Some of the SpaceX investors on Kahlo’s notebook are easy to identify: Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi; former US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; A British Virgin Islands company owned by Indonesian billionaires. But others on the list are shell companies whose ultimate owners remain hidden.
One such company is HAL9001 Partners Fund I, a Delaware LLC that invested about $10 million in the SpaceX fund in 2020. founding documents Signed for HAL9001 by venture capitalist Roman Sobachevski. The Treasury Department recently fined a company Sobachevsky co-owned hundreds of millions of dollars for managing a different investment on behalf of a company. He sanctioned the Russian oligarch. Sobachevsky was not personally accused of wrongdoing.
A spokesman for Tomales Bay Capital said the oligarch had “no connection with the capital.” Sobachevsky did not answer questions, including who put up the money for the SpaceX investment.
The memos also shed some light on the relationship between SpaceX and Qatar. Funds linked to Bracket Capital, an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London and Qatar, invested about $48 million through a series of deals from 2017 to 2020, the documents show. According to Kahlon’s email to SpaceX’s CFO, Brackett has money from the Qatari royal family. The book also lists Doha, Qatar as the address of a mysterious entity called AM FIG Cayman Limited, which invested about $10 million in 2020.
The filings do not indicate that Bracket’s investments were made on behalf of the royal family or any other client. In 2021, when Kahlon was pitching supporters for another SpaceX deal, he texted a Bracket staffer: “Finally we can send Yalda to talk to the big guy. We need a pledge, lol.” (Yalda Aoukar is a co-founder of Bracket. It’s unclear whether the “big guy” refers to a member of the royal family and what Kahlo meant by “collateral.”)
Bracket did not respond to requests for comment.
The investments covered in the book were small percentages of SpaceX, but would have unexpected consequences. The company’s valuation has exploded in recent years, from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion as of Wednesday morning.
Last year, ProPublica gave information about SpaceX’s unusual approach to receiving money from Chinese investors. according to Statement from Delaware casethe company allowed Chinese investors to buy shares in SpaceX as long as the money went through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy centers.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. register for Big Story newsletter to get stories like this in your inbox.
