Cashing in on SpaceX

**Sarah Rogers** (0:03)
Why thousands of SpaceX staff could become millionaires from today, we speak to one of them. It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I'm Sarah Rogers. Facebook owner Meta has become the latest tech firm to say one of its AI agents hacked another company. And as wildfires become more common, we speak to one of the world's biggest reinsurance companies over who picks up the tab.
Yes, potentially a massive payday for the people who built the world's biggest rocket company SpaceX.
Almost one billion shares held by staff and early investors unlock and become eligible for sale. Now, startup stock options can make you rich on paper, but today is the day that that wealth could become real. SpaceX listed on the NASDAQ in June in the biggest initial public offering in history, valuing the rocket and satellite firm at more than $2 trillion. This week, it posted quarterly revenue hitting close to $8 billion. That's almost double the figure from the same time last year, but its shares tumbled over its AI spend. So will those early staff sell up or hang on for higher gains? Samira Hussain, BBC's North America business correspondent, has been speaking to one former staff member who joined in 2009

**Samira Hussain** (1:33)
Andre Lavoie currently lives in northern Italy. He worked as an engineer for SpaceX for six and a half years, and walked away with a lot of shares in the company.

**Andre Lavoie** (1:43)
Early employees of the company were granted stock options in lieu of higher pay, and then time goes by and you find out whether or not that sacrifice in time and lower pay pays off.

**Samira Hussain** (1:55)
How many shares do you hold of SpaceX right now?

**Andre Lavoie** (1:58)
Around 200,000 shares.

**Samira Hussain** (2:00)
And what's your plan? Are you planning to sell?

**Andre Lavoie** (2:04)
I will probably try to sell part of them, and every chance I get going forward, sell a little bit more. Basically, I have projects and the shares will finance them. Next summer, I'll have a brewery open up in the mountains of northeast Italy, the Friuli region, and the following year, a hotel.
This is how I have fun with the SpaceX windfall, you might say.

**Samira Hussain** (2:27)
So let's say Andre is able to sell 20% of his stock. He's walking away with a pretty $5 million, give or take, depending on the stock price at the time of sale. That's not a bad payout for a few years of work.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:40)
Certainly not. That was Samira Hussain, North America business correspondent. I've got Nicola's higher lead alternative analyst for Hargreaves Lansdowne with me.
Now, brewery and hotel, it all sounds very nice, but if loads of staff decided to sell off, how much would that impact SpaceX and the stock?

**Nicholas Hyatt** (2:58)
Well, pre-IPO investors are able to sell about 20% of their shares today. That's around 7% of the total shares in the company and worth $100 billion.
Obviously, if all of those hit the market at the same time, it is going to weigh on the share price. It is, after all, more than the company sold across its entire IPO. But if you're a post-IPO investor in SpaceX, then really you're buying into Elon Musk's long-term vision. So you should be willing to look through that sort of short-term headwind.

**Sarah Rogers** (3:24)
And how usual is it for stock to be staggered for release like it has been with SpaceX?

**Nicholas Hyatt** (3:30)
It is pretty unusual.
Normally, insiders are locked into their shares for about 180 days after an IPO. In this case, because of the very large number of early investors and staff who might want to sell their shares earlier, they've decided to stagger the sell so that not all of those shares hit the market in one go.

**Sarah Rogers** (3:46)
Thank you. And we're also hearing, Nicholas, that Iran says a deal with Oman on a shipping route through the Strait of Hormuzes in its final stages. The US has yet to comment. What's it now like for oil traders? Wait and see? Or are the movements?

**Nicholas Hyatt** (4:01)
Well, Brent crude is trading up a bit today at $81 a barrel. So investors are clearly nervous that this deal might not land.
Having said that, if you look back a bit further, the oil price is up around 8.5 per cent. It's 8.5 per cent lower than it was five days ago, which suggests the market is attaching at least some credibility to the claim that there's a deal on the table.

**Sarah Rogers** (4:21)
Well, we'll see what happens next. Nicholas Hyatt from Holgreaves lands down. Thank you.