A prince, an accountant and the founders of Twitter and Oracle: who made money from the SpaceX IPO

The record-breaking SpaceX IPO is almost guaranteed to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire in history, but it will also significantly increase the fortunes of his longtime partners and early investors in the company. At least two of them have already become billionaires as a result of SpaceX's IPO. Forbes calculated who, in addition to Musk, became the main beneficiary of the giant listing.

Saudi Prince Al-Waleed's fortune after the SpaceX IPO is estimated by Forbes at $25.4 billion. In 2011, he became a shareholder of Twitter and converted his $1.6 billion stake into Musk's non-public assets, the publication says.These investments, supplemented by an investment in Musk's AI company xAI, gave the prince a 0.28% stake in SpaceX, which has a listed market value of $5.1 billion. This does not include the assets of Al-Waleed's Kingdom Holding, which owns a separate $5.7 billion stake in SpaceX.

The capital of venture investor and PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek is now $3.4 billion, and almost all of this amount is accounted for by his 0.19% stake in SpaceX. In 1998, Nosek, together with Peter Thiel, founded a company, which after merging with Musk's online bank X.com became the payment system PayPal. In 2006, Nosek and Thiel launched Founders Fund, a venture capital fund, and two years later invested in Musk's aerospace startup. Nosek also joined the SpaceX board of directors, where he still sits today.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison's 0.15% stake in SpaceX - worth $2.7 billion - was created by reinvesting $1 billion. The businessman used these funds to co-finance Musk's buyout of Twitter in October 2022. After the integration of the social network into the structure of xAI, and then SpaceX, this asset was converted into shares of the aerospace company. Forbes estimates Ellison's total fortune at $230.1 billion, including a stake in Tesla worth more than $14 billion.

The co-founder of Twitter, as well as the founder of the payment service Square, now called Block, holds a 0.14% stake in SpaceX worth $2.6 billion. His total capital is $6.7 billion, according to Forbes. Dorsey ran Twitter until 2008, returning as CEO in 2015 and finally leaving the board in the spring of 2022. But despite his departure, he remained a key player: when Musk bought Twitter five months later, Dorsey did not take the money, but fully reinvested his shares worth almost $1 billion in the new non-public company. That bet is what brought the Twitter creator into SpaceX's equity.

Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX after the IPO of the company entered the club of billionaires: with a share of 0.1% of her fortune is now estimated at $ 1.7 billion. Shotwell found herself in SpaceX by accident. In 2002, working in a small aerospace firm, she came to visit a former colleague, who got a job in a startup to Musk. That's where she met the SpaceX founder, who immediately invited her to become vice president of business development. She eventually became the company's 11th employee, and in 2008 she became head of its operations department.

Johnsen's 0.07% stake in SpaceX after the IPO is valued at $1.2 billion, making him one of the richest certified public accountants (CPAs) in the world, Forbes writes. Before joining SpaceX in 2011, Johnsen spent nearly 10 years at semiconductor giant Broadcom, where he rose to the position of vice president, and also served as CFO of Mindspeed Technologies, another publicly traded semiconductor company

Rocket engine designer Tom Mueller joined SpaceX when the company was founded in 2002, becoming its first employee. Today his capital is $2 billion and is based on two main assets: his remaining 0.06% stake in SpaceX, worth $1.1 billion, and a 21% stake in his own space startup Impulse Space, which investors valued at $4.3 billion in June 2026.

Kimbal Musk's fortune is estimated by Forbes at $1.6 billion, of which $760 million is 0.04% of the aerospace company's shares. Kimbal Musk was a member of the SpaceX board of directors from its inception until 2022, and also holds a similar position in Tesla. The bulk of his capital is formed by minority stakes in his brother's technology giants. In particular, Kimball Musk owns more than $500 million worth of Tesla shares.

The fortune of Steven Whitkoff, American real estate billionaire and envoy of US President Donald Trump, reaches $2.4 billion. The SpaceX IPO gave the minority stake of 0.01% he owns a valuation of $270 million. According to Whitkoff's latest filing, this stake was also generated by reinvesting the $100 million the businessman gave Musk in 2022 to buy out Twitter.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor