SAN FRANCISCO — This Friday, when SpaceX shares begin trading in the biggest IPO in history, a series of friends, associates and figures close to Elon Musk are about to become fabulously rich.
Also on the list of those expected to receive a life-changing jackpot is Justin Fishner-Wolfson, long a secondary figure in Musk’s orbit, but whose professional trajectory was shaped by being one of the rocket maker’s most loyal investors.
Working from unmarked offices in San Francisco above a tailor shop, Fishner-Wolfson has spent the last 15 years accumulating as much of a stake in SpaceX’s private shares as possible.
He raised money in various parts of the world to buy shares of the company directly, including making offers to acquire shares from SpaceX employees. Since its manager, 137 Ventures, made its first investment in 2011, it has not sold any shares in the company, despite all the temptation to pocket profits beforehand.
Little by little, Fishner-Wolfson’s firm came to hold more than 1% of SpaceX, a stake valued at around US$20 billion, considering the company’s expected value of US$1.77 trillion at its debut price on the stock exchange. He has been buying SpaceX shares on the private market since the company was worth US$1 billion.
“This will probably define my career,” he said in an interview this week.
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Fishner-Wolfson’s entry into the SpaceX universe dates back to 2008, when the company seemed like something between a dream and a joke. At the time, at the age of 26 and as the most junior among the five investment professionals at Peter Thiel’s venture capital manager Founders Fund, he was tasked with monitoring the company’s new investment in SpaceX.
SpaceX was so unknown at the time that the Founders Fund kept hand-drawn drawings of future rocket prototypes on office whiteboards.
That August, Fishner-Wolfson flew to Los Angeles and stood in the control room at the company’s headquarters, alongside Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, watching a live broadcast from the Marshall Islands of the company’s third attempt to launch a reusable rocket. The vehicle remained in the air for just two minutes before crashing in flames.
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“What are you going to do?” he remembers asking Shotwell. His partners had just invested US$20 million in SpaceX, something like 10% of the house’s most recent fund. He needed an explanation for what had gone wrong at launch.
According to him, Shotwell did not appear shaken. Maybe it was a software timing problem, he suggested. They would have to build another rocket and try again.
“That’s it?” replied Fishner-Wolfson. He returned to San Francisco without knowing much more than he did before the trip. But his bosses at Founders Fund were undeterred and continued betting on SpaceX.
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According to three investors in the fund, the US$20 million contribution is now worth billions of dollars.
“No one could have expected this 20 years ago,” Fishner-Wolfson said.
SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
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Three years after witnessing the failed launch, Fishner-Wolfson decided to strike out on her own and founded 137 Ventures, named after her grandfather’s seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
He has invested in other startups, such as Uber, but SpaceX has always been by far his main focus. 137’s offices house a kind of company sanctuary. Right at the entrance, in the place of a receptionist, there is a huge engine used from a SpaceX rocket. It took a crane and the removal of a window to place the piece inside the building.
But even after spending more time than virtually anyone else with SpaceX’s top executives — and even hosting some of them at her wedding — not even Fishner-Wolfson can predict whether the company’s billion-dollar valuation will sustain post-IPO. SpaceX has been racking up billions of dollars in losses, and some of its core businesses, such as artificial intelligence, lag behind rivals.
In light of this, he adopted a kind of trained Zen.
“On Friday, the stock could quadruple or drop 50%,” Fishner-Wolfson said.
The decision whether to sell or not is still, for now, out of your hands. Like other pre-IPO investors, Fishner-Wolfson and her manager are prevented by SpaceX from starting to sell shares until shortly after the release of the first balance sheet, scheduled for August, and will not be able to dispose of their entire stake before six months after the IPO.
He stated that, at the first opportunity, he intends to distribute the majority of their SpaceX shares to the manager’s investors, allowing each one to decide whether they prefer to sell or remain positioned for longer.
According to him, personally there is no rush to sell — his expectation is that SpaceX could be worth 10 times more than the offering price in a short time.
“It’s still a company I believe in,” Fishner-Wolfson said.
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