SpaceX’s valuation has exploded from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion as of Wednesday morning — and a newly unsealed investor ledger shows that small, secret stakes from abroad helped seed that rise.
Tomales Bay Capital and the middleman who sold access
Many of the foreign entries on the ledger flowed through a U.S. middleman: Tomales Bay Capital, run by investor Iqbaljit Kahlon. According to court records obtained by ProPublica and unsealed after Tomales Bay’s appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, Kahlon regularly bought SpaceX shares, packaged them into funds, and sold pieces to outside investors — often promising privileged access. In a 2021 pitch to a potential investor in China, Kahlon offered “quarterly updates on the company’s business development, visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” the meeting minutes show.
A lawyer for Tomales Bay said the firm “has not provided any non-public, sensitive information regarding SpaceX to investors,” and described investors as passive limited partners who receive only fund financials and quarterly valuations. Ryan Stonerock, the lawyer, added: “The vast majority, if not all, of the investors included on the unsealed Tomales Bay investor list are not citizens of any foreign adversary, including Russia or China, and certainly none of them are agents of Russia or China, or any other foreign adversary.”
China-, Hong Kong- and Russia-linked addresses on the ledger
The unsealed list details at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX between 2018 and 2021 through Tomales Bay. Individual investments recorded on the ledger range from $800,000 to $40 million. ProPublica reports that the investors identified appear to be wealthy businesspeople or their children.
One previously unreported investor entry ties to David Su, co-founder of the Beijing venture capital firm MPCi: an entity owned by Su invested $15 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020, the documents show. MPCi’s public profile includes high-profile backing of Chinese competitors to SpaceX and work with Chinese government investment funds; China’s Ministry of Science and Technology last year named Su’s firm as a partner in a state-backed aerospace effort. MPCi told reporters that Su “has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX” and described him as “a Singapore citizen who resides in Singapore,” while a 2024 profile says Su “spent almost 100 per cent of his time in China over the last 20 years.”
Sanctions links and the national-security line experts highlight
ProPublica’s documents also draw lines — not direct allegations — between some investors’ other activities and U.S. sanctions. It notes that two satellite companies backed by MPCi were sanctioned by the U.S. government for allegedly assisting the Wagner Group; one of those companies was sanctioned again last month for allegedly helping Iran attack U.S. military forces during the war. The reporting emphasizes that there is no evidence Su did anything improper in relation to SpaceX.
Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who previously worked at the State Department reviewing foreign investment, summarized the security concern: “If an investor has conflicts of interests with other companies in China — if they could feed that information to competitors — it could be a national security concern.” The U.S. government, the story notes, has warned that China seeks access to cutting-edge technology via investments in sensitive industries, and while Chinese investment in U.S. military contractors is not banned, it is heavily regulated.
Qatar, opaque vehicles, and other overseas threads
The ledger also records ties to investors with Qatar connections. Funds affiliated with Bracket Capital invested roughly $48 million across deals from 2017 through 2020; an internal email from Kahlon to SpaceX’s CFO, cited in the records, says Bracket “has money from the Qatari royal family.” A separate entity, AM FIG Cayman Limited, lists Doha as its address and invested around $10 million in 2020. The documents do not state whether those funds represented the royal family or other clients.
Opaque structures appear elsewhere on the list. A Delaware LLC, HAL9001 Partners Fund I, invested roughly $10 million in a 2020 fund; its incorporation papers were signed by venture capitalist Roman Sobachevskiy. The Treasury Department recently fined a company co-owned by Sobachevskiy hundreds of millions of dollars for managing an investment on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy has not been personally accused of wrongdoing, and a Tomales Bay spokesperson said the oligarch “had no involvement with the investment.”
What this means for the U.S. government, SpaceX, and investors
- The U.S. government: Will focus on whether China-based or other foreign investors obtained nonpublic technical or strategic information about SpaceX — the precise national-security concern flagged by Sarah Bauerle Danzman — and regulators will weigh the routing of funds through offshore vehicles like Cayman entities.
- SpaceX and its investors: SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its IPO last week “due to ‘regulatory and compliance risks,’” Bloomberg reported; the unsealed ledger will likely sharpen internal compliance and due-diligence reviews among current and future backers.
- Intermediaries and foreign investors: Tomales Bay’s fundraising practices and Kahlon’s promises of access are now public record; intermediaries who package stakes and use offshore secrecy hubs may face more scrutiny in litigation and regulatory filings.
The newly unsealed investor list widens the public view of who quietly held stakes in SpaceX as private valuations soared. It does not, however, allege that those investors received nonpublic SpaceX information; the central question for regulators and national-security reviewers remains whether access and influence crossed into the realm of sensitive technology transfer. The Delaware courts have already allowed this ledger into the public record; whether other official reviews follow is the next concrete step left to watch.
