By Peter Rudegeair
On the list of investors set to generate billion-dollar gains with stakes in SpaceX, one name appears twice.
Gavin Baker first bet on Elon Musk's rocket maker in 2015, as a star stock picker at Fidelity Investments. At the time, SpaceX was far from a sure bet -- it had suffered some high-profile failures and hadn't yet landed a rocket.
Baker kept the faith in Musk's grand ambitions when he parted ways with Fidelity and launched his own hedge-fund firm, Atreides Management, in 2019, buying up shares when SpaceX was still well off much of Wall Street's radar screen.
Now, Baker and Fidelity are about to reap the rewards of those wagers.
Fidelity and Atreides started investing in SpaceX when it was worth about $10 billion and $30 billion, respectively. The company is now eyeing a market value of $1.5 trillion or more when it goes public next month.
"Elon has always made investors money. He treats it like a sacred covenant," Baker said this week on the "Invest Like The Best" podcast.
Few events have the potential to create as much wealth and liquidity for venture capitalists and stock pickers as SpaceX's listing, which advanced on Wednesday with the unveiling of its investor prospectus. That filing revealed that Antonio Gracias, chief executive of Valor Equity Partners and a longtime SpaceX shareholder and board member, owns a massive 7.3% of the company's Class A shares, mostly on behalf of funds he manages.
Other likely winners from the IPO include Google, venture firm Founders Fund, Ron Baron's Baron Capital and hedge-fund firms Darsana Capital Partners and D1 Capital Partners.
Baker, a Dartmouth College grad and former ski bum who once worked as a housekeeper at a mountain lodge in Utah, started working at Fidelity in 1999 as an analyst.
He was an early Nvidia bull -- CEO Jensen Huang gave him a shout-out in a keynote address in March for being Nvidia's "first major institutional investor" -- and one of the first mutual-fund managers to assemble a big collection of startup stakes. His portfolio included pre-IPO positions in Meta Platforms and Uber Technologies. (Not all were hits -- Baker was also an investor in WeWork).
Fidelity first invested in a $1 billion venture-capital round fundraising for SpaceX alongside Google in 2015. Unlike other startups it invested in, SpaceX had no intention of going public anytime soon. Fidelity lets investors enter and exit its mutual funds every day, so owning much stock in a private company with no line-of-sight to a liquidity event presented risks.
Fidelity received an $100 million allocation in the deal, people familiar with the matter said. Other portfolio managers there invested alongside Baker, including Will Danoff, who led Contrafund, and Sonu Kalra, who led the Blue Chip Growth Fund. Baker's old OTC fund invested fewer dollars in the round than the Contrafund, but its SpaceX stake was a bigger share of fund assets, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
It didn't immediately look like a home run. Months after the 2015 round closed, one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets carrying an unmanned cargo capsule suffered a catastrophic failure shortly after launching, breaking into pieces over the Atlantic Ocean and putting future flights on hold. The company's prospects brightened at the end of that year when it completed its first-ever controlled landing of a Falcon 9 rocket, paving the way for reusable rockets.
Baker's fund and other Fidelity funds accumulated more SpaceX shares in subsequent rounds, including from current and former employees. The OTC fund spent $56 million acquiring a current stake, according to a person familiar with the matter. That stake was valued at about $2 billion, equivalent to 4.7% of its net assets in April.
In 2017, Baker left Fidelity following a review into hostile workplace conduct (a spokesman for Baker has said he left amicably). He launched Atreides in 2019 and immediately bought SpaceX stock again, dedicating a quarter of the firm's venture-capital capacity to the position, a person familiar with the matter said. He later invested in Musk's xAI.
Last year, gains on his holdings of SpaceX and xAI helped an Atreides portfolio that invests in public and private companies generate a 47% return, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Atreides received more shares in SpaceX when the company merged with xAI earlier this year in an all-stock deal.
As of April, that Atreides portfolio owned about $2.5 billion in SpaceX stock and was up about 19% on the year, the person said. That amounts to over a fifth of the firm's roughly $11 billion in assets under management.
SpaceX isn't the only IPO this year to give Atreides a performance boost. Baker made a series of investments into Cerebras in recent years, including a round last fall that his firm co-led with Fidelity that valued the chip maker at about $8 billion. Cerebras completed a monster-sized initial public offering this month and finished its first trading day with a market value over $66 billion.
Write to Peter Rudegeair at peter.rudegeair@wsj.com
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May 22, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
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