SpaceX makes its public debut on Friday and some investors who backed the company through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) still don’t know how many shares they’re entitled to or whether they’ll get any shares at all.
Investing through SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to invest in a single company, has been around for a while. But SpaceX represents an unprecedented case of an IPO with multiple layers of these vehicles. Since demand for SpaceX allocations has been so high in recent years, investors in an SPV have occasionally formed a new SPV from their shares, creating a structure sometimes stacked four or five layers deep.
SpaceX will be the first major test of the legitimacy of multi-layer SPV. In recent months, Anthropic and Anduril have announced that they are disallowing these structures.
Nearly a dozen SPV managers and secondary market investors who spoke to TechCrunch said that backers in lower-tier vehicles might find they own fewer shares than they think or, in rare cases, that they may not receive any shares at all.
In most situations, these investors won’t learn how many SpaceX shares they actually own until the company’s rolling lock-ups, scheduled to take place over about four months, begin to lift. That’s because SPV managers won’t begin distributing shares to investors in these vehicles until they get access to the shares themselves, sources told TechCrunch. Lock-up agreements prevent insiders, including employees, their friends and family, and venture investors, from s …