Elon Musk’s SpaceX is facing protests against its expected initial public offering from some of the same advocacy groups that helped erase $600 billion from Tesla’s market cap early last year.
SpaceX’s IPO is poised to be the largest ever, raising tens of billions of dollars for the Musk-founded company and valuing it above $2 trillion. If all goes as intended come June, the conglomerate that now owns a rocket manufacturer, a social media app, and an AI chatbot developer will instantly rank among the world’s top 10 largest publicly-traded companies.
On Wednesday, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote to the US Securities and Exchange Commission urging it to scrutinize SpaceX’s IPO preparations. The company’s shares are likely to end up in the retirement accounts of the union’s 1.8 million members who come from education, health care, and government. “I have significant concerns about the degree to which this extremely large offering will comply with the securities laws’ requirements concerning full disclosure of material information and fair treatment of investors,” Weingarten wrote in a letter shared with WIRED.
The union is one of several organizations and activists advocating for greater oversight of SpaceX’s IPO. Some are going as far as calling for investors to boycott the IPO for many of the same reasons they outlined when pressuring Tesla shareholders to dump their stock last year.
The IPO “will bring an infusion of cash that Musk will control and tap for personal and political gain,” says the loosely organized activist group Divest From Tesla. “Just as he has tapped Tesla to access tremendous wealth that he used, not for the greater good, but to sow seeds of chaos and fascism, so he will with SpaceX.”
Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers want SEC chair Paul Atkins to direct his teams to closely check SpaceX’s IPO filings as part of a routine review that is currently underway. She cited concerns about the company’s business plans potentially relying on “nonexistent or speculative technologies,” the reported thoroughness of its accounting, and the adequacy of its board of directors. Members’ pension funds are likely to hold SpaceX shares within days—not months—of the IPO under newly enacted stock exchange rules. But whether SpaceX can ever deliver the profits necessary to justify its outsized valuation is questionable, meaning the value of the stakes could fall precipitously and harm retirees.
“The commission must demand ironclad disclosures, independent oversight and safeguards against forced investment—or risk consigning workers’ life savings to the whims of a company that operates more like a Musk family venture than a transparent, publicly traded enterprise,” Weingarten said in a statement.
Last year, she urged state and local officials and six big investment funds to review their holdings of Tesla shares.
AkademikerPension, a retirement plan for teachers and other government workers in Denmark, considers SpaceX’s rumored valuation target “very rich and would in isolation make us cautious in participating,” says the fund’s head of global equities, Dan Wejse. As SpaceX reveals additional details closer to its stock market debut, Wejse also plans to scrutinize the company’s financials and shareholder structure. AkademikerPension has been divested from Tesla since last year over concerns about a lack of independence on the automaker’s board and Musk’s involvement in politics.
Lehigh County, Pennsylvania’s retirement board paused new investments in Tesla last year. County controller Mark Pinsley says the board hasn’t discussed a potential SpaceX investment yet, but he’s concerned that it will automatically become part of the county’s portfolio through index funds that generally hold stakes in the largest companies. “SpaceX is going to be supported by pension funds not because it has good fundamentals but because it lands in an indexable range,” Pinsley says. “It’s going to do OK even if it shouldn’t. Tesla was losing revenue hand over fist as [Musk] was talking to Trump, but barely did Tesla shares fall.”
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