In 2017, Ron Baron started purchasing SpaceX shares somewhere in the secondary trade market. When SpaceX personnel needed or desired to turn some of their ownership into cash, they did it covertly through private sales rather than through a news release, a public offering, or the fanfare that usually accompanies big institutional bets. One of the buyers on the other side of those deals was Baron Capital, which amassed a position at valuations that appear incredibly accurate in hindsight.
Built over nine years through a number of secondary purchases, this accumulation has yielded an estimated 1,312 percent return and a compound annual growth rate of roughly 54 percent, transforming an investment that ultimately totaled between $1.1 and $1.7 billion into a position worth $24 billion at the SpaceX IPO valuation. It takes a moment to settle, but the number is stated swiftly.
By April 2026, Baron’s SpaceX stake had grown to be his largest asset, accounting for almost 33% of the whole portfolio of the Baron Partners Fund. By the norms of the majority of professional fund managers, the concentration is out of the ordinary. According to Morningstar’s analysis, most fund managers would have eliminated such a winner in order to adhere to internal policies about exposure to a single stock.
However, Baron has a track record of allowing his greatest ideas to proceed rather than eliminating them in order to preserve a neat risk profile. He followed suit with Tesla, which at its height in 2022 accounted for 54% of the Baron Partners Fund’s net assets. In some respects, SpaceX’s stance is a reiteration of the same idea applied to a new wager on the same network of businesses run by Elon Musk. Baron anticipates that his $4.7 billion stake in Tesla will increase fivefold over the next ten years. That’s a side story. The front-runner is SpaceX.
Baron outlined his expectations for SpaceX’s trajectory over the next ten to fifteen years in a letter to investors in late April 2026. He estimated that the company would be worth between $10 trillion and $30 trillion, mostly due to Starlink’s global internet business and its planned expansion into space-based AI data centers. In a May interview with CNBC, he reaffirmed his predictions. Few investment letters make the kind of projection over a very long time horizon required by those numbers.
Baron might be correct; Starlink has already surpassed nine million users and is expanding in areas with few terrestrial internet options, and the future of satellite-based computing and internet delivery seems conceivable. The 10- to 30-trillion range may also be an estimate that is not entirely supported by the available data, and investors who purchase at the IPO price may be placing bets on changes that will take longer than anticipated or arrive differently than anticipated. Both continue to be true at the same time.
The public order Baron issued prior to the IPO pricing eliminates any doubt on his personal belief. “At the IPO price, I’ve got an order for $1 billion,” Baron declared in May. “I would like to purchase additional stock during the IPO. We’re going to try, but I’m not sure if we’ll be filled.” With almost $150 billion in demand for an offering totaling $75 billion, the SpaceX IPO was reportedly more than twice oversubscribed.
In an overcrowded offering of such size, the allocation that any individual investor actually receives is far less than the order made. However, the commitment’s direction is evident: a manager who has already made $12 to $13 billion for his clients on a single investment is attempting to spend an additional billion in the same business on its first day of public trading. As you watch that happen, it’s easy to characterize it as confidence. That would most likely be true.
