Justin Fishner-Wolfson has spent 15 years quietly doing one thing: scooping up privately held SpaceX stock, and that low-key obsession is about to pay off on a staggering scale. When SpaceX goes public Friday in what’s expected to be the biggest IPO ever, his firm, 137 Ventures, will see its stake—now just over 1%—valued at roughly $20 billion, based on the rocket maker’s anticipated $1.77 trillion market value, the New York Times reports.
- The 44-year-old Texas native started watching SpaceX back in 2008, when he was a junior employee at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm and its future looked shaky. He was assigned to check on the company after Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $20 million, a stake now believed to be worth billions. Fishner-Wolfson’s own firm has never sold a single share since its first investment in 2011. “This will most likely define my career,” he says.
Fishner-Wolfson, who launched 137 Ventures in 2010 and built an office shrine complete with a used SpaceX engine, has tethered his fortunes to Elon Musk’s company even as he mostly sidesteps Musk’s public controversies. “Whoever Elon happens to be dating at any given moment is not that relevant to the business of SpaceX,” he says. The filing will make thousands of current and former SpaceX employees millionaires, though some have already sold at least part of their holdings to Fishner-Wolfson’s firm.
Fishner-Wolfson plans to distribute SpaceX shares to the firm’s investors so they can decide whether to sell. Like other pre-IPO investors, they won’t be allowed to unload their shares until months after the IPO. Fishner-Wolfson moved to Nevada in 2018, partly for tax reasons, in anticipation of a windfall like this one. But he’s in no rush to sell off his personal stake. He believes SpaceX could ultimately be worth 10 times its offering price, though he acknowledges that it could “quadruple or go down 50%” on Friday. “It’s still a company I believe in,” he says. The stock will be listed on the Nasdaq on Friday, though the exact time is unclear, the AP reports.
