SpaceX IPO investors who got in early, and stayed patient, are now staring at some of the largest paper gains in the history of private markets. The rocket maker filed a confidential draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 1 April 2026, the first formal step toward what ARK Invest describes as potentially the largest IPO in the history of capital markets.
The company is targeting a Nasdaq listing as early as June 2026. According to ARK Invest’s official IPO guide, SpaceX is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion and aims to raise up to $75 billion. The snippet cited a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion; ARK’s own publication gives $1.75 trillion. The article uses both figures where relevant, with the ARK document taken as the more precise reference.
How SpaceX IPO Investors Built Their Positions
The beneficiaries span nearly every corner of institutional finance. Ron Baron, the veteran stock picker, first invested in 2017 through employee tender offers when SpaceX was valued at less than $22 billion and has since participated in 27 funding rounds. His firm has put roughly $2 billion into the company over the years; that stake had grown to approximately $12 billion by the time Baron spoke to investors in a webcast.
By the end of March, SpaceX accounted for 33% of assets in the $10.4 billion Baron Partners Fund and 25.5% of the Baron Asset Fund. Baron Capital attributes SpaceX’s competitive edge to what it calls the company’s launch cost leadership, vertical integration, and innovative design approach, a framework that underpins the case for Starlink’s expanding satellite broadband business. Historical snapshots of the Baron Partners Fund show the SpaceX weighting climbing steadily across prior periods, from low single digits toward its current outsized share.
‘We think that SpaceX will become the largest, most profitable company on the planet,’ Baron said during the webcast.
Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest has been another substantial holder. The ARK Venture Fund Annual Report confirms ARK Investment Management LLC as the fund’s adviser, with a mandate centred on thematic investing in disruptive innovation. The snippet puts SpaceX at 11.4% of the ARK Venture Fund’s net assets as of 31 March; a separate data source cited by TechFlowPost places the figure at 17.02% for the same date. The discrepancy has not been resolved by ARK’s public disclosures at the time of writing, so the snippet figure is used as the baseline here.
Wood frames SpaceX’s opportunity in expansive terms. ‘Through Starship, Starlink and the acquisition of xAI, we believe SpaceX is building vertically integrated AI infrastructure for a much larger space economy,’ she told CNBC. She added: ‘For long-term shareholders, an IPO would provide broader access to a company that we believe remains early in its value creation.’
Fidelity, Pension Funds and the Scarcity Premium
No traditional asset manager may have accumulated a more consequential position than Fidelity Investments. Former portfolio manager Gavin Baker began buying SpaceX shares in 2015 when the company was valued at around $10 billion. By 31 March, SpaceX represented 4.7% of the $177 billion Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX), one of the world’s largest actively managed mutual funds, which carries a net expense ratio of 0.74% as of 28 February 2026. The company also made up 3.3% of the $103 billion Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund and 2.6% of the nearly $99 billion Fidelity Growth Company Fund. Fidelity declined to comment.
The source of these returns is partly structural. Greg Martin, co-founder and managing director of Rainmaker Securities, describes SpaceX’s cap table as unusually restricted: ‘Once they took the chance on Elon, the long-term cap table position turned out to be very scarce because the cap table is managed very tightly.’ Investors who secured positions early were repeatedly offered participation in later rounds unavailable to most institutions. ‘Their early bet on Elon not only paid off for their initial investment, but enabled them to deploy a lot more capital when the business became more and more of an obvious success,’ Martin said.
Venture firm Founders Fund began backing SpaceX in 2008. Hedge funds Coatue Management and D1 Capital Partners gained exposure through later private rounds. At the Global Alts conference in New York, Coatue founder Philippe Laffont offered his own account of the firm’s edge: ‘Our success is almost by thinking all the things that other people do that don’t make sense, and just, hopefully, by doing those, it’s like 75% of the work.’
Pension funds and university endowments round out the list of winners. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan invested more than $200 million in SpaceX in 2019 through a technology-focused investment vehicle, describing it at the time as ‘a compelling investment opportunity’ given its ‘proven track record of technology disruption in the launch space and significant future growth potential in the satellite broadband market.’ Washington University in St. Louis invested roughly $50 million in SpaceX nearly a decade ago; that holding now accounts for more than 10% of the university’s approximately $17 billion endowment, according to Bloomberg News.
The question for those investors now is a practical one: whether a Nasdaq debut at a $1.75 trillion valuation represents an exit, a hold, or an opportunity to attract a new wave of retail capital into a story still, by Wood’s reckoning, in its early chapters. The June 2026 window is the first real test of that thesis.
