NEW YORK TIMES: It pays to be Elon Musk’s friend as SpaceX goes public

For 25 years, Antonio Gracias has dedicated himself to serving as one of Elon Musk’s most loyal lieutenants, doing anything and everything to aid the tech mogul across his business and political empire.

On Friday, it’s payday.

When SpaceX, Mr Musk’s rocket company, most likely starts trading on the stock market that day, Mr Gracias and his private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, are set to reap one of the largest-ever returns from a private investment. Valor is the second-biggest disclosed shareholder in SpaceX after Mr Musk, and the blockbuster initial public offering will almost certainly make Mr Gracias and his Chicago-based firm billions of dollars.

Mr Gracias and Valor control a $US65 billion ($93b) stake in SpaceX at its target IPO valuation of $US1.77 trillion, according to calculations by The New York Times. If SpaceX soars when it starts trading, Mr Gracias, 55, will instantly become one of the world’s wealthiest people — though he would still be less rich than Mr Musk, who could become a trillionaire.

Mr Gracias’ potential windfall from SpaceX shows how extreme wealth can be created by betting on one friend over and over — in this case tying himself to Mr Musk, a once-in-a-lifetime wealth-generation machine, and holding on for dear life.

“Antonio’s ownership stems from absolute support, even when it looked like SpaceX would fail, and many investments over two decades,” Mr Musk posted Saturday on X, his social media platform. “One could not ask for a better friend.”

Mr Gracias is so financially intertwined with SpaceX that the company’s IPO filing required a 390-word footnote to identify the 30 separate Valor- and Gracias-affiliated entities that control 503 million of the rocket maker’s shares, totalling about 3.7 per cent of the company. Five of those entities appear to be space-focused funds, or what Mr Gracias has called “single asset vehicles”.

To achieve that stake, Valor invested $US400 million to $US500 million in SpaceX as of 2021, according to estimates that Mr Gracias gave in two depositions related to Mr Musk’s pay package at Tesla, his electric carmaker.

Most of the returns from SpaceX’s IPO will accrue to Valor’s investors, called “limited partners,” Mr Gracias said last month, though he said he had a “large” personal stake in the funds. Mr Gracias said in the depositions that for the main funds that have invested in SpaceX, his firm takes 20 per cent of the profits that it makes for those investors, and he then personally takes about 50 per cent of those profits made by the firm. Precisely how much he will be worth could not be determined.

When asked in one of the depositions if he had personally generated “dynastic or generational wealth” because of Mr Musk, Mr Gracias agreed. “We have amassed a great deal of wealth, yes,” he said in 2022.

Valor has a close financial relationship with SpaceX in other ways. The rocket company owes Valor about $US20 billion after xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary, struck three deals with the investment firm to lease infrastructure for artificial intelligence, according to its IPO filing.

“Valor and Antonio have stuck with this so doggedly and with such determination,” said James Star, an investor in SpaceX and Valor. The investment generated “a lot of controversy over a long period of time,” including with Valor’s investors.

A representative for Mr Gracias, who also serves on SpaceX’s board, said he had no comment, citing the so-called quiet period before an IPO.

Mr Gracias is a son of immigrants, with one parent born in Spain and the other in India. Raised in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, he attended Georgetown University and then the University of Chicago law school. There, he befriended a classmate, David Sacks, who became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor.

In 1995, while in law school, Mr Gracias began a predecessor firm to Valor with $US400,000. It primarily invested in manufacturing but eventually bet on a company where Sacks worked, Confinity. Confinity and a startup that Mr Musk had created later merged to form PayPal. Through PayPal and Sacks, Mr Gracias met Mr Musk.

The two men became friends. After Mr Musk’s eldest son died around 2002, Mr Gracias consoled Mr Musk, according to the depositions.

In 2005, Mr Gracias invested in Tesla, joining the company’s board two years later at Mr Musk’s request. Mr Musk, meanwhile, invested in Mr Gracias’ two first funds at Valor.

Mr Gracias also helped Mr Musk develop the idea for SpaceX, and their ties tightened further when Valor invested $US25 million in the company in 2008. Mr Gracias joined SpaceX’s board two years later.

