Elon Musk’s friend Antonio Gracias is set to reap billions from SpaceX’s IPO

For 25 years, Antonio Gracias has served as one of Elon Musk’s most loyal lieutenants, doing everything to help the tech mogul in his business and political empire.

Payday is on Friday.

When SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, most likely goes public that day, Mr. Gracias and his private equity firm Valor Equity Partners are poised to reap one of the biggest returns on a private investment in history. Valor is SpaceX’s second-largest disclosed shareholder after Mr. Musk, and the blockbuster initial public offering will almost certainly net both Mr. Gracias and his Chicago-based firm billions of dollars.

Mr. Gracias and Mr. Valor control a $65 billion stake in SpaceX at an IPO target of $1.77 trillion, according to calculations by The New York Times. If SpaceX takes off when it goes public, Mr. Gracias, 55, will instantly become one of the world’s richest people — though he would still be less wealthy than Mr. Musk, who could become a billionaire.

Mr. Gracias’s potential earnings from SpaceX show how extreme wealth can be created by repeatedly betting on one friend — in this case, hooking up with Mr. Musk, a once-in-a-lifetime wealth-generating machine, and holding on to him.

“Ownership of Antonio stems from absolute support even when it looked like SpaceX would fail and from many investments over 2 decades,” Mr Musk wrote on Saturday. on Xhis social media platform. “One couldn’t ask for a better friend.”

Mr. Gracias is so financially connected to SpaceX that the company’s IPO filing required a 390-word footnote to identify 30 separate entities affiliated with Valor and Gracias that control 503 million shares of the rocket maker, or about 3.7 percent of the company in total. Five of those entities appear to be space-focused funds, or what Mr. Gracias called “single-asset vehicles.”

To achieve that stake, Valor has invested $400 million to $500 million in SpaceX starting in 2021, according to estimates Mr. Gracias provided in two depositions related to Mr. Musk’s pay package at Tesla, his electric car company.

Most of the proceeds from SpaceX’s IPO will go to Valor’s investors, who are called “limited partners,” Mr. Gracias said. he said last month, although he said he had a “large” personal stake in the funds. Mr. Gracias said in depositions that for the major funds that have invested in SpaceX, his firm takes 20 percent of the profits it makes for those investors, and he personally then takes about 50 percent of those firm profits. How exactly it will cost could not be determined.

Asked in one of the depositions whether he had personally created “dynastic or generational wealth” because of Mr. Musk, Mr. Gracias agreed. “We have accumulated a great deal of wealth, yes,” he said in 2022.

Valor has a close financial relationship with SpaceX in other ways as well. The rocket company owes Valor about $20 billion after xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, entered into three deals with the investment firm to lease artificial intelligence infrastructure, according to its IPO.

“Valor and Antonio stuck with it so doggedly and with such determination,” said James Star, an investor in SpaceX and Valor. The investment generated “a lot of controversy over a long period of time,” including with Valor’s investors.

A representative for Mr. Gracias, who also serves on SpaceX’s board, said he had no comment, citing the so-called quiet period before the IPO.

Mr. Gracias is the son of immigrants, with one parent born in Spain and the other in India. Raised in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, he attended Georgetown University and then the University of Chicago Law School. There he befriended classmate David Sacks, who became an entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley.

In 1995, while in law school, Mr. Gracias founded the predecessor firm, Valor, with $400,000. It primarily invested in manufacturing, but eventually bet on Confinity, where Mr. Sacks worked. Confinity and the start-up Mr Musk created later merged to form PayPal. Through PayPal and Mr. Sacks, Mr. Gracias met Mr. Musk.

The two men became friends. After Mr. Musk’s oldest son died around 2002, Mr. Gracias comforted Mr. Musk, according to testimony.

In 2005, Mr. Gracias invested in Tesla, and two years later, at Mr. Musk’s request, he joined the company’s board of directors. Mr. Musk, meanwhile, invested in two of Mr. Gracias’ first funds in Valor.

Mr. Gracias also helped Mr. Musk develop the SpaceX idea, and their ties were further strengthened when Valor invested $25 million in the company in 2008. Mr. Gracias joined SpaceX’s board of directors two years later.

