SpaceX set a $135 share price for its initial public offering on June 3, putting a $1.8 trillion valuation on the rocket company and sharply lifting the paper value of Antonio Gracias’s 7.2% stake. If that figure holds, the holding controlled through Valor Equity Partners could be worth roughly $90 billion.
That is why investors are searching Antonio Gracias SpaceX investment now: one early Musk backer who once lent the company $1 million in 2008 could suddenly be sitting on one of the biggest gains of the IPO era. Musk will keep control of SpaceX after the offering, and the company is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq on June 12.
Gracias is not just a name attached to the cap table. He founded Valor Equity Partners in 1995, joined SpaceX’s board in 2008 and remains a SpaceX executive. Over the years, he also became an early institutional investor in Tesla and served on Tesla’s board from 2008 through 2021, while Valor backed SolarCity, the Boring Company and Neuralink as part of a portfolio that now manages $17.5 billion in assets.
The scale of the possible payout is what makes the story hard to miss. Fortune reported that Gracias and Valor’s SpaceX holdings could be worth about $90 billion, a number that would put the long-time Musk ally in rare company. Yet his reported net worth is $4.3 billion, a reminder that a headline valuation does not always translate neatly into cash and that the terms governing the IPO will matter as much as the price itself.
The relationship between the two men has long been unusually close. In January 2025, Gracias wrote on X that he had worked closely with Musk for more than 20 years, and Musk said in a 2012 speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, “I don’t think we would have made it without his help.” That history now sits beside a much more immediate question: how much of the paper gain from SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion valuation will actually survive the IPO structure and become real wealth.
For now, the answer depends on what happens when SpaceX reaches the market and how much of the stake stays intact through the listing. What is already clear is that the company’s June 3 pricing has transformed an old rescue loan into a potential fortune that could reshape both Gracias’s standing and the size of the Musk universe around him.
