The Information
SpaceX’s expected IPO next week will mean a banner day for many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names. But given the offering’s stratospheric size—it’s the largest ever stock market debut—it will also create life-altering wealth for a cast of lower-profile overnight billionaires, centimillionaires and millionaires. In some cases, those people never expected such a windfall. Jeremy Hollman, SpaceX employee No. 11, recalled often wondering whether the value in the shares he collected over five years at the company would ever materialize. “There were multiple times it was like: Is this worth 1 cent or $5 or $10 a share?” said Hollman. “You had no idea what it was going to be worth.” He wants to play things conservatively with his nest egg—about 250,000 shares worth some $34 million at the IPO’s expected price —and is mainly focused on how it’ll ease his worries about his kids’ education. “Our goal is to get them through high school and into college, then go from there,” said Hollman, who today works as a vice president at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston-area nuclear energy startup. Another early SpaceX employee, Matt Soule, who now runs Parallel, a Los Angeles–based autonomous railcar startup, said he knew fellow SpaceX alums who were “just chilling on the beach” ahead of the IPO. And Brogan BamBrogan, SpaceX employee No. 23, has spent the last few months inundated with invitations to join dinners, lunches, meetings, parties and presentations from wealth managers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other firms—all of them eager to advise him on what to do with his money. (Meanwhile, a group of over 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have reportedly pooled their wealth to negotiate lower fees for financial advice.) “The sharks are circling,” said BamBrogan, who founded several startups after leaving SpaceX, including Hyperloop One, a defunct high-speed transportation startup, and more recently, Ethos Space, which hopes to industrialize the moon.
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