SpaceX investors face difficulties determining their shares after IPO

On Friday, SpaceX will make its public debut, but some investors who invested in the company through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) still do not know how many shares they own or if they will receive any at all. While investing through SPVs—pooling funds from multiple parties into a single company—has long existed, SpaceX has become an unprecedented case involving multi-layered structures. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reports .

Due to the high demand for SpaceX shares in recent years, SPV investors have created new SPVs from their stakes, sometimes resulting in complex four- or five-layer structures. SpaceX will be the first major test of the legitimacy of these multi-layered SPVs. It is worth noting that companies like Anthropic and Anduril have already announced bans on the use of such structures.

Experts believe that lower-tier SPV investors may end up with fewer shares than expected or, in rare cases, receive no shares at all. In many cases, investors will not know their actual stake until the lock-up period, which lasts about four months, expires. This is because SPV managers only begin distributing shares after they have received ownership rights themselves.

The first-tier SPV will have 30 days to distribute shares to its investors. Consequently, subsequent layers will have to wait another 30 days, meaning it could take eight or nine months for the lowest-tier investors to receive their shares. Furthermore, various fees and commissions in multi-layered structures can significantly reduce the amount of shares investors expected.

In conclusion, the structural ownership of these vehicles has become so convoluted that even the best-intentioned SPV sponsors may inadvertently mislead their investors. Currently, the biggest risk for downstream investors is the possibility of being left without any SpaceX shares at all.