At least 10 Trump administration officials have reported stakes in SpaceX or xAI worth as much as $44 million combined, according to Bloomberg. Steve Witkoff, the special envoy leading peace negotiations in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, indirectly holds between $1 million and $5 million in SpaceX.
Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, holds xAI shares through a fund under Valor Equity Partners—the firm run by SpaceX board member and DOGE alumnus Antonio Gracias.
Betsy DeVos, the former education secretary, purchased shares in SpaceX through an investor who was mentioned earlier this year in a ProPublica piece about Chinese investment in SpaceX.
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as President Trump’s White House communications director for all of 11 days in 2017, took to X to announce, “I own SpaceX. I participated in a private round. I was also an investor in xAI”—before adding that the “cult of personality around Elon Musk gives his companies an excessive premium that is off the charts.”
The SpaceX Insiders
Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO, told Time in March, “I love working for Elon,” her boss since 2002. “He’s really quite funny.” Her current stake is worth roughly $1 billion—a figure that could double to $2 billion if the stock reaches the company’s $2 trillion target valuation.
Bret Johnsen, chief financial officer, admits that, when he was approached by a recruiter about a role at SpaceX in 2011, his knowledge of space “began and ended with Star Wars,” but he took the job anyway. Now Johnsen holds a stake currently worth around $695 million, potentially rising to $1.4 billion at a $2 trillion valuation.
Antonio Gracias, a SpaceX board member, briefly doubled as the highest-ranking DOGE official. A close personal friend of Musk’s, he’s the founder of Valor Equity Partners—through which he controls one of the largest stakes in the company after Musk himself, with some now estimating it could be worth some $90 billion.
Donald Harrison, Google’s representative on the SpaceX board, is a longtime Alphabet executive who oversees the company’s global strategic partnerships and manages its AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures. Harrison joined the SpaceX board as a representative of Google, an early institutional investor. Last week the two companies announced a cloud computing deal under which Google will pay SpaceX nearly $1 billion a month for AI compute capacity.
Steve Jurvetson, an early Tesla and SpaceX investor and board member, apparently decided not to wait for the IPO windfall: Days before the listing, he reportedly spent $125 million on a home in Tahoe, breaking the local real estate record. Why wait, indeed.
The VCs
Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz came in later than most, leading a $750 million round in 2023 at a $137 billion valuation—setting it up for a 12x return at the anticipated IPO valuation.
Joshua Kushner, the founder of Thrive Capital—and, for what it’s worth, Jared Kushner’s younger brother—is a known SpaceX investor. Thrive, which also backs OpenAI, Stripe, and Skims, recently raised $10 billion in its largest-ever fund, which was heavily oversubscribed. The firm now manages $50 billion in assets, with SpaceX among its largest positions.
