SpaceX’s looming IPO is set to mint more new billionaires than any liquidity event in history. Investors and employees are rushing to prepare for the windfall.
“It’s completely life changing,” an anonymous source who invested in SpaceX nearly 20 years ago told me. While she’s made many successful investments, this single bet could increase her net worth 20 fold. “I didn’t think I’d be a billionaire,” she added.
SpaceX is expected to list on the Nasdaq in June, and the company’s valuation could exceed $2 trillion, making it the largest company ever to go public.
“No one’s seen anything like this before,” Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a partner at 137 Ventures and one of SpaceX’s earliest outside investors told me.
While Fishner-Wolfson declined to disclose his fund’s total investment in SpaceX, he has said 137 Ventures’s investment will be north of $10 billion on the public market.
When the San Francisco-based 137 Ventures launched in 2010, the firm raised just $50 million for its first fund.
The anonymous early investor told me she’s already hired someone to run her newly created family office, which manages her investment portfolio, and sold her Manhattan apartment. She’s scoping out property in Palm Beach and spending more of her time in Florida so she won’t be on the hook for New York taxes.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of investors and employees are in a similar situation.
“There are going to be a lot of single family offices that come out of this IPO,” said Cindy Scholz, who founded the Family Office Division at Compass and has several clients who are SpaceX investors. Family offices have already grown 25% over the last five years, and she expects to see that number skyrocket in the coming months thanks in part to SpaceX.
Scholz, who works with ultra-high-net-worth families, said her clients who are expecting a windfall are already setting up trusts, building multi-state real estate portfolios, hiring security teams and interviewing chiefs of staff to train their household employees.
“This kind of wealth comes with a lot of responsibility,” she told me.
Scholz also believes the SpaceX windfall will accelerate the exodus from California.
“People are moving to low-tax states because of the enormous amount of money you save … but they’re also thinking through all the logistics — you don’t want to buy a $50 million house now that fire insurance is so hard to get.”
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The private plane industry is also expecting a boost.
“Large scale liquidity events such as the one expected from the SpaceX IPO often bring a number of new travelers into the private aviation fold,” Ben Klein, the CEO of private jet airline AERO, told me. “Once people experience private travel, it tends to stick.”
Analysts say the IPO won’t just be a boon to the luxury market, it will also spur innovation, just as the original PayPal sale did in 2002. After cashing out, newly uberwealthy techies, known as the PayPal mafia, went on to create a whole new generation of companies.
Among them were Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir in 2003, and Elon Musk himself. Musk launched SpaceX in 2002 and joined Tesla in 2004.
“SpaceX as a liquidity event is going to spawn 10-15 unicorns over the coming years. It is creating a category and a ripple effect of so many other people in the space,” Dan Ives, managing director and technology analyst at Wedbush Securities, told me. “The people who built SpaceX will go on to found even more companies.”
Saudi Aramco, which went public in 2019 at a $1.7 trillion valuation, holds the current record for the largest IPO. But SpaceX dwarfs it in both scale and significance. The oil company returned much of its wealth to the Saudi government, while SpaceX money will go to some of the most brilliant engineers and savviest investors — at a transformative time for tech.
“When you think about SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic — for the first time in 30 years the US is ahead of China,” said Ives. “AI is still at the third inning.”
Investors who plan to keep their money in the company are also bullish.
“This is a company with 15,000 employees and they still operate with the same kind of urgency we would see in a 50-person startup, which is crazy,” Fishner-Wolfson said. “The IPO … is like a step in the journey, but in many respects doesn’t really change anything about the business.”
“I’m much more excited about the next decade.”
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