From Fortune, May 25:
Elon Musk’s best friend Antonio Gracias bet early on Musk. His 7.3% SpaceX stake could soon make him one of the 50 wealthiest people alive.
Elon Musk has a shadow.
His name is Antonio Gracias, a handsome private equity investor from Detroit. The two met through the Silicon Valley web at the turn of the century, and soon Gracias—at 55, just one year older than Musk—lent Musk $1 million in his early days at Tesla, when the company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
The two have been best friends ever since. Gracias was a groomsman at Kimbal Musk’s wedding, the families have vacationed together, spent the holidays together, and even traveled to David Copperfield’s private island in the Bahamas.
And Gracias trailed Musk through all of his ventures. He’s sat on the boards of Tesla—where he spent eight years as lead independent director—SpaceX, SolarCity, Neuralink, and The Boring Company. His firm, Valor Equity Partners, was one of Tesla’s earliest institutional investors and has put money into nearly every Musk company.
Gracias even followed Musk into the federal government, taking a role at the Department of Government Efficiency before resigning in July amid scrutiny over managing $2 billion in public pension assets while serving as a government employee.
Now, with SpaceX preparing for the largest IPO in history, Gracias’ loyalty is about to pay off.
His Valor entities collectively hold more than 500 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock—roughly 7.3% of the company, making him the second-largest individual shareholder after Musk. At the $1.75 trillion valuation Bloomberg and Reuters have reported SpaceX is targeting, Gracias’ stake will be worth around $90 billion. At $2 trillion, it climbs past $140 billion. Either way, the IPO will make him one of the 50 wealthiest people alive.
He’s also earning it.
Three leases, $20 billion, one board member
Last October, SpaceX’s S-1 shows, an xAI subsidiary called CTC signed an equipment lease agreement with Valor for AI infrastructure hardware—specifically, the GPUs needed to power xAI’s data centers. (xAI was a separate Musk company at the time; SpaceX absorbed it in February.) In January, CTC signed a second lease with Valor. In April, a third.
Together, the three agreements obligate the company to pay Valor close to $20 billion over their terms. And SpaceX guarantees the payments—meaning if the xAI subsidiary can’t cover them, SpaceX itself is on the hook. That guarantee is unusual on its own: It suggests xAI couldn’t get this kind of financing on its own credit, and needed its parent company to step in. Indeed, the new filing shows xAI was ridden with debt, including secured senior notes at a 12.5% interest rate—distressed-borrower pricing that shows the company was struggling to access typical financing routes.
Once SpaceX goes public, all that liability transfers to public shareholders, who will inherit billions in obligations from a deal struck while the company was still private.
So far, the Valor entities have collected roughly $885 million from the leases in 2025, and another $857 million in just the first two months of 2026.
The structure is unusual enough that SpaceX’s auditor, PwC, refused to treat it as a normal lease, and instead called it a “failed sale leaseback.” In a typical sale-leaseback, one party sells an asset to another, then leases it back. Here, that meant CTC—the xAI subsidiary—”sold” the GPUs to Valor, then leased them back for use in its own data centers. For the deal to count as a real sale, Valor needed to actually obtain control of the GPU. But the terms of the arrangement, in PwC’s view, meant CTC retained effective control of the assets, making Valor just like a regular lender, with the GPUs serving as collateral....
....MUCH MORE
Pro Tip: Always check the "Related Party Transactions."
Here's page 243 of the S-1:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026036936/spaceexplorationtechnologi.htm#id286866c4c474ba490d6531a57db9e93_63
