scaled it by cloning as many as possible, constantly suffering from & overcoming hardware obstacles along the way. Tesla himself would have been alive and in his prime, and if brought on the team, then Henry Ford's chances might have been quite a bit more limited.

Then Bezos would get recognition for his less-well-publicized flying machine as his indulgence becomes realized.

And straightforward comparisons between these two approaches should eventually be able to be made.

By the time Packard & Hewlett came along in 1939 there would have been far less doubt that a garage was the ideal place to start.

I mean if you can make your employees work 80hr weeks for below market rates that’s a winning strategy.