SpaceX says it will reserve 5% of its IPO shares for staff, friends and family

By William Gavin

In a new filing, the company also clarified the nature of its multibillion-dollar deal with rival Anthropic

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's shares in the company will be locked up for 366 days after its final prospectus paperwork is filed.

SpaceX plans to reserve 5% of its outstanding common stock for certain employees and others selected by its executive officers, the company said on Monday.

The aerospace company said it would make that stock available through a directed share program, according to an amended filing. Such programs are usually designed to benefit friends and family of a company or its leaders. Those shares, if purchased, would not be subject to the lockup restrictions imposed on stock held by insiders, SpaceX said.

Some 7.8 billion shares of common stock, or more than 60% of currently outstanding shares, are subject to a lockup period, according to the filing. That includes the shares held by SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, which he will be barred from selling for a year and a day after SpaceX finalizes its prospectus paperwork.

SpaceX is preparing for what is likely to be a record-setting initial public offering and is expected to pursue a listing later this month. It's seeking to raise about $75 billion at a valuation of at least $1.8 trillion, according to reports.

Read more: Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO could quickly launch into your retirement plan

The amended filing also clarified SpaceX's deal with Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence lab that it counts as a rival and now also a customer. Anthropic last month agreed to purchase access to AI compute capacity in SpaceX's Colossus I and Colossus II data centers at the cost of $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. SpaceX said in its filing that Anthropic is paying a reduced fee for this May and June.

The deal was seen as a major win for SpaceX, which is losing money on the AI division it inherited after acquiring Musk's xAI in February. But Musk threw potential investors a curveball last week when he posted on X that SpaceX had requested a short-term deal to kick things off.

"SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it's possible that may be what happens," Musk said. "This is a 180-day lease with 90-day notice mutual cancellation thereafter."

That caveat was not included in SpaceX's initial IPO paperwork filed with regulators last month. The amended filing made public on Monday, however, does note that the deal can be terminated after an "initial three-month period."

Monday's filing also clarifies that Anthropic has been given access to some 325,000 Nvidia (NVDA) graphics processing units. Most of that capacity is likely housed in Colossus I, which has over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, according to SpaceX. Musk last month said the company was now training its models in the Colossus II data center.

"We have sufficient capacity to provide compute for our own AI models, including support of our training and inference demands, and to satisfy the obligations under these agreements," SpaceX said in its filing.

Read more: Anthropic nears $1 trillion valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI

-William Gavin

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

06-01-26 1115ET