How a $900 million bet on SpaceX turned 100x into $94 billion for Alphabet

Alphabet is by far the largest single institutional shareholder in SpaceX following the company’s $86 billion IPO in June, a Reuters analysis of public quarterly filings found.

Other investors who disclosed their holdings after the IPO include early backer Fidelity Investments, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — the Public Investment Fund — and Hancock Prospecting, the holding company controlled by Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart.

The filings reveal the stakes SpaceX’s backers built as the company grew from a closely held startup into a publicly listed giant. Along with separate disclosures on early investments, including Alphabet’s, they show just how dramatically the value of some of those early bets has multiplied.

The 13F data is a snapshot as of June 30, filed up to six weeks later — it won’t reflect any buying or selling since then as per Reuters’ report. It also has limits given SpaceX’s vast investor base and the shifting timeline for when different stakes become eligible for public trading, the Reuters report said.

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“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.

Alphabet had however revealed the $900 million investment in SpaceX in 2015, which has enabled measuring the extent of growth over time.Sosnick noted that the 13F filings don’t show investors’ lockup status or their plans for cashing in on pre-IPO gains.

Alphabet held 551.2 million SpaceX shares at the end of the quarter, valued at about $94.2 billion based on SpaceX’s June 30 price of $170.86, according to the filing. At Thursday’s price, the stake was worth roughly $77.9 billion, but still represented 86.5 times Alphabet’s original investment.

Fidelity Investments held 302.6 million SpaceX shares, followed by Gigafund Management with 171.8 million, Saudi Arabia’s PIF with 154.1 million, Baillie Gifford with 51.4 million and BlackRock with 51 million. Hancock Prospecting held 8 million shares.

The five largest reported holders made up for nearly three-quarters of SpaceX’s reported shares. Separately, SpaceX said Elon Musk owned a 48.4% stake in the company.

SpaceX was listed on June 12 at $135 a share. The stock closed at $141.29 on Thursday, up 4.7% from its IPO price but down 17.3% from its June 30 close.

Sosnick told Reuters that SpaceX remains one of the most actively traded stocks among customers at Interactive Brokers, receiving a “fresh jolt of buying last week when market fears about what would happen when the first lockup expiry arrived proved to be unfounded.”

SpaceX shares fell 3% on Thursday but remain up 30% since August 5. Retail investors turned net sellers for the first time since the IPO on Friday, selling a net $4.5 million worth of shares, according to Vanda Research, which tracks self-directed investors.