SpaceX surge further boosts Saudi billionaire prince’s fortune

FRIDAY’S (Jun 12) debut share surge for SpaceX is bolstering the fortunes of one of Saudi Arabia’s richest men. 

Prince Alwaleed Talal’s investment firm Kingdom Holding jumped at Sunday’s open after SpaceX’s share gains on its first day of trading drove the value of the Saudi firm’s holding to almost US$7 billion, or roughly half its market capitalisation.

Kingdom Holding said it holds 42.4 million shares in SpaceX, valued at US$6.8 billion based on the company’s closing price.

Shares of Kingdom Holding rose as much as 5 per cent, valuing the firm at 56 billion riyals (S$19.1 billion).

SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, began trading on Friday after raising US$75 billion in the largest listing of all time.

Its stock closed up 19 per cent at US$160.95, netting tens of billions of dollars in returns for a small number of firms.

Founders Fund, a venture firm led by Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, owns a roughly 3 per cent stake, while Andreessen Horowitz – also a venture capital player – will get the biggest return in its history, Bloomberg News has reported.

Sequoia Capital, which first backed SpaceX at the end of 2019, owns about 1.5 per cent of the company.

Earlier this month, Kingdom Holding said its stake represents 0.34 per cent of SpaceX, while Alwaleed’s personal exposure amounts to about 0.29 per cent of Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company.

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The holdings have propelled the prince’s net worth to just over US$27 billion, a decade high, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The Saudi royal first threw his lot in with Musk in 2022 when the Tesla co-founder bought Twitter – since rebranded as X – for US$44 billion, rolling over his equity alongside investors such as Larry Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz.

The SpaceX listing will benefit other investors in Saudi Arabia too, including the US$1 trillion Public Investment Fund (PIF) – which owns a stake in Alwaleed’s firm – as well as the country as a whole, which has made artificial intelligence a central plank of its efforts to diversify the economy away from oil.

Humain, a PIF-backed AI firm, invested US$3 billion into Musk’s xAI this year as part of a US$20 billion funding round. That deal gave Humain a significant minority stake in xAI, with holdings that it said at the time would convert into SpaceX shares. 

Elsewhere, too, regional investors have been building positions across the AI ecosystem.

Abu Dhabi’s MGX holds stakes in Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, an investing hat-trick that gives it exposure to three of the most closely watched AI firms.

Qatar has pursued a similar strategy, investing in both Anthropic and xAI. 

While the AI push is often viewed as a recent phenomenon, some Gulf investors have been making bets on transformative technologies for years.

Abu Dhabi’s IHC invested in SpaceX in 2020, while Aabar took a stake in Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in 2009, years before space and AI became market obsessions. BLOOMBERG