Who will benefit most from SpaceX IPO? Mostly Elon — and a few from his inner circle

SpaceX IPO? Mostly Elon — and a few from his inner circle">

While there are some shocking revelations in SpaceX's S-1 filing as it prepares to become a public company, Elon Musk's total control of the company perhaps isn't one of them. The oddball provision where Elon Musk gets up to a billion more shares to add to his already oversized, company-controlling cache once a million people are living on Mars (yes, really), is perhaps the most jaw-dropping. It is also fairly unserious.

Musk controls and can vote those shares now, by the way. But even a billion extra super-voting rights shares are immaterial in this company's setup because Musk is, by miles, the largest shareholder in the company. He owns just under 850 million Class A shares, entitled to 1 vote per share, and another nearly 5.6 billion Class B shares, entitled to 10 votes per share.

That includes the billion shares contingent on a million people living in a SpaceX company-town colony on Mars. There are a handful of people who stand to benefit most should the SpaceX IPO be a success and the stock continue to do well in the future: the 5% shareholders. These are the people who hold at least 5% of the company.

While the company has not yet said how many shares it will sell or at what price, the whisper number on the street is that this IPO will raise a whopping $75 billion, with a post-money valuation of $1.7 trillion. At those numbers, even a 1% stake is worth $17 billion. The biggest beneficiaries, aside from Musk, are: Antonio Gracias, investor and board member with just over 503.4 million shares; Luke Nosek, investor and board member with nearly 33 million shares; Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX COO with nearly 12.6 million shares; Bret Johnsen, CFO with nearly 9.6 million shares; Ira Ehrenpreis, investor and board member with 809,050 shares; and Randy Glein, investor and board member with 277,800 shares.

Around 400 other VCs have also invested in SpaceX, which has raised around $30 billion in private capital to date. The company shared the prices that these investors paid for their shares, with Series A investors paying $1 per share, Series F investors paying $7.50, and the final investors, in Series N, paying $270 a share.