Original text byLi Helen
The largest initial public offering (IPO) in global history is entering its final countdown. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to price its IPO on June 12, with trading to begin the following day.
Investors are anchoring to an estimated valuation of around $2 trillion. If this holds, Musk would instantly become the world’s first trillionaire. But the real drama of this deal lies in the fact that wealth won’t flow solely to Musk. As the prospectus is revealed, the holdings of a group of long-time loyal lieutenants and early allies who have operated behind Musk’s shadow are now coming to light.
Their "loyalty" and patience are being rewarded with the most generous returns in history.
01 Musk's Shadow Partner
Among all those who became immensely wealthy due to SpaceX’s IPO, Antonio Gracias holds the most unique position—he is not an employee of the company, yet he is more deeply embedded in Musk’s business empire than most executives.
Gracias, 55, is the founder of Chicago-based investment firm Valor Equity Partners. The two met through Silicon Valley connections formed after transacting via PayPal in the early 2000s, when Musk had just sold his company to eBay and Gracias was running his own investment firm, Valor Equity Partners.
During Tesla's near-bankruptcy period between 2008 and early 2009, Gracias personally lent Musk $1 million. Since then, he has become one of Musk’s closest personal friends. He was also a groomsman at Kimbal Musk’s wedding, and the two families have even gone on vacation together.
This twenty-year friendship is now turning into an extraordinary fortune. Through investment entities associated with Valor, Gracias holds over 500 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock, representing approximately 7.3% of the company’s Class A shares, making him the second-largest individual shareholder after Musk.
Based on a conservative valuation of $1.5 trillion, these shares are worth approximately $91.6 billion. At a $2 trillion valuation, they exceed $140 billion. Regardless of where the final price falls within this range, he will rank among the 50 richest people in the world.
Garcia appears on the boards of nearly all of Musk’s companies. He served as Tesla’s lead independent chairman for eight years and has been a director at SolarCity, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. He even agreed in early 2025 to finance Musk’s unsuccessful $97 billion hostile takeover bid for OpenAI.
Gracias’s financial relationship with SpaceX extends beyond equity. The prospectus reveals an unusual arrangement: In October 2025, CTC, a subsidiary of xAI, signed a lease agreement with Valor for AI infrastructure hardware. In January and April 2026, a second and third lease agreement were signed respectively. Over the terms of these three agreements, CTC is required to pay Valor nearly $20 billion, with SpaceX providing full guarantees for these payments.
This means that if xAI’s subsidiary fails to make payments, SpaceX is legally obligated to cover them. Such guarantees themselves signal that xAI may not be able to secure financing of this scale on its own creditworthiness and requires its parent company’s intervention. In fact, the documents reveal that xAI is heavily indebted, including secured senior notes with interest rates as high as 12.5%—a pricing level typically associated with financially distressed borrowers, indicating the company’s difficulty in securing conventional financing.
The structure of these transactions raised concerns among auditors. PwC, SpaceX’s auditor, refused to classify these agreements as ordinary leases and instead characterized them as “failed sale-leasebacks.”
In a typical sale and leaseback arrangement, one party sells an asset to another and then leases it back for use, requiring the buyer to obtain actual control of the asset. However, PwC believes that the contract terms allowed CTC to retain actual control of the GPUs, meaning Valor’s role was more akin to a lender using the GPUs as collateral. The auditors required SpaceX to keep this $9 billion debt on its balance sheet, classified as related-party debt payable to entities where the company’s directors are affiliated.
02 President and COO of SpaceX
Among all the newly minted billionaires about to emerge, Gwynne Shotwell’s story is the most representative. At 62, she joined the company in 2002 as employee #11.
Schottvill's initial task was to secure sales orders for the then-obscure Falcon 1 rocket. More than twenty years later, she is the company's president and chief operating officer, frequently appearing at industry events during Musk's periods of divided attention, becoming SpaceX's de facto public spokesperson.
According to the prospectus, Shotwell directly or through trusts holds 12.4 million shares of SpaceX and 4.7 million stock options. If the company is valued at $200 billion, the value of her shares alone would reach approximately $2 billion. Shotwell’s total compensation for 2025 was $85.8 million, primarily from substantial restricted stock awards.
Shotwell was born in Illinois and studied mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University, beginning her career at an airline working on thermal analysis and small spacecraft design.
She joined SpaceX shortly after meeting Musk in 2002 and was promoted to president in 2008. For this engineer, who had bet her entire career on a company once mocked as a "madman's dream," this wealth represented a long-overdue acknowledgment.
