Fortune’s investigation into SpaceX and Antonio Gracias’s Valor Equity Partners reveals more than $20 billion in related party GPU leasing deals reclassified as debt, a governance tangle that could reverberate through Musk linked AI and potentially crypto risk capital.
Summary
- Valor funds hold over 500 million SpaceX Class A shares worth an estimated $90 billion to $140 billion at rumored IPO valuations
- Three xAI GPU lease agreements with Valor, guaranteed by SpaceX, total close to $20 billion in obligations
- PwC pushed to book roughly $9 billion of those leases as related party debt on SpaceX’s balance sheet
- The structure amplifies governance and concentration risk around Musk adjacent AI, infra and crypto narratives
According to Fortune, Valor entities controlled by Antonio Gracias collectively own more than 500 million Class A shares of SpaceX, about 7.3 percent of the company, making him the second largest individual shareholder after Elon Musk.
At the $1.75 trillion valuation SpaceX is targeting in its IPO, that stake would be worth roughly $90 billion, and if the company lists closer to $2 trillion, the value jumps past $140 billion, instantly placing Gracias in the global wealth elite.
How big is Valor’s SpaceX stake and why do the leases matter?
The same reporting details that, beginning last October, an xAI subsidiary inside SpaceX called CTC signed an equipment lease agreement with Valor for high end AI infrastructure hardware, specifically Nvidia GPUs used to power xAI data centers.
Two more GPU leases followed in January and April, and together the three Valor agreements obligate the xAI unit to pay close to $20 billion over their terms, with SpaceX itself guaranteeing the payments if the subsidiary cannot cover them.
Fortune notes that Valor entities have already collected about $885 million from the leases in 2025 and another $857 million in the first two months of 2026, turning the structure into a substantial income stream for Musk’s long time ally ahead of the IPO.
Auditors at PwC concluded that the transactions “were loans in substance, not leases,” forcing SpaceX to record around $9 billion of the arrangement as related party debt owed to Valor on its balance sheet.
That reclassification lands on top of an already heavy debt load, after earlier reporting showed SpaceX’s total debt climbing to roughly $23 billion in 2025, much of it tied to lease style financing for xAI’s GPU buildout.
This means IPO investors are not just betting on rockets and satellites but on a deeply intertwined capital stack where Musk’s AI venture, Valor’s compute funds, and SpaceX’s own guarantees all sit on top of the same risk pyramid.
Why does this matter for AI and crypto capital flows?
The GPU leasing deals with Valor do not exist in a vacuum; they sit alongside xAI’s pursuit of up to $20 billion in additional chip financing, structured through vehicles where Valor, Apollo, Nvidia and other creditors fund Nvidia hardware that is then leased back to xAI.
In one such structure described by Bloomberg and summarized by CryptoRank, roughly $7.5 billion of equity and up to $12.5 billion of debt would be used to buy GPUs, with xAI leasing them for five years and Nvidia itself contributing as much as $2 billion of equity.
Apollo meanwhile has announced a $3.5 billion capital solution for Valor Compute Infrastructure to support a $5.4 billion acquisition and lease of data center hardware, including Nvidia GB200 GPUs, to an xAI subsidiary, underscoring how much Wall Street credit is now tied to Musk’s AI stack.
As ChainCatcher’s summary of the Fortune report points out, this lattice of leasebacks and guarantees raises classic governance questions, because one of SpaceX’s directors stands on both sides of the trade and collects debt service from a company he helps oversee.
If regulators, ratings agencies, or public market investors decide that these arrangements are too close to self dealing or that the leverage profile is under disclosed, the immediate impact would be a higher cost of capital or tighter covenants for Musk linked AI and infra vehicles.
That in turn filters into the broader risk complex where Musk names occupy outsize mindshare, from xAI tokens and AI infrastructure plays on public markets to private rounds for data center projects that often overlap with crypto, edge computing and decentralized infrastructure pitches.
Any serious hit to the perceived integrity or solvency of the SpaceX xAI Valor triangle would likely compress valuations and risk appetite across adjacent narratives, reducing the marginal dollar available for speculative bets, including Musk inspired AI and crypto crossovers.
/Given how quickly capital rotates between AI, meme driven crypto and high beta tech, a governance scandal around these leases might not be a chain level shock, but it would be a liquidity and trust event for one of the main narrative engines driving flows into the riskiest parts of the market.
