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

A rocket company losing nearly $5 billion a year is now valued at $2 trillion. That's the SpaceX story, and investors are betting big on it anyway.

The comparison drawing Wall Street's attention is to Amazon, which cratered 90% after the dot-com bubble before becoming a $2.6 trillion giant. SpaceX, freshly public at $135 a share, is being pitched as the next version of that improbable ascent.

The two companies look surprisingly similar up close: satellites, cloud computing, chips, advertising. But the numbers tell a starker story. Amazon pulled in $716.9 billion in revenue last year. SpaceX managed $18.7 billion.

"You're basically buying it at an Amazon valuation when it has one-twentieth the revenue of Amazon," said Jim Lebenthal of Cerity Partners. "SpaceX is an incredibly cool company. I also think it's wildly overvalued right now."

Then there's Elon Musk, who projects $1 trillion in SpaceX revenue by 2030, against an estimated $40 billion this year. As Lebenthal put it, "$960 billion of incremental revenue" doesn't just materialize from optimism alone.