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Chinese Investor With Military Links Secretly Acquired SpaceX IPO Stake

This story was originally published by Pro Publica

A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.

The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive U.S. government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.

In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The U.S. government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.

The company’s IPO last week was the largest ever, making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Musk has extensive business interests in China, where Tesla builds many of its cars.

The new records detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX years ago through a middleman firm in the U.S. called Tomales Bay Capital. The investments are relatively small, ranging from $800,000 to $40 million, and were made between 2018 and 2021.

One investment came from an entity owned by David Su, the co-founder of the prominent Beijing venture capital firm MPCi. The Su entity invested $15 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020, according to the investor list. It was not Su’s only foray into the space industry; his company has been a high-profile backer of some of SpaceX’s Chinese competitors. Two satellite companies that Su’s firm invested in were sanctioned by the U.S. government for allegedly assisting the notorious Russian mercenary organization the Wagner Group. One of the companies was sanctioned again last month for allegedly helping Iran attack U.S. military forces during the war.

MPCi has also worked with Chinese government investment funds. Last year, the website for China’s Ministry of Science and Technology named Su’s firm as a partner in a state-backed effort to develop the country’s aerospace industry.

There is no evidence that Su did anything improper. But the key question from the U.S. government’s perspective would be whether China-based investors got access to nonpublic information about SpaceX’s technology or strategies, said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments. “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,” she said.

In a statement, MPCi said that Su “has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX.” The statement described Su as “a Singapore citizen who resides in Singapore,” adding: “MPCi is a brand name with different teams and funds. Mr. Su is responsible for the US dollar funds.” According to a 2024 profile of him, Su “spent almost 100 per cent of his time in China over the last 20 years.”

A lawyer for Tomales Bay Capital said in a statement that the firm “has not provided any non-public, sensitive information regarding SpaceX to investors.” He said the investors are passive limited partners: “Aside from fund financials that include quarterly valuations, Tomales Bay’s investors have not received any further information regarding SpaceX.”

“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,” said the lawyer, Ryan Stonerock, “and certainly none of them are agents of Russia or China, or any other foreign adversary.” He added that some of the investors “may have mailing addresses listed” in Russia or China but do not actually live there “and are in fact citizens and residents of the United States or other countries that are not foreign adversaries.”

SpaceX did not respond to questions. One of the Chinese space companies sanctioned by the U.S. government, Spacety, previously denied providing support to the Wagner Group.

All the investors located in China or Russia that ProPublica identified appeared to be either wealthy businesspeople or their children.

The new documents come from a corporate dispute in Delaware involving Tomales Bay Capital. The court records were unsealed this month after ProPublica moved to make them public, with the help of attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller. Tomales Bay Capital appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of ProPublica.

Tomales Bay Capital is run by an investor named Iqbaljit Kahlon, who has long been close to SpaceX’s leadership and even involved in the company’s operations. SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen, who’s worked there for 15 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.”

Before SpaceX went public, Kahlon made a fortune by acting as a middleman for investors hoping to add the rocket company to their portfolio. His firm regularly bought SpaceX stock, packaged it into investment funds and then charged fees to investors who bought pieces of those funds.

In a 2021 pitch to one potential investor in China, Kahlon promised special access to SpaceX, including quarterly updates on the company’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” according to the meeting minutes, which later appeared in court records.

While ProPublica and other outlets have previously reported on the existence of Chinese investors in SpaceX, the identities of most of the rocket company’s investors have been closely guarded. The Kahlon investor list adds hundreds of names to the public picture of who owns SpaceX. The list details investments in several Tomales Bay Capital funds that have acquired SpaceX stock; it is possible that some of the funds own stakes in other companies too.

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

One such company is a Delaware LLC called HAL9001 Partners Fund I, which invested roughly $10 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020. The incorporation documents for HAL9001 were signed by the venture capitalist Roman Sobachevskiy. The Treasury Department recently fined a company that was co-owned by Sobachevskiy hundreds of millions of dollars for managing a different investment on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy has not been personally accused of wrongdoing.

A Tomales Bay Capital spokesperson said that the oligarch “had no involvement with the investment.” Sobachevskiy did not respond to questions, including who put up the money for the SpaceX investment.

The records also shed some light on the connections between SpaceX and Qatar. Funds affiliated with Bracket Capital — an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London, and Qatar — invested about $48 million through a series of deals from 2017 through 2020, the documents show. Bracket has money from the Qatari royal family, according to an email that Kahlon sent to SpaceX’s CFO. The ledger also lists Doha, Qatar, as the address for a mysterious entity called AM FIG Cayman Limited, which invested around $10 million in 2020.