Mr. Musk said Mr. Gracias gave him $1 million in 2008 as a “short-term loan when I ran out of money,” which helped SpaceX and Tesla when they were tight on cash. As Mr. Musk recounted the near-death years of those companies in a 2012 speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, he motioned to Mr. Gracias.

“I don’t think we could have done it without his help, so thank you,” Mr. Musk said in a tuxedo.

Mr. Gracias takes pride in getting his hands dirty. During a difficult period at Tesla in 2018, he said in one of the depositions, he “slept in a conference room next to” Mr. Musk at the carmaker’s factory.

Sam Teller, Mr. Musk’s longtime chief of staff who later worked for Valor, said Mr. Gracias “showed up in the most challenging times, not only with capital, but as an invaluable operating partner on the ground alongside us.”

By 2021, Mr. Gracias had personally earned between $900 million and $1 billion from his Tesla investment, before taxes, he said in the deposition. (Tesla shares have since doubled.)

Mr Gracias was technically an independent director at Tesla until 2021, although what it means to be independent at Mr Musk’s companies has been questioned by critics. According to reports, the two men vacationed together in Africa, the Bahamas and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and vacationed at each other’s homes. Mr. Gracias is also close to Mr. Musk’s younger brother, Kimball, who accompanied him to the emergency room after he broke his neck while skiing and served as a nurse in his 2018 wedding.

“We usually talk about business when we hang out,” Mr. Gracias said in one of the depositions.

When Mr. Musk bought Twitter, now X, in a contentious $44 billion deal in 2022, it was no surprise that Mr. Gracias pledged his support.

“I’m with you 100% Elon,” Mr. Gracias wrote in texts during the acquisition that were later made public as part of the lawsuit. He quoted “The Godfather” and vowed to go to “mattresses no matter what” to defend the principle of free speech “with our lives or we will be lost in darkness”. Using expletives, he added, “Sorry for the expletives. I’m getting excited.”

Mr. Gracias was intimately involved in arranging Mr. Musk’s funding for Twitter. After the purchase closed in October 2022, he helped Mr. Musk with layoffs and reorganization at the social media company.

Like Mr. Musk, Mr. Gracias has been a Democrat for most of his career. In 2016, he participated in the presidential debate as a supporter of Hillary Clinton and has published extensively on the Internet about his support for Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois. (Mr. Gracias lived in Chicago until 2021, when he moved to Miami after his divorce.)

But like Mr. Musk, Mr. Gracias has seen a turnaround in recent years.

When Donald J. Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Gracias joined Mr. Musk at Mar-a-Lago to outline a plan to cut the federal bureaucracy. He was motivated by concerns that the United States was flirting with becoming a “kleptocracy” and a “Latin American-style autocracy,” he said in the podcast. Mr. Gracias and two Valor employees then worked with Mr. Musk in Washington to crack down on what they said was fraud on the Social Security Administration.

In March 2025, Mr. Gracias shed his usual penchant for anonymity at a high-profile political engagement in Wisconsin with Mr. Musk, who was running for a conservative judicial nominee.

“I’d like to welcome my friend Antonio Gracias to the stage,” Mr. Musk told a crowd of 2,000 in Green Bay. Out came Mr. Gracias, who spent more than an hour on stage speaking through a presentation that was at times misleading as he said he had exposed rampant fraud on the Social Security records due to illegal immigrants. He supported federal employees and legal immigration, he added.

“This is not political,” he said to cheers. “This is about America and the future of America.”

Mr. Gracias appears to be channeling his wealth primarily into the world of psychedelics. In 2023, his charitable foundation gave $16 million to start a drug research program at Harvard. His foundation is also trying to do that perform the complicated takeover of Lykos Therapeutics, a psychedelic biotech company.

Mr Gracias has vowed to remain active in AI, casting doubt that the technology will cause widespread job losses and telling a conference in March that he will “work really hard in the next five or 10 years to make sure that’s not true”.

But his main interest remains Mr. Musk. Last month, Mr. Gracias joined the boards of two of Musk’s other companies, Neuralink and the Boring Company, according to SpaceX’s IPO.

Ryan Mac contributed reporting.