Mr Musk said Mr Gracias had given him $US1 million as a “short-term loan when I ran out of money” in 2008, which helped SpaceX and Tesla when they had little cash. Recounting those companies’ near-death years in a 2012 speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, Mr Musk motioned to Mr Gracias.

“I don’t think we would’ve made it without his help, so thank you,” a tuxedoed Mr Musk said.

Mr Gracias prides himself on getting his hands dirty. During a difficult period at Tesla in 2018, he said in one of the depositions, he “slept in the conference room next to” Mr Musk at the car company’s factory.

Sam Teller, a longtime chief of staff to Mr Musk who later worked for Valor, said Mr Gracias “showed up during the most challenging times, not just with capital, but as an invaluable operational partner alongside us on the ground.”

By 2021, Mr Gracias had personally made $US900 million to $US1 billion thanks to his investment in Tesla, before taxes, he said in a deposition. (Tesla’s stock has since doubled.)

Mr Gracias was technically an independent director at Tesla until 2021, though what it means to be independent in Mr Musk’s companies has been challenged by critics. The two men have vacationed together in Africa, the Bahamas and Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and spent holidays at each other’s homes, according to the depositions. Mr Gracias is also close to Mr Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal, accompanying him to the emergency room after he broke his neck skiing and serving as a groomsman in his 2018 wedding.

“We are usually talking about business when we are socialising anyway,” Mr Gracias said in one of the depositions.

When Elon Mr Musk bought Twitter, now X, in a contentious $US44 billion deal in 2022, it was little surprise that Mr Gracias pledged his support.

“I am 100 per cent with you Elon,” Mr Gracias wrote in texts during the acquisition, which were later made public as part of litigation. He cited “The Godfather” and vowed to go to the “mattresses no matter what” to defend the principle of free speech “with our lives or we are lost to the darkness”. Using expletives, he added: “Sorry for the swearing. I am getting excited.”

Mr Gracias was intimately involved in organising Mr Musk’s financing for Twitter. After the purchase closed in October 2022, he helped Mr Musk with layoffs and reorganisation at the social media company.

Like Mr Musk, Mr Gracias was a Democrat for most of his career. He attended a 2016 presidential debate as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and posted extensively online about his support for Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois. (Mr Gracias lived in Chicago until 2021, when he moved to Miami amid a divorce.)

But like Mr Musk, Mr Gracias took a turn in recent years.

When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2024, Mr Gracias joined Mr Musk at Mar-a-Lago to sketch out a plan for cutting the federal bureaucracy. He was motivated by concerns that the United States was flirting with becoming a “kleptocracy” and a “Latin American-style autocracy,” he said on a podcast. Mr Gracias and two Valor employees then worked with Mr Musk in Washington to crack down on what they said was fraud at the Social Security Administration.

In March 2025, Mr Gracias shed his usual penchant for anonymity at a high-profile political engagement in Wisconsin with Mr Musk, who was rallying for a conservative judicial candidate.

“I’d like to welcome my friend Antonio Gracias to the stage,” Mr Musk told the crowd of 2000 in Green Bay. Out walked Mr Gracias, who spent over an hour onstage talking through a presentation, which was at times misleading, that he said exposed rampant fraud in Social Security rolls due to immigrants lacking permanent legal status. He supported federal employees and legal immigration, he added.

“This is not political,” he said to cheers. “This is about America and the future of America.”

Mr Gracias seems to be channelling his wealth primarily into the world of psychedelics. In 2023, his charitable foundation gave $US16 million to start a program at Harvard focused on research into the drugs. His foundation is also trying to execute a complicated takeover of Lykos Therapeutics, a psychedelic biotechnology company.

Mr Gracias has promised to stay active in AI as well, disputing that the technology will cause widespread job losses and declaring at a conference in March that he was “going to work really hard in the next five or 10 years to make it not true.”

But his main interest remains Mr Musk. Last month, Mr Gracias joined the boards of two more Musk companies, Neuralink and the Boring Co., according to SpaceX’s IPO filing.

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