More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the Hawthorne-based company’s expected initial public offering.
The group, organized in a private Slack room and led by a former SpaceX engineer, has considered over 20 financial advisers and private banks, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg. They are leveraging their collective purchasing power to secure fees below 0.5% on assets under management, compared with the traditional 1% charged by wealth advisers.
The initiative began with approximately 200 people representing at least $2 billion in wealth and has grown significantly, with assets now estimated at as much as $20 billion. The group is seeking complex strategies including equity-based lending and direct indexing to defer capital gains taxes on rapidly growing equity portfolios.
“What’s interesting here is not that employees want financial advice. It’s that they’re recognizing their collective purchasing power and using it to negotiate access to specialized expertise,” said Brian Werner, chief investment officer at Winthrop Partners. “I would not be surprised if we see more employee groups at high-growth private companies pursue similar arrangements.”
SpaceX is planning to go public as soon as this month in what could be the largest IPO ever, seeking to raise as much as $75 billion in an offering that could value the company at $1.8 trillion. The company, founded in Hawthorne in 2002, maintains significant operations in the Los Angeles area.
The employee group’s collective bargaining approach has the potential to create a new playbook for startup employees managing wealth from blockbuster IPOs — a cohort that will grow as Anthropic and OpenAI also prepare to go public. Big banks like Morgan Stanley and registered investment advisers including Creative Planning and Corient are among the firms being considered by the group.
The SpaceX IPO is expected to create significant economic ripples across the Los Angeles technology ecosystem, where the company remains one of the region’s most prominent employers.
