It took barely three full trading days. Since its stock-market debut on June 12 under the ticker SPCX on the Nasdaq, SpaceX’s share price has surged from 135 to most recently 206.26 US dollars – a gain of around 52 percent. On today’s trading day alone the stock is up 7.15 percent. With that, Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI conglomerate climbs to a market capitalization of 2.700 trillion US dollars – overtaking Amazon for the first time, which slips to sixth place at 2.655 trillion US dollars.

The gap is razor-thin, around 45 billion US dollars. But the symbolism is enormous: a company that went public only four days ago, and that generated just 18.7 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025, is now worth more than the retail and cloud giant that turned over 717 billion US dollars in the same year. And it is more than a stock-market curiosity – it is the provisional scoreline in the most expensive personal duel in tech history: Jeff Bezos versus Elon Musk.

The world’s most valuable companies

“T” = trillion (10¹²). As of June 16, 2026.

Why Bezos and Musk are arch-rivals

The rivalry is almost as old as commercial spaceflight itself. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000; Musk followed with SpaceX in 2002. Two billionaires, two rocket companies, one goal – and ever since, a back-and-forth that oscillates between technical competition and personal provocation. Musk has mocked Bezos publicly for years, sometimes wryly, sometimes bluntly. When Blue Origin lost in court against NASA in 2021, Musk simply wrote: “You have been judged.” Bezos countered more subtly earlier this year – with an image of a tortoise, an allusion to Blue Origin’s motto Gradatim Ferociter (“step by step, ferociously”) and to the fable of the tortoise and the hare.

Behind the sniping lies real, hard competition – now on three fronts.

Front 1: Rockets

The original battlefield. SpaceX upended the market with reusable rockets: the Falcon 9 flies on a weekly cadence, and Starship aims to push launch costs down to around 200 US dollars per kilogram (versus roughly 2,700 US dollars for the Falcon 9 today). Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, by contrast, has flown only a handful of times.

The most symbolic clash came over the NASA Moon lander for the Artemis program: in 2021 SpaceX won the initial contract, Blue Origin filed a protest, lost in court – and then secured a second lander contract in 2023 anyway. The irony of the industry: because Blue Origin’s New Glenn arrived late, Amazon had to buy Falcon 9 launches from, of all companies, SpaceX, in order to get its own satellites into orbit.

Front 2: Satellite internet

Here SpaceX is unassailably ahead. Starlink orbits the Earth with more than 9,000 satellites and counts over 10 million customers – the business accounts for 11.4 billion US dollars, or 61 percent of SpaceX’s 2025 revenue. Bezos’s answer today is Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper), which has reached only a few hundred satellites; its commercial launch is planned for mid-2026. In parallel, Blue Origin has announced its own high-performance constellation, TeraWave.

How personal the conflict is becomes clear in a shareholder lawsuit against Amazon: the company allegedly excluded SpaceX – the “most obvious and affordable” launch provider – from its procurement process because of Bezos’s personal rivalry with Musk. Amazon calls the claims without merit.

Front 3: Data centers

This is where 2026 gets explosive, because here the two empires collide twice over – on the ground and in orbit.

On the ground, Amazon is the world’s largest cloud provider with AWS; the segment grew 20 percent in 2025 to around 130 billion US dollars. Musk, in turn, folded his AI company xAI into SpaceX in February 2026 – SpaceX now operates its own AI computing capacity and has thereby pushed, at least indirectly, into AWS territory. One piece of evidence for this new cash machine: according to the IPO prospectus, Anthropic pays SpaceX 1.25 billion US dollars a month through 2029 for cloud computing power.

In orbit, the two are racing toward the boldest idea in the industry – the data center in space, fed by permanent solar energy, cooled by the vacuum, freed from the power and water bottlenecks on the ground. SpaceX has filed an application with the FCC for up to one million satellites and, according to the prospectus, aims to fly a first orbital-data-center test by 2027/28. Bezos counters with Project Sunrise – 51,600 sun-synchronous satellites, tightly integrated with AWS. “These giant training clusters will be better built in space, because we have solar power there 24/7,” Bezos predicted – gigawatt-scale data centers, he says, are realistic within 10 to 20 years.

It is precisely this narrative – Starlink as a cashflow machine, space as the next compute platform for the AI era – that earns SpaceX its current valuation on the stock market.

The valuation: SpaceX is in a league of its own

Set market capitalization against 2025 revenue (the price-to-sales ratio, P/S) and the scale becomes visible. SpaceX is valued at roughly 145 times its annual revenue – while Amazon, with 38 times SpaceX’s revenue, sits at 3.7 times.

For context: even NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable stock and the AI boom’s profiteer par excellence, trades at “only” 23 times revenue. SpaceX sits a factor of six above that. Put differently: whoever buys SpaceX today isn’t paying for the present business, but making a bet on Starlink growth and orbital data centers that don’t yet exist in that form.

The risks of that bet are written in black and white in the prospectus: in 2025 SpaceX booked a net loss of 4.9 billion US dollars, and its accumulated loss since its founding in 2002 stands at 41.3 billion US dollars. The company is carried by Starlink alone; the AI segment (including xAI) lost more than 6 billion US dollars in 2025. Critics accordingly warn of an overvaluation built on a technological future whose timelines – orbital data centers by 2027/28 – even Bezos describes as “a little ambitious.”

Aus Datenschutz-Gründen ist dieser Inhalt ausgeblendet. Die Einbettung von externen Inhalten kann in den Datenschutz-Einstellungen aktiviert werden: