Google Is Up $94 Billion on SpaceX But Not for the Reason You Think
Google just revealed it holds about $94 billion of SpaceX stock. The win came from one bet it made back in 2015.
That sounds like a giant new investment, but it is not. Google made this bet more than ten years ago, long before SpaceX got big.
How Google’s SpaceX Bet Started in 2015
In January 2015, Google and Fidelity put $1 billion into SpaceX. Together they got just under 10% of the company. That valued SpaceX at more than $10 billion. Google led the round.
Then SpaceX grew for a decade. It went public in June at about $135 a share. That valued it near $1.77 trillion, the biggest IPO ever. Google’s early bet had grown into a stake worth about 100 times more.
New funding rounds slowly shrank Google’s slice. Today it owns close to 5% of SpaceX.
Why the Windfall Barely Moved the Stock
The gain showed up in Google’s June quarter. Its investments rose about $99 billion on paper. That pushed profit up to $112 billion. Stakes in AI firm Anthropic helped too.
But almost none of it was real cash. Of the $9.11 Google earned per share, $6.26 came from the paper gain. Without it, profit looked ordinary. The gain even brought a $21.9 billion tax bill.
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