Twitter’s buyers could see 200% gains via SpaceX

Twitter deal – Investors who backed Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition are seeing their stakes rebound sharply—after X’s owners accumulated a 5% stake in SpaceX through Musk’s broader corporate reshuffling, setting up potential upside tied to a possible SpaceX IPO v

For a time. Elon Musk’s Twitter deal looked like a headline waiting to sour—made bigger by the Delaware Chancery Court forcing him to complete the purchase after he tried to back out. The $44 billion price tag carried weight. too: roughly $10 billion of that sum came from equity put up by outside investors. including both preexisting shareholders rolling over their stakes and new backers eager to join Musk’s latest bet.

Now those same backers are being drawn into a different narrative. After a flurry of corporate moves that tied Musk’s companies closer together. name-brand investors including Larry Ellison. Bill Ackman (through his charitable foundation). and Andreessen Horowitz have “by this point” seen a nearly 200% return on their investment. according to a calculation laid out in a recent report by Bloomberg.

The ride hasn’t been comfortable for everyone. X may have been renamed and rebranded. but its position in a fast-shifting internet environment has stayed shaky—short-form video continued to eat the internet. and users reportedly fled the platform over Musk’s right-wing politics. So the question investors now face is simple and uncomfortable: how did backing X stop looking like an expensive mistake?.

The answer. in the framework laid out in the report. is M&A that effectively rerouted value toward X’s shareholders. X shareholders, the report says, now own a cumulative 5% of another Musk venture: SpaceX. That stake could matter a lot if SpaceX becomes public—something the report ties to expectations that an upcoming initial public offering would value the company at $100 billion if SpaceX goes public at a rumored $2 trillion valuation.

The stakes tied to a potential listing aren’t theoretical. Reuters pegged the expected IPO valuation at $1.75 trillion on May 15, adding that even that figure would make it the biggest stock market debut by an American company ever.

SpaceX. in the meantime. owns both X and xAI following a merger in February that reportedly valued xAI at $125 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion. That same structure is where X shareholders’ upside is supposed to come from: the SpaceX IPO would let X shareholders cash out their shares and translate earlier investments into a new kind of payoff.

Ross Gerber, CEO of the investment firm Gerber Kawasaki, put it in blunt terms. “The same people own all of Elon’s companies,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg. Gerber also described the recovery on his own position: “I had marked down the position like 75%, and I got to mark it back up.”

His estimate of what could come next is even more aggressive. He said he expects the SpaceX listing to net him “a 2.5 or 3 times return on his X stake.”

But the math that helps one group can leave another holding the risk. Gerber acknowledged that Musk’s financial engineering has a downside for other investors. saying: “The fact that essentially SpaceX got heavily diluted so that Elon could make whole his Twitter and xAI investors kind of just sucks for SpaceX.”.

Musk’s corporate sequence also helps explain why the optimism now appears so stark compared with the deal’s early skepticism. Last year, Musk merged X with xAI—described in the report as the machine learning startup behind his chatbot Grok. The chatbot is said to have been trained on Twitter’s massive logs of user content. Bloomberg reports that the xAI-plus-X arrangement valued xAI at $80 billion and X at just over $40 billion.

Even before these mergers, investors weren’t short on famous names. The report lists other shareholders in the platform as Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Jack Dorsey.

The human problem behind these numbers is that returns don’t land evenly. Some backers appear to be getting their money back—and then some—through a circuit that leads from X to xAI to SpaceX. Others. including SpaceX investors dealing with dilution. are left confronting a quieter version of the same question: when one investor group is “made whole. ” who absorbs the cost?.

In the background, Musk’s broader story remains tied to whether the market will reward these intertwined holdings. The report’s central bet is that a future SpaceX listing will give X shareholders a clear path to realizing gains—at a time when X’s own cultural and user momentum has faced headwinds. And for investors who once watched their Twitter-related positions sink. the timing of this reroute is the difference between regret and profit.

—Brian Contreras, Staff Writer

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.

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Elon Musk Twitter acquisition X SpaceX xAI M&A IPO valuation investor returns Larry Ellison Bill Ackman Andreessen Horowitz Ross Gerber Delaware Chancery Court