SpaceX and Amazon are tech doppelgangers worth $4.5 trillion—and they’re headed for a collision

A charismatic founder with near-obsessive conviction, a business that bleeds money, and a stock price based on a wildly optimistic valuation. 

In 1997, Jeff Bezos took Amazon public at a price of $18 per share at a $438 million valuation. The online bookseller’s stock would then crater 90% after the dot-com bubble burst, before flourishing into a $2.6 trillion conglomerate that raked in $77.7 billion last year. 

Enter SpaceX in 2026. 

Founded by Elon Musk, the company lost $4.9 billion last year, and went public at $135 a share in June, with a valuation that quickly rose to a sky-high $2 trillion. 

The two mega-cap companies are primarily known for businesses that have little in common, with Amazon dominating the online retail business while SpaceX has become the world’s leading rocket maker. But look a little closer, and the two companies have strikingly similar silhouettes which seem likely to bump up against each other ever more frequently as they compete on the public market stage. 

Perhaps more than any other tech companies out there today, Amazon and SpaceX are both conglomerates with broad collections of assets and businesses that each believe work together to create a more powerful whole....