On June 1, SpaceX issued an amended registration statement for its upcoming IPO that contains a couple of noteworthy additions to the original filing submitted two weeks earlier. In one new provision, the rocket and AI giant announced that it will reserve 5% of the offering’s shares for “certain employees and persons… which may include parties with whom we have business relationships and friends and families of our executive officers.” The document adds that these grants “will not be subject to a lockup restriction.” In other words, the folks who receive these allocations, unlike Elon Musk and top execs who can’t sell for around a year, are free to unload their holdings any time after SpaceX’s debut, slated for mid-June.
These recipients could pocket gigantic windfalls overnight. It’s now widely reported that in the IPO, SpaceX will issue 555.6 million shares at $135 each to raise roughly $75 billion. So it’s handing friends and family and chosen employees the right to buy $3.75 billion in shares (5% of $75 billion) at the insider price paid by investors, primarily anointed big institutions, that purchased in the underwriting phase. How much the executives, their relatives and SpaceX business partners gain right away depends on how much SpaceX’s stock pops on day one. Of course, we don’t know what will happen to SpaceX shares once the bell rings at the Nasdaq. A substantial rise over the pre-trading price would send the valuation into the stratospheric $2 trillion range or higher.
