The SpaceX board member and longtime partner of Peter Thiel Luke Nosek joins the three-comma club thanks to his stake in Elon Musk’s rocketmaking giant.
SpaceX took another big step toward going public on Wednesday with the filing of its IPO prospectus. Among the biggest revelations from the document is that SpaceX board member Luke Nosek, a cofounder of PayPal and venture capital firms Founders Fund and Gigafund, is a billionaire. Forbes estimates that Nosek is worth $2.7 billion thanks to his 0.22% stake in the rocketmaker, which was valued at $1.25 trillion when it merged with another of Elon Musk’s companies, xAI Holdings, in February.
Not included in Forbes’ estimate of Nosek’s net worth: a 0.07% stake worth $860 million that is owned by an entity called Nosek Capital, LLC. Forbes excluded the shares held by that vehicle as it couldn’t be determined whether other investors own any of the stock. Representatives for SpaceX and Gigafund, where Nosek serves as managing partner, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
A computer engineering major at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Nosek, 50, cofounded PayPal with fellow billionaire Peter Thiel and others in 1998. He served as vice president of business development, marketing and strategy until 2002, when the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion; two years prior to that, PayPal had merged with an online bank cofounded by Musk called X.com. Nosek then cofounded venture capital firm Founders Fund with Thiel in 2006 and served as a general partner until 2017, when he left to cofound Gigafund.
Nosek has been a director of SpaceX since 2008. He also serves on the boards of a number of other private companies, including nuclear energy outfit Last Energy, autonomous life science lab firm Emerald Cloud Lab and an online platform that connects scientists and researchers, ResearchGate. He previously was a director of AI research lab Deepmind before it was acquired by Google in 2014. Nosek likely has additional wealth from these ventures.
Nosek’s estimated stake in SpaceX is double that of the company’s longtime president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, 62, who has just a 0.11% stake, worth $1.3 billion. The company’s chief financial officer Bret Johnsen, 57, meanwhile, is worth an estimated $700 million thanks to his estimated 0.06% stake (excluding options that could boost his stake to 0.08%). Johnsen, who joined SpaceX from publicly traded semiconductor company Mindspeed Technologies in 2011, could become a billionaire as well if SpaceX achieves its reported $2 trillion target valuation when it goes public as soon as next month. Billionaire investor and SpaceX director Antonio Gracias is also listed with an estimated 4.3% stake worth $54.3 billion, but all of that stock appears to be held by his venture capital and private equity firm Valor Equity Partners, and it’s unclear what his personal stake in SpaceX is.
The biggest shareholder listed in Wednesday’s filing, of course, is its founder, chairman, CEO and chief technical officer, Elon Musk, who is worth an estimated $822 billion, thanks in large part to an estimated 41% SpaceX stake worth an estimated $514 billion. That’s excluding options and performance-based restricted shares that could boost his stake to an estimated 50% if SpaceX achieves lofty goals like a $7.5 trillion market cap and the company’s “establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” Even without unlocking those shares, Musk is well on his way to becoming the first trillionaire.
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