Darsana Capital Partners has nearly 60% of the money it manages in shares of Elon Musk’s rocket maker.
SpaceX’s planned initial public offering is expected to be a windfall for futurist investors and venture capitalists. A publicity-shy hedge-fund manager whose other investments include Dick’s Sporting Goods and Wingstop is also expected to make a killing.
Darsana Capital Partners first invested in SpaceX in 2019 when Elon Musk’s rocket maker was valued at around $30 billion, and made several subsequent investments since then. Should SpaceX go public at a valuation of around $1.5 trillion or more next month, as many expect, Darsana’s paper gains on their investment could top $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
Several billion of that would be gains since SpaceX’s December funding round that valued it at around $800 billion.
The soaring valuation of Elon Musk’s rocket maker means the investment now accounts for nearly 60% of Darsana’s assets under management, the people said.
Anand Desai launched New York-based Darsana, which takes its name for a Sanskrit word that means seeing the true nature of reality, in 2014 with about $1.4 billion. He previously spent nearly a decade at Eric Mindich’s Eton Park Capital Management. It doesn’t focus on any particular industry or sector and prefers to hold investments for multiple years.
Anand Desai, CEO of Darsana Capital Partners, speaking at the SALT conference.
Darsana got interested in SpaceX after one of its partners, Dan Irom, was looking into publicly traded satellite companies and met with privately held SpaceX as part of his research, the people familiar with the matter said. Through that process, the firm got to know SpaceX, and the company invited it to invest.
Darsana has made other investments in companies that wound up doing deals with SpaceX, resulting in it receiving additional shares, and has never sold any of its SpaceX shares, the people said. The firm invested in venture-capital and debt financings for social-media platform X after Musk took it private and before it merged with xAI last year. That company then merged with SpaceX in an all-stock deal early this year.
The largest holding in Darsana’s disclosed portfolio of publicly traded stocks at March 31 was EchoStar. The satellite and telecommunications company struck a deal to license some of its wireless spectrum to SpaceX for $17 billion in cash and stock.
Darsana has about $15 billion in assets under management, with SpaceX presenting about $8.5 billion of that, the people said. That is much larger than the firm’s disclosed portfolio of publicly traded stocks, which totaled about $4.7 billion as of Mar. 31.
Even excluding SpaceX, the firm’s portfolio is concentrated in a few investments, many of which have nothing to do with tech. Darsana most recently disclosed it owns the publicly traded stocks of just 13 companies.
Darsana’s clients have included the endowments of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, according to regulatory filings reviewed by fund-data tracker Old Well Labs. About $100 million in capacity for a special Darsana SpaceX invest vehicle was allocated to clients of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
The hedge-fund firm isn’t a stranger to startup investing, having previously owned stakes in DoorDash before it went public and e-cigarette maker Juul Labs. In December, Darsana led a $300 million funding round for Boom Supersonic, an aerospace startup that recently expanded into making natural-gas turbines for AI data centers.
Daniel Sundheim’s D1 Capital Partners is another hedge-fund firm that stands to make a killing when SpaceX goes public. D1 is sitting on paper gains of about $9 billion on SpaceX stock that it acquired over several years for about $600 million, other people familiar with the matter said. That mark is based on the valuation SpaceX attained late last year, and is likely to go significantly higher in an IPO.