Elon Musk’s beneficial ownership of SpaceX, as set out in the company’s June prospectus and Musk’s Form 4 filed with the SEC on June 17, comes to 6,418,547,515 shares of Class A and Class B common stock, including options. At SpaceX’s Nasdaq close of $134.27 on Friday, November 6, that is about $861.8 billion, by our arithmetic.
That sits slightly below the $870 billion in a BigGo Finance headline on November 8; the headline does not give a share count or price, and $870 billion would correspond to about $135.54 a share on the same share count, by our arithmetic.
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The key insight:Elon Musk’s SpaceX holdings in the June prospectus and Form 4 total 6,418,547,515 shares including options, about $861.8 billion at the November 6 close of $134.27, by our arithmetic. Excluding options, Musk holds about 44.7% of the 13.58 billion shares SpaceX reported outstanding on October 15.
SpaceX’s final prospectus, filed on June 12, lists Musk with 849,494,440 shares of Class A common stock and 5,569,053,075 shares of Class B common stock, and 84.4% of combined voting power after the offering.
The prospectus footnote says the Class B figure includes 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B common stock “the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions”, and 350,000,000 shares of Class B common stock issuable upon exercise of options.
Musk’s Form 4 filed on June 17 reports 842,091,670 Class A shares held by the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, plus 7,402,770 held by a grantor retained annuity trust. EDGAR lists no later Form 4 from Musk for SpaceX through November 8.
SpaceX shares outstanding at 15 October 2026 (13,581,063,709, Form 10-Q) by holder: Elon Musk 6,068,547,515 shares excluding options (424B4 prospectus and Form 4), Alphabet 555,043,560 Class A shares (Form 13F, 30 September 2026), all others the remainder; values at the 6 November Nasdaq close of $134.27. Musk’s holdings are $861.8 billion including 350 million options, $814.8 billion excluding them and $640.0 billion excluding options and 1.30 billion performance-vesting restricted shares. Shares and values are our arithmetic.
Three Ways to Count the Stake
Valued at the November 6 close of $134.27, our arithmetic gives three figures, depending on what is counted.
Counting everything the SEC treats as beneficially owned, including the 350 million options, the holdings come to about $861.8 billion. Leaving out the options, the 6,068,547,515 shares come to about $814.8 billion. Leaving out both the options and the 1,302,072,285 restricted shares that vest only on performance conditions, the 4,766,475,230 remaining shares come to about $640.0 billion.
Musk’s Form 4 says 302,072,285 restricted Class B shares were granted under what it calls the “AI CEO Award”. The options carry an exercise price of $8.3998, which our figures do not deduct.
Against the Rest of the Register
SpaceX’s Form 10-Q says that as of October 15 it had 8,246,541,218 shares of Class A common stock and 5,334,522,491 shares of Class B common stock outstanding, 13,581,063,709 in total. At the November 6 close that is a market value of about $1.82 trillion, by our arithmetic.
On that count, the shares Musk holds, excluding options, are about 44.7% of the total, about $814.8 billion. Alphabet’s Form 13F lists 555,043,560 SpaceX Class A shares at the end of September, as we reported in Alphabet Added 3.85M SpaceX Shares in Q3, about 4.1% and about $74.5 billion at the same close. All other holders account for about 51.2%, by our arithmetic.
As we read the filings, the size of the stake depends on what is counted: options and performance-vesting restricted shares account for $221.8 billion of the gap between the highest and lowest figures, by our arithmetic.
As we read the register, Musk and Alphabet together hold about 48.8% of the shares outstanding on the filings we read, by our arithmetic.
As we read the timing, these counts come before the December 11 index rebalance that Goldman Sachs estimated could bring more than $10 billion of passive buying, as we covered earlier.
SpaceX prospectus, on Musk’s restricted Class B shares
“the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions”
Three Implications
FOR INDEX FUNDS Goldman Sachs estimated more than $10 billion of passive buying at the December 11 Russell 1000 Growth rebalance, as we reported earlier.
FOR THE FREE FLOAT Musk and Alphabet together hold about 48.8% of the 13.58 billion shares outstanding on the filings we read, by our arithmetic.
FOR VOTING CONTROL The prospectus put Musk’s combined voting power at 84.4% after the offering.
The analysis says: “The job of any operator, investor, or builder is to know which layer they are operating inside and which layer the binding constraint is rotating toward next.”
As we read it, for SpaceX holders the register itself is part of that question. The analysis does not discuss SpaceX ownership.
What Is Not Established
The share counts are from the June prospectus and Form 4, and EDGAR lists no later Form 4 from Musk; the filings we read do not establish Musk’s holdings on November 6. The 10-Q gives a smaller Class B count on October 15 than the prospectus did at the offering, and the filings we read do not say whose shares converted. The 13F gives Alphabet’s holding at September 30 only. BigGo Finance’s headline does not explain its $870 billion figure.
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On the June filings and the November 6 close of $134.27, Musk’s SpaceX holdings come to about $861.8 billion including options, about $814.8 billion excluding them, and about $640.0 billion excluding unvested performance shares as well, by our arithmetic. Excluding options, Musk holds about 44.7% of the 13.58 billion shares the 10-Q reports outstanding.
A note on sourcing. Musk’s share counts are from SpaceX’s final prospectus (Form 424B4, 12 June 2026) and Musk’s Form 4 (17 June 2026); shares outstanding are from SpaceX’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 September 2026; the price is Nasdaq’s SPCX close on 6 November 2026; Alphabet’s holding is from its Form 13F for 30 September, as covered in our earlier piece. All valuations and percentages are our arithmetic; option exercise costs are not deducted.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
