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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Sure, Jan:
Bloomberg (12/3/25) — Shares of Tesla Inc., Elon Musk’s public company, have been in freefall for the last few months. But shares in his private companies aren’t.
Secondary market investors have sent the collective valuation of four of Musk’s private entities up 45% since the US election, according to a new analysis from trading platform Caplight, exclusively shared with Bloomberg.
Musk’s status as world’s richest person rests more with SpaceX than Tesla. He owns 42 per cent of the rocket launcher, which was valued at $350bn by a December tender offer to employees.
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Since about two-thirds by value of Musk’s companies are private, estimating his net worth involves a lot of guesswork. Funding round announcements for his start-ups often lack a pre-money valuation, which he prefers to tweet. There’s very little in the public domain about his liabilities and intercompany loans.
Into this void, Caplight applies “aggregated secondary transaction data along with other signals, such as buyer interest”, says Bloomberg. And hoo-boy, these are some signals!
According to the report, SpaceX’s valuation is up 53.9 per cent since the US election! XAI is up 110.1 per cent! Neuralink is up 25.1 per cent!
The problem here is that pre-IPO stock markets are too illiquid to be fit for purpose. Scarcity and novelty puff up the premiums.
For example, SpaceX’s quote on the Forge secondary market stepped higher by 63 per cent on one day in December, after the employees’ tender offer set a new floor price. For xAI, the quote’s unchanged in the year to date on Forge while on Hiive’s it’s up 94 per cent. These are not efficient markets.
Is there a better way? No.
is there a different way? Yes. Here you go:
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The above chart uses the RShares Private-Public Crossover ETF, a fund that bundles together a big lump of SpaceX with a bunch of tech stocks. Per the website, current holdings are:
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All the stocks in red are in the Entrepreneur 30 Total Return Index, while those in blue are privately held.
What we’ve done is to normalise both the index and the ETF at the day of the tender offer announcement in December then track the difference on to SpaceX using that day’s $350bn valuation as the starting point.
Our methodology, to be clear, is rubbish. The XOVR ETF only took its current form in August, the amount of SpaceX it holds hasn’t been constant, and there’s a bit of Klarna in there too.
Trying to value the world’s biggest privately held company with an ETF that trades about half a million shares a day is like trying to estimate the size of an elephant’s footprint by what it had for lunch. Nevertheless, as methodology goes, it’s no worse than looking at secondary transactions.
In conclusion, since the US election, SpaceX’s market readthrough valuation has risen about 2 per cent. It’s not a very interesting finding, but at least it’s ours.