The documents do not specify whether the Bracket investments were made on behalf of the royal family or some other client. In 2021, as Kahlon was soliciting backers for yet another SpaceX deal, he texted a Bracket employee: “At the end we can just send Yalda to talk to big guy. We need a bail out lol.” (Yalda Aoukar is Bracket’s co-founder. It’s unclear whether the “big guy” refers to a member of the royal family and what Kahlon meant by “a bail out.”)

Bracket did not respond to requests for comment.

The investments covered in the ledger were tiny percentages of SpaceX but would have generated windfalls. 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 reported on SpaceX’s unusual approach to accepting money from Chinese investors. According to testimony from the Delaware case, the company allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes in SpaceX so long as the money was routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs.

New Book: First Lady Objected To 'Unhinged' Musk Crashing In White House

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's new book was released Tuesday to the public, and among the revelations about the First Lady is that she didn't want trillionaire Elon Musk anywhere near the White House residence.

The Daily Beast dug through the book, uncovering a story that the tech guru, who promised and failed to reduce government spending by $2 trillion, once needled the president about crashing in the White House. Melania Trump put her foot down, but her husband didn't care. Musk then spent several nights in the Lincoln bedroom, the Daily Beast relayed.

Despite his vast wealth, Musk is known for couch surfing or living out of his offices or factories, as the New York Post reported in 2022.

“Though he also told associates he had taken to using a sleeping bag on the floor of his office in the Eisenhower Building," the book says.

The trillionaire bragged about it to the press, saying, “Sometimes I stay at the White House." He then noted he'd done it “more than once.”

According to Trump's version of events, the two were on Air Force One when Trump asked Musk where he was staying. During Trump's first term, he liked to ask the question to test whether people were staying at his Washington hotel. Musk said he didn't know yet. Trump then invited him to the White House for a private tour.

The Tesla boss said he thought the Lincoln Bedroom was "cool" and swore he never requested it.

Musk aslso praised Trump as a great host.

The First Lady didn't like Musk around and neither did many of the White House staffers, the book said. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles didn't like him much either, feeling he had a "strangeness" to him. He came across as "unhinged."

After Musk left the White House, it was revealed that he may have been using an extensive amount of drugs at the time, some of which are illegal. The New York Times reported in May 2025 that "Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it."

The Times was careful to explain that it was unclear whether Musk was doing all of those drugs while at work in the White House. Musk denies the reporting, saying that he does not use drugs.

Haberman and Swan's new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, is on sale Tuesday.

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Stupid Rich: Elon Musk Spews Idiocy On Universal Income And Social Security

I have no idea how smart or stupid Elon Musk actually is. Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t do IQ testing. But like everyone else in the world, I can evaluate the logic of the things he says. And there ain’t much there.

Apparently, Musk is now babbling something about how we need the government to provide a universal high income because AI will take all the jobs. The idea of universal high income is a contrast with the universal basic income plan that many have put forward, which would ostensibly provide enough money for people to afford basic necessities. Musk is saying that the income provided by a government payment should be enough to support a comfortable standard of living.

If it’s not obvious to everyone already, these views are 180 degrees at odds with each other. If we have enough money sitting around to pay people a universal high-income, then we surely have enough money to pay people the Social Security and Medicare benefits they are expecting and paid for. It’s probably also worth mentioning that if we really thought that we need to reduce the deficit, we could tax people like Musk more and/or reduce the size of the government contracts we are giving him.

Anyhow, we have Elon Musk simultaneously saying that we are richer than we can possibly imagine and that we are so poor we can’t pay the basic benefits that tens of millions depend upon to support them in retirement or due to disability. This isn’t the first time Musk has spewed utter nonsense.

Last year, when he was playing DOGE master, he insisted that 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits. While one dead person was uncovered, the other 19,999,999 are still free. The claim is utterly absurd on its face.

There surely are a small number of cases where a few checks get sent out after someone dies. These would barely make a dent in the cost of the program. Furthermore, much of the money is later recovered.

Musk also has repeated lunatic claims about millions of non-citizens voting. This claim, which Donald Trump also likes to make, defies common sense at both ends. The overwhelming majority of non-citizens in the country want, first and foremost, to be able to stay here to work and ultimately to gain legal citizenship.

How many of these people would risk everything to cast a vote in an election? In every election, there are tens of millions of citizens who have every right to vote, who decide it’s not worth their time. Elon believes that there are millions of non-citizens who would risk everything to cast an illegal vote?

On the other side, we have had Republicans yelling about non-citizens voting for more than a quarter-century. In all that time, maybe they have found a few dozen non-citizen voters. (There is a larger number, although still very small, who seem to have mistakenly registered. The overwhelming majority of these people never cast a vote.) We know that Trump and his crew are not very sharp, but if there were really millions of non-citizens voting in every election, even they would be competent enough to find ten or twenty thousand.

