Investment and private equity firm, Valor Equity Partners, founded by Antonio Gracias, a long-time Elon Musk backer and current SpaceX board member, has opted to give away part of its SpaceX stock to its limited partner investors, according to an SEC filing spotted by Bloomberg.
Valor made a killing on SpaceX after investing in it over decades, with entities controlled by Gracias owning more than 500 million shares at the time of the IPO. This was second only to Musk (who owned over 6 billion shares at the time). But instead of cashing out and issuing returns to LPs, Valor handed over 8.5 percent of its holdings to them, worth about $8.5 billion, Bloomberg estimates.
The investment firm will still own more than 460 million shares after the giveaway, the SEC disclosure form says.
Transferring ownership of the shares could give those Valor limited partners a tax advantage. More importantly, it avoids dumping a giant tranche of shares into the open market. Such a dump could cause a glut of available shares and a corresponding dip in price. SpaceX is already down about 10 percent since its blockbuster IPO day.
Former Waymo CFO Moves To Self-driving Startup, Wayve
Former chief financial officer (CFO) at Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle company, Waymo, Elisa de Martel has been appointed to the same position at buzzy self-driving vehicle startup, Wayve. Outgoing Wayve CFO, Max Warburton, who held the position since 2024, is moving into a strategic advisory role supporting the company’s leadership team.
Her appointment as CFO comes as Wayve moves from development and testing to a company on the verge of deploying its automated driving technology on two fronts — robotaxis and passenger vehicles.
De Martel, who will be based out of Sunnyvale, California, has a history of working for tech companies, including as CFO at industrial-grade 3D printing company, Carbon, and an 11-year stint as manufacturing finance director at Apple. She was CFO at Waymo from 2022 to January 2026 — a critical period for the company as it began to commercially operate in several cities and raised $5.6 billion in a Series C fundraising round that was led by its parent company and pushed its valuation to more than $45 billion.
Wayve now sits in a similarly pivotal moment. The startup, which was founded in 2017 and now valued at about $8.5 billion, attracted investors and automotive customers for its self-learning approach to its automated driving software. The company developed a software layer using an end-to-end neural network that doesn’t rely on high-definition maps, custom hardware, or hand-coded rules and only uses data to teach the vehicle how to drive.
The company’s tech is the basis of two products: an “eyes on” assisted-driving system and an “eyes off” fully automated-driving system, which could be applied to robotaxis or consumer vehicles that can handle all of the driving in certain environments.
Wayve’s pitch, and the agnostic nature of its technology, has resonated with automakers already locked into certain hardware. It’s also attracted investors — Wayve has raised $3.2 billion to date — and companies like Uber that want to use a more capable version of the self-driving tech to deploy robotaxis.
While de Martel has a well-documented career in top financial posts, it was her connection to deep tech that was particularly attractive to Wayve’s leadership, including founder and CEO Alex Kendall, according to insiders who asked not to be named.
