‘One could not ask for a better friend’: Elon Musk’s mate eyes a $100 billion windfall

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.

When SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, most likely starts trading on the stock market that day, 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 Musk, and the blockbuster initial public offering will almost certainly make Gracias and his Chicago-based firm billions of dollars.

Gracias and Valor control a $US65 billion ($93 billion) 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, Gracias, 55, will instantly become one of the world’s wealthiest people, though he would still be less rich than Musk, who could become a trillionaire.

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 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 2 decades,” Musk posted Saturday on X, his social media platform. “One could not ask for a better friend.”

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 Gracias has called “single asset vehicles”.

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

Most of the returns from SpaceX’s IPO will accrue to Valor’s investors, called “limited partners”, Gracias said last month, though he said he had a “large” personal stake in the funds. 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 p