GoKawiilIt’s the latest Star Wars battle. Only this time, the fight is for satellites. Amazon is paying $11.57 billion to acquire Globalstar, the little-known company behind Apple’s Emergency SOS feature. It’s the latest episode of Jeff Bezos’s long-running space rivalry with Elon Musk. The move gives Amazon a quicker way to take on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its Starlink network, which already has more than 9 million users worldwide, Reuters reports.
The deal adds Globalstar’s two dozen satellites to Amazon’s growing Project Kuiper network. Amazon plans to launch about 3,200 satellites by 2029. That still leaves it far behind Starlink’s roughly 10,000 satellites in orbit. So Amazon is buying something more valuable than hardware. Globalstar’s technology can send messages directly to phones without a cell tower, making it useful during hurricanes, blackouts, road trips, and in rural areas where bars disappear. Amazon says it wants to roll out that service in 2028.
For Amazon, this is not really about catching Musk today. It is about owning the next version of your phone tomorrow.