Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Other Rocket Moguls Poised to Benefit From SpaceX IPO | Vanity Fair

Come Friday, the initial public offering of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space-exploration-meets-AI mishmash company, is expected to mint around 4,000 new millionaires, multiple new billionaires, and potentially even turn its founder into the world’s first-ever trillionaire.

Under the ticker SPCX, the company plans to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece—bringing its total market cap to $1.77 trillion and making it the largest IPO in history. (The IPO record is currently held by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco, which had a $1.7 trillion valuation when it went public in 2019.) If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will pocket $74.4 billion from the offering.

Read A Billion to One: From the mad scientists to the megadonors, a dispatch on the money, power, and influence of technology.

In part, that’s because SpaceX, in typical Musk fashion, doesn’t play by traditional rules. In February, Musk folded his AI company, xAI, which makes the anti-liberal Grok and his satellite-internet service, Starlink, into SpaceX, inflating its value. The IPO, whose lead underwriter is Goldman Sachs, now values the company at more than 90 times its 2025 revenue. Financial-research firm Morningstar, meanwhile, estimated the fair value of SpaceX’s rocket launch and Starship divisions at $611 billion and gave its AI division a provisional value of $180 billion—all in, about $780 billion, nearly a trillion dollars short of the IPO’s implied valuation.

To get the listing off the ground, Nasdaq implemented a new rule allowing mega-offerings like SpaceX—and OpenAI and Anthropic, expected to follow in the coming months—to list in just 15 days, rather than the traditional one year. The S&P 500, meanwhile, is sticking to its one-year seasoning period.

So who’s getting rich?

Already the world’s richest man, Musk is worth more than $700 billion and stands to earn even more from his 42% stake at the $135 list price—though he can’t sell his shares until the company hits various operational milestones, per the IPO filings. Depending on where the stock trades in its first few days, he could become the world’s first trillionaire.

Peter Thiel once declared, “I would never bet against Elon—in anything. That’s hard rule number one.” It’s a position that has benefited the PayPal founder handsomely. Thiel’s Founders Fund was among SpaceX’s earliest investors and now owns a stake that could reportedly end up worth more than $60 billion.

Luke Nosek, Thiel’s fellow PayPal founder and Founders Fund partner, was likewise one of SpaceX’s first institutional investors. Nosek holds a stake worth roughly $2.5 billion at the IPO price and sits on the company’s board of directors. He also cofounded Gigafund, a vehicle that has invested in a number of Musk’s ventures, which has poured some $1 billion into SpaceX alone.

Donald Trump Jr. holds SpaceX shares through 1789 Capital, his “patriotic capitalism” venture firm, which has grown from having $200 million in assets to having $3.5 billion worth since his father returned to the White House.

At least 10 Trump administration officials have reported stakes in SpaceX or xAI worth as much as $44 million combined, according to Bloomberg. Steve Witkoff, the special envoy leading peace negotiations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, indirectly holds between $1 million and $5 million in SpaceX.

Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, holds xAI shares through a fund under Valor Equity Partners—the firm run by SpaceX board member and DOGE alumnus Antonio Gracias.

Betsy DeVos, the former education secretary, purchased shares in SpaceX through an investor who was mentioned earlier this year in a ProPublica piece about Chinese investment in SpaceX.

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as President Trump’s White House communications director for all of 11 days in 2017, took to X to announce, “I own SpaceX. I participated in a private round. I was also an investor in xAI”—before adding that the “cult of personality around Elon Musk gives his companies an excessive premium that is off the charts.”

Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO, told Time in March, “I love working for Elon,” her boss since 2002. “He’s really quite funny.” Her current stake is worth roughly $1 billion—a figure that could double to $2 billion if the stock reaches the company’s $2 trillion target valuation.

Bret Johnsen, chief financial officer, admits that, when he was approached by a recruiter about a role at SpaceX in 2011, his knowledge of space “began and ended with Star Wars,” but he took the job anyway. Now Johnsen holds a stake currently worth around $695 million, potentially rising to $1.4 billion at a $2 trillion valuation.

Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX board member, briefly doubled as the highest-ranking DOGE official. A close personal friend of Musk’s, he’s the founder of Valor Equity Partners—through which he controls one of the largest stakes in the company after Musk himself, with some now estimating it could be worth some $90 billion.

Donald Harrison, Google’s representative on the SpaceX board, is a longtime Alphabet executive who oversees the company’s global strategic partnerships and manages its AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures. Harrison joined the SpaceX board as a representative of Google, an early institutional investor. Last week the two companies announced a cloud computing deal under which Google will pay SpaceX nearly $1 billion a month for AI compute capacity.

Steve Jurvetson, an early Tesla and SpaceX investor and board member, apparently decided not to wait for the IPO windfall: Days before the listing, he reportedly spent $125 million on a home in Tahoe, breaking the local real estate record. Why wait, indeed.

Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz came in later than most, leading a $750 million round in 2023 at a $137 billion valuation—setting it up for a 12x return at the anticipated IPO valuation.

Joshua Kushner, the founder of Thrive Capital—and, for what it’s worth, Jared Kushner’s younger brother—is a known SpaceX investor. Thrive, which also backs OpenAI, Stripe, and Skims, recently raised $10 billion in its largest-ever fund, which was heavily oversubscribed. The firm now manages $50 billion in assets, with SpaceX among its largest positions.

The Saudi government’s Kingdom Holding Company has confirmed it holds a SpaceX stake valued at $4.47 billion.

Several universities have a portion of their endowments in SpaceX, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, and Stanford. And lest we forget: rapper 2 Chainz, media personality Angela Yee, and Rich Habits podcast members Christian Blackwell and Austin Hankwitz.

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