Who says investing in Twitter alongside Elon Musk was a bad deal? With SpaceX going public, early shareholders made a comeback and nearly doubled their profits.

According to 动察 Beating monitoring, in 2022 Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, bringing along a group of well-known investors such as Larry Ellison, Andreessen Horowitz, and Bill Ackman’s foundation. At the time, the general consensus was that he had overpaid, and institutional investors like mutual fund giant Fidelity quickly marked down their holdings' valuations. Now, the situation has reversed, and these investors’ equity returns have approached 200%.

X’s advertising revenue has yet to recover, and user growth has stagnated. The investors' turnaround relied on two rounds of mergers led by Musk: in March 2025, he merged AI company xAI (valued at $80 billion) with X (valued at $44 billion, including debt); this February, the merged company was then incorporated into SpaceX. SpaceX has already secretly submitted its IPO application and may go public in June with a valuation exceeding $2 trillion, at which point X shareholders will have an opportunity to cash out.

After two rounds of mergers and financing dilution, X shareholders currently hold about 5% of SpaceX, which, based on a $2 trillion valuation, is worth around $100 billion. Of the original $44 billion price for acquiring Twitter, about $33.5 billion was equity investment, with external investors contributing around $10 billion. Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal kept his Twitter shares during the acquisition and participated in xAI’s early-stage financing. His current SpaceX holdings are valued at over $4 billion, more than seven times his original investment. Gerber Kawasaki’s CEO Ross Gerber stated that he had written down Twitter holdings by 75%, only to recover those losses after the merger. If SpaceX lists at its target valuation, he expects returns of 2.5 to 3 times the original investment. However, he also pointed out that SpaceX was actually heavily diluted, and Musk did this to make sure Twitter and xAI investors recouped their investments.