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When Google parent Alphabet wrote a $900 million check into Elon Musk's SpaceX in 2015, the rocket company was a closely held startup with audacious ambitions and an unproven commercial model. A decade later, that single investment is worth $94 billion, a return of more than 100 times the original outlay, and Alphabet has emerged as the largest single institutional holder of SpaceX stock.
Alphabet held 551.2 million SpaceX shares at the end of the second quarter, worth about $94.2 billion at SpaceX's June 30 share price of $170.86. The figures come from quarterly 13F filings made public after SpaceX's $86 billion initial public offering in June, which transformed the company from a private startup into a publicly traded giant.
SpaceX went public on June 12 at $135 a share. Its shares have since retreated from their end-June level, closing at $141.29 on Thursday, 4.7% above its IPO price but 17.3% below the June 30 close. At Thursday's closing price, Alphabet's disclosed position would be worth approximately $77.9 billion, still about 86 times the size of its original investment.
Fidelity Investments was the second-largest reported institutional holder, with 302.6 million SpaceX shares, followed by Gigafund Management with 171.8 million, Baillie Gifford with 51.4 million and BlackRock with 51.0 million. Together, the five largest reported holders accounted for nearly three quarters of all reported institutional SpaceX shares, highlighting the concentration of ownership among a handful of investors.
Separately, SpaceX said in a regulatory filing that Musk owned a 48.4% stake in the company.
The Alphabet figure is unusually transparent by the standards of pre-IPO investing. Because the company publicly disclosed its original $900 million investment in 2015, it provides one of the only reliable benchmarks against which the current value of an early SpaceX stake can be measured. Most other large institutional holders acquired their positions under terms that remain less visible.
"It's very, very difficult to tease out which of these institutions were holding pre-IPO shares," said Steve Sosnick, market strategist at Interactive Brokers.
Sosnick added that the 13F filing data does not reveal investors' lockup status or their intentions with respect to selling pre-IPO positions, meaning the disclosed holdings capture a snapshot of ownership as of June 30 rather than current positions.
SpaceX remains one of the most actively traded stocks among customers at Interactive Brokers, receiving what Sosnick described as a "fresh jolt of buying last week when market fears about what would happen when the first lockup expiry arrived proved to be unfounded."
Retail owners of SpaceX shares turned into net sellers of the stock on Friday for the first time since the IPO, according to data from Vanda Research, which calculated that self-directed individual investors sold a net $4.5 million on that day. SpaceX shares were down 3% on Thursday but have risen 30% since August 5.
The scale of Alphabet's return underscores how transformative the SpaceX IPO has been for its earliest institutional backers. A $900 million commitment made when the company had yet to prove its reusable rocket technology commercially has become one of the most valuable single equity positions in any technology company's portfolio.
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