03 SpaceX CFO
Compared to Shotwell, who frequently appears in public, Johnson is more like SpaceX’s internal financial steward, responsible for sustaining the company’s capital lifeline.
He joined SpaceX in 2011 after spending nearly a decade in finance at Broadcom and the semiconductor company Mindspeed. During SpaceX’s long period of confidential operations and financial performance, Johnson was the primary point of contact for answering all difficult questions and coordinating stock transactions.
In December 2025, Johnson sent employees a memo outlining the reasons for the company’s public listing, writing: “Our idea is that if we execute exceptionally well and the market cooperates, the public offering can raise substantial funds.”
Johansson holds approximately 9.6 million shares of SpaceX. Based on a $2 trillion valuation, these shares are worth approximately $1.4 billion. His total compensation for 2025 is $9.8 million.
04 "The PayPal Mafia"
Luke Nosek’s connection to Musk dates back to the PayPal era. He was a co-founder of PayPal and served as Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, and is a core member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia.”
In 2002, eBay announced and completed its acquisition of PayPal. Noser, along with Peter Thiel and others, co-founded Founders Fund and led its initial investment in SpaceX in 2008. He subsequently joined the board and has served ever since.
Afterward, Nosék left Founders Fund and founded his own venture capital firm, Gigafund, investing over $1 billion in SpaceX, as well as supporting Neuralink and The Boring Company.
Nosek directly holds nearly 25 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock and an additional approximately 8 million shares through Nosek Capital. Based on a $2 trillion valuation, the total value of his holdings is approximately $5.3 billion. Similar to Musk, Nosek has pledged nearly 24 million shares of SpaceX stock as collateral for loans.
05 Institutional Investors and University Funds
Beyond the personal wealth stories of individual shareholders, the list of SpaceX shareholders also prominently features the names of institutional players.
Donald Harrison, a Google executive, joined the SpaceX board as a representative of this early institutional investor. Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Founders Fund and a long-time ally of Musk, has served on the board since 2009.
Ira Ehrenpreis joined the board in February 2026 and is expected to serve as Chair of the Compensation and Nominating Committee. Randy Glein, co-founder of DFJ Growth, became a director in 2026 after serving long-term as a board observer and will serve as Chair of the Audit Committee. Ehrenpreis holds approximately 1.37 million shares of SpaceX, valued at approximately $250 million based on a conservative valuation; Glein holds approximately 278,000 shares, valued at approximately $50 million.
A more dramatic story unfolded at a higher education institution. Around a decade ago, Scott Wilson, the chief investment officer at the University of Washington, allocated approximately $50 million of the school’s funds into SpaceX. This bet has since surged to account for more than 10% of the university’s $17 billion endowment assets, primarily through co-investments and participation in later-stage rounds via external private equity and venture capital managers.
Anders Hall, Vanderbilt University’s investment officer, said the university’s position in SpaceX is estimated at $1.71 billion, with some investments made over a decade ago through relationships with general partners. The university’s endowment totaled $10.9 billion as of June 2025.
However, massive IPO payouts are a double-edged sword for endowments. While they will receive significant cash inflows, the wealthiest private schools will face higher Net Investment Income Taxes. The U.S. Congress has raised the tax rate from 1.4% to either 4% or 8%, depending on the size of the school.
06 AI Incurs an Exorbitant Bill
This IPO by SpaceX reveals not only a windfall opportunity for a select few, but also the company’s own awkward financial reality.
This rocket and artificial intelligence company has not yet turned a profit and is spending money far faster than it earns it. For the full year of 2025, the company incurred a loss of $4.9 billion. In just the first three months of 2026, it lost $4.3 billion on $4.7 billion in revenue.
Annual revenue is growing at a rate of approximately 33%, while capital expenditures are doubling each year. In 2025, SpaceX spent $20.7 billion, with about 60% invested in artificial intelligence. In the first three months of 2026, the company has already spent $10.1 billion, with $7.7 billion allocated to AI.
Once listed, all of these debt and expense burdens will be transferred to public shareholders. They will also inherit billions of dollars in debt obligations arising from a series of transactions completed during SpaceX’s private era, including the lease agreement with Valor.
The prospectus includes a particularly startling clause: once one million people live on Mars, Musk will receive up to one billion additional shares, which are already included in his vast voting pool sufficient to control the company.
For a company that has been losing money year after year, investors will have to make their own judgment between aggressive spending, massive losses, and a governance structure entirely controlled by insiders.