# More than 1,000 SpaceX employees have joined forces to get a deal on wealth management.

*aerospace · news · 2026-06-03 · New York Magazine*

## Key points

- Over 1,000 SpaceX employees formed a collective to negotiate lower wealth management fees post-IPO.
- The group demands advisory fees below 0.5% of assets, half the industry standard 1%.
- Their combined wealth has grown from $2 billion to as much as $20 billion within months.
- SpaceX's IPO plans price shares at $135, targeting a $1.75 trillion company valuation.
- Employees seek financial products to leverage SpaceX shares without selling and to diversify holdings.

Elon Musk is more than likely going to become the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX goes public, but he’s not the only one for whom the IPO will be like winning a giant Publishers Clearing House check every hour of every day until the end of time. SpaceX employees are also going to see their bank accounts transformed, and in anticipation, they’ve formed a kind of union for the very rich. Bloomberg reports that more than 1,000 current and former employees of the rocket/satellite/AI company have joined forces to get a deal on wealth management, asking nearly two dozen firms for “significantly lower fees” on financial advice. According to a document viewed by the outlet, the group’s goal is to pay less than 0.5 percent on assets under management, or half of the typical 1 percent charged, saying that they are “leveraging collective power” for a “group based discount.” The effort was reportedly spearheaded by a former engineer and organized in a Slack channel; earlier this year, there were said to be approximately 200 people in the group, its collective wealth at least $2 billion. Their ranks have now grown to approximately five times that, with their wealth ballooning to up to $20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The group is looking into, among other things, products that will help them use the value of their shares in the company without having to sell their holdings and ways to diversify their portfolios since, obviously, much of their wealth will be tied up in SpaceX. (They’ll also naturally be seeking to minimize their tax bills.) CNBC reported Wednesday that SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a pop, giving the company a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Musk does not appear to have commented on the group effort. On the one hand, he should appreciate it, given the news that SpaceX is apparently trying to pay the banks working on the IPO less than 0.75 percent of the $75 billion it’s aiming to raise, despite such fees usually being more than 1 percent for debuts of this size. On the other, his disdain for labor organizing is well-known, having previously stated that he “disagree[s] with the idea of unions,” and that they “try to create negatively in a company.” Clearly, this is a different type of organizing, and one that’s not costing him anything, so presumably he’s fine with it. Employees at Anthropic, which is expected to go public this fall, and OpenAI, which will likely IPO by the end of the year, will undoubtedly take a page from the SpaceX group’s playbook in anticipation of also becoming very, very rich at some point in the near future. “I would not be surprised if we see more employee groups at high-growth private companies pursue similar arrangements,” Brian Werner, chief investment officer at Winthrop Partners, told Bloomberg.

**Companies:** SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI
**Countries:** United States

[Read the full story on New York Magazine](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/spacex-employees-bargaining-union-ipo.html)

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