Before the SpaceX IPO, Chinese investors raised money privately

Some of the SpaceX investors on Kahlon’s ledger are easy to spot: Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi; Betsy DeVos, former US education secretary; a British Virgin Islands company owned by Indonesian billionaires. But others on the list are shell companies whose ultimate owners are hidden.

One such company is a Delaware LLC called HAL9001 Partners Fund I, which invested $10 million in the SpaceX fund in 2020. attachment documents of HAL9001 was signed by capitalist Roman Sobachevskiy. The Treasury Department recently fined a company that belonged to Sobachevskiy hundreds of millions of dollars for managing other funds on behalf of the company. recognized Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy was not charged with any wrongdoing.

A spokeswoman for Tomales Bay Capital said the oligarch “did not participate in the investment.” Sobachevskiy did not respond to questions, including those who invested in SpaceX Investment.

The document also sheds light on SpaceX’s connection with Qatar. Funds associated with Bracket Capital – an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London, and Qatar – invested about $48 million through a series of transactions from 2017 to 2020, documents show. Bracket has funding from the Qatari royal family, according to an email Kahlon sent to SpaceX’s CFO. The book also mentions Doha, Qatar, as the address of a mysterious company called AM FIG Cayman Limited, which invested about $10 million in 2020.

The documents do not specify whether Bracket’s money was made on behalf of the royal family or another client. In 2021, when Kahlon was asking sponsors to get another contract for SpaceX, he wrote to a Bracket employee: “Finally we can send Yalda to talk to the big guy. We want to bail out lol.” (Yalda Aoukar is a co-founder of Bracket. It’s not clear if “big man” meant a member of the royal family and what Kahlon meant by “bail out.”)

Bracket did not respond to a request for comment.

The amount listed in the book was a small amount for SpaceX but it would bring a windfall. The company’s valuation has exploded in recent years, from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion as of Wednesday morning.

Last year, ProPublica reports on SpaceX’s strange way of receiving money from Chinese investors. According to evidence from a Delaware casethe company allowed Chinese investors to buy products from SpaceX as long as the money went through the Cayman Islands or other secret offshore locations.

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