Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been valued at $350bn in a new deal to purchase employees’ shares, making the rocket and satellite maker the world’s most valuable private start-up.
SpaceX and its investors will purchase $1.25bn of the company’s existing common shares at $185 a share, said four people with knowledge of the transaction. That marks a 65 per cent leap in its share price since its most recent deal in September, when employees sold shares for $112 apiece.
SpaceX will purchase about $500mn of the shares with the rest of the capital provided by outside investors, the people said. The deal was first reported by Bloomberg.
SpaceX had proposed pricing its shares at roughly $125 as recently as mid-November, which would have valued the company at more than $250bn, but bumped that up by an eye-watering $100bn amid extremely high investor appetite.
Musk helped deliver the US election for Donald Trump last month, spending more than $250mn on his campaign, and has become a close confidant of the president-elect, advising him on senior government appointments and attending his calls with world leaders. Trump has also appointed Musk to co-lead a new ‘department of government efficiency’.
That proximity to the incoming administration has led to a “Trump bump” in the fortunes of the world’s richest man as investors have raced to back his sprawling business interests.
Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, raised $6bn earlier this month at a valuation of $50bn, roughly double its valuation six months earlier. Tesla’s share price has soared 60 per cent since the November 5 election, giving the electric-car maker that Musk runs as chief executive a record capitalisation of $1.26tn.
The new valuation means SpaceX has pushed ahead of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, which was valued at about $300bn in a share buyback programme last month.
Read the full article here