It's still a company I believe in.
Fishner-Wolfson accumulated over 1% of SpaceX through his 137 Ventures fund since 2011, holding firm through market pressures and never selling shares despite opportunities for earlier profits. His journey began in 2008 witnessing a failed rocket launch, yet he and his Founders Fund colleagues continued investing $20 million when SpaceX seemed like a risky bet.
- Justin Fishner-Wolfson's 137 Ventures holds over 1% of SpaceX, valued at approximately $20 billion
- He has accumulated SpaceX shares for 15 years without selling, beginning in 2008 when the company seemed like a risky bet
- Witnessed the company's third failed rocket launch in August 2008 while sitting in the control room with SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell
- His fund is locked from selling shares until after SpaceX reports first earnings in August, with a full six-month lock-up period
Justin Fishner-Wolfson, a longtime SpaceX investor, stands to gain approximately $20 billion as the aerospace company prepares for its historic IPO, rewarding 15 years of unwavering commitment to the private space venture.
Justin Fishner-Wolfson is about to become very rich, and he got there by doing almost nothing but waiting. On Friday, when SpaceX begins trading on the public markets in what will be the largest initial public offering in history, Fishner-Wolfson's stake in the company—accumulated over fifteen years through his investment firm, 137 Ventures—will be worth approximately twenty billion dollars. He is not a household name. He has never run SpaceX. He is not Elon Musk. But he has been, in his own quiet way, the most faithful investor the rocket company has ever had.
Fishner-Wolfson works out of unmarked offices in San Francisco, above a tailor shop, where he has spent the last decade and a half buying as much SpaceX stock as he could get his hands on. He raised money from investors around the world. He made offers to buy shares directly from SpaceX employees. His firm, 137 Ventures, has never sold a single share of the company despite countless opportunities to cash out early and walk away wealthy. The result is that his fund now controls more than one percent of SpaceX, a stake valued at roughly twenty billion dollars based on the company's expected valuation of one point seven seven trillion at the IPO price.
His entry into the SpaceX orbit began in 2008, when he was twenty-six years old and the most junior of five investment professionals at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. SpaceX at that time was something between a dream and a punchline. The fund kept hand-drawn sketches of future rocket prototypes on office whiteboards. Fishner-Wolfson was assigned to monitor the firm's new investment in the company. In August of that year, he flew to Los Angeles and sat in the control room at SpaceX headquarters alongside Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president, watching a live feed from the Marshall Islands as the company attempted its third launch of a reusable rocket. The vehicle stayed in the air for two minutes before falling in flames. Fishner-Wolfson asked Shotwell what came next. His colleagues had just invested twenty million dollars—roughly ten percent of their most recent fund. He needed to understand what had gone wrong. Shotwell seemed unshaken. Perhaps it was a software timing issue, she suggested. They would build another rocket and try again. "That's it?" Fishner-Wolfson remembered asking. He returned to San Francisco knowing little more than when he arrived. But his bosses at Founders Fund did not flinch. They kept betting on SpaceX. That twenty-million-dollar investment, according to three investors in the fund, is worth billions today.
Three years after witnessing that failed launch, Fishner-Wolfson struck out on his own and founded 137 Ventures, named after the seat his grandfather once occupied on the New York Stock Exchange. He invested in other startups, including Uber, but SpaceX was always his true north. The offices of 137 Ventures contain what amounts to a shrine to the company. At the entrance, where a receptionist might sit, stands an enormous used rocket engine from SpaceX. It took a crane and the removal of a window to get it inside the building.
Yet even after spending more time with SpaceX's senior executives than almost anyone outside the company—even attending some of them at his wedding—Fishner-Wolfson cannot predict whether the company's valuation will hold after it goes public. SpaceX has been accumulating losses in the billions of dollars. Some of its core businesses, including artificial intelligence, lag behind competitors. Faced with this uncertainty, he has cultivated what he calls a trained zen. On Friday, he said, the stock could quadruple or fall fifty percent. He does not know which.
He also does not have a choice about when to sell. Like other pre-IPO investors, Fishner-Wolfson and his fund are locked up by SpaceX from selling shares until shortly after the company reports its first earnings, expected in August. He cannot fully exit his position for six months after the IPO. When the lock-up period ends, he plans to distribute most of the SpaceX shares to his fund's investors, letting each of them decide whether to sell or hold longer. Personally, he said, there is no rush. His expectation is that SpaceX could be worth ten times the IPO price in a relatively short period. "It's still a company I believe in," he said. The waiting, it seems, is not over yet.
Citações Notáveis
This will probably define my career.— Justin Fishner-Wolfson, in an interview the week of the IPO
On Friday, the stock could quadruple or fall 50 percent.— Fishner-Wolfson, on the uncertainty surrounding SpaceX's public debut
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
How does someone end up betting their career on a company that just watched a rocket explode on live television?
You have to understand what Shotwell's reaction meant. She wasn't panicked. She was already thinking about the next attempt. That kind of composure—that refusal to treat failure as terminal—that's what made Fishner-Wolfson believe the people running the company understood something the rest of the world didn't.
But he was young, junior, and his bosses had just put ten percent of their fund into this. Didn't he feel pressure to recommend they pull out?
He did feel pressure. That's why he asked the question in the first place. But the Founders Fund partners didn't waver. They saw something worth the risk. And Fishner-Wolfson learned from that. He learned that conviction sometimes looks like patience.
Why keep a rocket engine in your office lobby instead of, say, a painting?
Because it's not decoration. It's a reminder. Every person who walks in sees that piece of hardware and understands what this firm is about. It's a statement: we are serious about this company in a way that goes beyond spreadsheets.
He's about to be worth twenty billion dollars. Why does he sound so uncertain about whether to sell?
Because he's been right for fifteen years by not selling. The uncertainty isn't weakness—it's the same discipline that got him here. He's asking himself the same question Shotwell asked him: what comes next? And he's not sure the IPO price is the end of the story.
What if he's wrong? What if SpaceX loses half its value after Friday?
Then he loses billions. But he's already lived through the moment when everyone thought SpaceX was a joke. He's seen what happens when you believe in something before the world does. That's a different kind of wealth than money.