The Companies Building Tomorrow's Trillion-Dollar Empires

With SpaceX announcing an IPO in the trillions, investors are hunting for the next trillion-dollar whale. One way to find it is by identifying the SpaceX playbook and pattern-matching from there.

The company took an industry with inflated budgets and high amounts of waste that was largely subsidized by the government, and moved at a glacial speed, and determined that it could be reinvented. The reinvention involved a software-first mentality, vertically integrated infrastructure, a belief in waste reduction at all levels, and the storytelling capacity to tie it all to a mission worth believing in. But while the playbook is straightforward, finding companies that possess the capacity for industry-wide transformation and consumer support is less so.

The challenge then for investors is finding who's actually executing versus who's just borrowing the vocabulary. But here are seven companies that are the real deal and that are on trajectories to reach SpaceX-like returns.

Like SpaceX, Relativity Space believes it's possible to re-invent the space industry but they are going about it a different way. They believe it’s possible to build a rocket with 100 parts instead of 100,000 by betting that large-scale 3D printing can do to aerospace manufacturing what containerization did to global trade i.e. compress complexity, shrink supply chains, and make the whole thing dramatically faster. But, when successful, the rocket will be almost secondary to what it proves about manufacturing itself, and that will mean big returns for Relativity Space across the board.

Like SpaceX, Stripe has reimagined the financial industry by approaching it as a technology company and looking to reduce bloat at every turn. This means the business is focused on the idea that finance can be abstracted into clean APIs that any developer can drop into any product. The result is a financial infrastructure layer running beneath a huge portion of e-commerce engines of the internet, but also the retail shops and experiences that power the entire economy. As integration and adoption continues, Stripe will be more and more well-positioned to topple the entire industry.

Like SpaceX, Colossal set out with a big mission that seemed impossible: bringing back extinct species. But the deeper story is what that ambition is really funding. While the mammoth grabs headlines, Colossal is a serious genomics and reproductive technology platform aimed at reimaging the fraught (and some would argue failing) industries focused on conservation and biodiversity at scale.

Not to mention that of those on the list, Colossal is the most capable of driving a consumer revolution and the sort of passion one expects of SpaceX fans. In a way, bringing back the woolly mammoth is comparable to the Falcon Heavy launch; it is a spectacle that funds and validates a genomics platform with far larger applications in conservation and biodiversity. The mammoth might be the lead, but the underlying biotech toolkit is the business and as Colossal succeeds, the possibility for applications of their technology will be almost endless.

Like SpaceX, it entered the market focused on a small experience: the chatbot. But OpenAI's real ambition is to become what Microsoft Office became for productivity or what AWS became for computing, i.e., the default infrastructure layer for an entirely new kind of work. Foundational AI models power enterprise software, developer tools, and automation pipelines at scale, creating a different kind of vertical integration in the enterprise. If that bet lands, which the massive adoption in the past two years would allude to, the revenue opportunity is almost impossible to size.

Like SpaceX, Databricks has identified a waste problem. Every large company is sitting on mountains of data it can't actually use. The company is trying to fix that by building a unified architecture that combines data storage, analytics, and machine learning into a single programmable platform. The pitch is seductive: stop managing a dozen fragmented tools and start running AI across your entire organization from one place. As enterprises race to operationalize AI, whoever owns that infrastructure layer is in an extraordinary position.

Like SpaceX, Anduril saw that defense contracting hadn’t changed much since the Cold War: slow procurement, legacy contractors, and hardware that ships years late and billions over budget. They decided to treat that dysfunction the same way SpaceX did by figuring out smart, more technologically efficient ways to do the same work on a faster timeline. Already, the company is making inroads at a speed that signals they are going to be a top competitive force in the industry, with the market cap that is expected of a company that can revolutionize a field.

While others may claim to be the next big thing, these companies appear to be doing it and have the traction to prove it. As they revolutionize staid industries, they are going to see the market returns that support an industry leader, and savvy investors are taking note.