But getting back to the basic economics, what does Musk think he’s saying when he says the government will go bankrupt? The government prints the currency it spends. There is a story where we could be spending and printing so much money that we get runaway inflation, but we are obviously very far from that now, even with the burst of inflation from Trump’s tariffs and war. And even runaway inflation is not bankruptcy. Does our DOGE master really know that little about government finance?

Musk obviously runs off his mouth to advance whatever goal suits him at the time. Whatever he may think about the world, his comments often make no sense and are frequently contradictory. They do not deserve to be taken seriously.

The famous line, “if you’re so rich, how come you’re not smart,” could have been written for Elon Musk.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Will Chinese AI Save Us From The Unaccountable Power Of Tech Trillionaires?

The world is leaning on China a lot these days as a counterweight to the lunacy of Donald Trump. No one has illusions that China and its leader, Xi Jinping, are champions of democracy, but at a time when the U.S. president is gleefully bombing boats and countries, and debating which regime to change next, China is an island of sanity.

I’ve made the analogy to Stalin in World War II, which continues to be appropriate. Roosevelt and Churchill had no illusions about Stalin’s USSR as a beacon of democracy, but they understood the essential role it played in defeating Hitler. China can play a similar role in protecting the world from the craziness emanating from the White House.

AI is one area where its role may prove to be extremely important. There have been many hugely overblown stories about how AI is going to take all the jobs and leave the rest of us unemployed and destitute.

This is an old theme about technology. Those of us who lived through the tech boom in the 1990s recall similar stories back then. There was even a boom in stories of technology-driven mass unemployment in the 1950s and 1960s. A famous novel of the time envisioned such a world in the not distant future. The fear that a new technology, in this case AI, will take all the jobs is not a new one.

Even if the prospect of mass unemployment is unlikely, there is a real concern that it will lead to even greater levels of inequality. Just to be clear, it is not the technology that creates inequality; it is the laws that govern its use. It’s unlikely that people would be making big fortunes on AI if the government didn’t grant patent and copyright monopolies to its developers.

But let’s leave that issue aside for a moment. The story of mass inequality is one where the AI makers are selling a product of enormous value that displaces millions of workers, including relatively highly paid workers. As a result, they can command huge profits from their AI.

Clearly, there is some validity to this story in that AI can displace labor in many areas, some of it highly paid. For example, AI can do much of the work in preparing legal briefs that is now done by lawyers. It’s not clear that AI will, on net, reduce the demand for lawyers, but it can substantially increase the productivity of lawyers.

But the fact that AI can lead to large gains in productivity doesn’t necessarily make the AI companies rich. That depends on the extent to which competition brings the price down.

To take an earlier technology, Dell is the largest manufacturer of computers in the United States. It is a successful and profitable company. Its market capitalization is less than $140 billion. That’s a good chunk of money, but less than 1/30^th of Nvidia’s $4.8 trillion market capitalization.

The fact that the PC is an incredibly useful product that has hugely increased productivity has not meant that PC makers would get immensely rich and dominate the economy. The reason is that competition, even with weak antitrust enforcement, has forced down the price so that most of the benefits have largely gone to consumers.

This is where the Chinese AI makers come in. While the leading U.S. makers may still be somewhat ahead by many measures, the Chinese companies are able to make AI products available to users, which likely meet most of their needs, at prices that are a fifth, a tenth, or even less than the price charged by the leading U.S. companies.

For this reason, Chinese AI is beating out U.S. in adoption through much of the world. Apparently, Chinese AI is even gaining many customers in Silicon Valley, both because of its lower price, but also because it is open source, which mean companies can alter it to fit their needs. This also means that a company can run the Chinese AI on their own systems and they don’t have to turn over control of sensitive company data.

This Chinese competition is a huge deal not only for bringing AI prices down, but also for preventing fascist clowns like Elon Musk from getting endless money. While Musk may always be insanely rich, if investors ever learn arithmetic and value his companies based on their profits, he will have far less money. (Tesla has a price-to-earnings ratio of 360. If it had a more normal, but still high PE of 20, Musk’s stake would be worth a bit more than 1/20^th its current value.)

We should have that conversation about intellectual property rules that make the Musks of the world ridiculously rich. We should also be changing rules on things like bankruptcy that private equity barons use to get rich by buying companies and putting them into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, we have not yet advanced to the point where we can have a serious discussion on the ways we structure capitalism to generate inequality. Perhaps one day we will, but until then, we should be thankful for Chinese competition.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Chinese Investor With Military Links Secretly Acquired SpaceX IPO Stake

New Book: First Lady Objected To 'Unhinged' Musk Crashing In White House

Will Chinese AI Save Us From The Unaccountable Power Of Tech Trillionaires?

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