“See space. Save billions.”
Austin, Texas-based Yeti Coolers last week unveiled a billboard over its flagship store in Austin emblazoned with those words, set against a backdrop of mountains and starry skies.
The apparent butt of this joke is the space race between billionaire Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Musk’s SpaceX announced this year its plans of building a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Austin. Bezos recently took an 11-minute flight to space that cost over $2.5 million per second, as the El Paso Times reported.
“With SpaceX and Tesla and everyone trying to get to Mars out of Texas it seems, we love the outdoors, and there’s a lot of space out there,” Paulie Dery, Yeti’s vice president of marketing, told Business Insider last week. “There’s a big chunk of the world on this planet, and we think it’s pretty special and it doesn’t cost you billions.”
This is not the first tongue-in-cheek billboard that Yeti has placed over its property. A past ad, also apparently Musk-related, depicted migratory ducks with the caption “They’re probably from California too.” Ostensibly, that joke referenced the many business leaders who have relocated to Austin in recent years, including Musk himself, who moved in 2020 due to disagreements with California’s COVID-19 policy.
With a new Tesla factory under construction just outside Austin and an industrial site nearby that Musk is eyeing for The Boring Company—a new creator of transportation, utility, and freight tunnels—the billboard jabs from Yeti are likely just getting started.