SpaceX employees unite to pressure advisors on fees before blockbuster IPO

A group of SpaceX employees are banding together to negotiate lower wealth management fees and access to tax-saving products from financial advisory firms ahead of next week’s historic IPO that reportedly values the company at $1.75 trillion.

More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together with a combined worth of $20 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg. Morgan Stanley as well as mega-RIAs Creative Planning and Corient are among the wealth management firms reportedly being targeted by the SpaceX group, who collectively aim to pay less than 0.5% on assets under management rather than the traditional 1% advisor fee.

In an effort to mitigate their capital gain taxes and heavy exposure to SpaceX, the staffers are also seeking equity-based lending and direct indexing, as well as loan-like variable prepaid forward contract (VPFC) structures and options-powered strategies such as collars and box spreads.

“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,” Brian Werner, chief investment officer at Winthrop Partners, told Bloomberg. “I would not be surprised if we see more employee groups at high-growth private companies pursue similar arrangements.”

SpaceX is going public on the Nasdaq exchange on June 12 in an IPO that is set to combine Elon Musk’s rocket maker as well as his artificial intelligence unit xAI and social network X. The group efforts from SpaceX staffers could form a new playbook for startup employees aiming to optimize their negotiating power for financial advice amid blockbuster IPOs, as Anthropic and OpenAI are also preparing to go public. 

“Banding together into a cohort and negotiating from a position of strength is going to be, without question, the way to go,” said Dominic Corabi, co-founder of Wedmont Private Capital. “They’re going to get better terms, better pricing from custodians and product providers.”

According to May documents reviewed by Bloomberg, the SpaceX group did not consider broker-affiliated advisers due to their “complex cost structures.” They also did not consider robo-advisers because they are “less suited for households with complex liquidity, tax and concentrated position planning needs.”