Elon Musk’s SpaceX is facing protests against its expected initial public offering from some of the same advocacy groups that helped erase $600 billion from Tesla’s market cap early last year.
SpaceX’s IPO is poised to be the largest ever, raising tens of billions of dollars for the Musk-founded company and valuing it above $2 trillion. If all goes as intended come June, the conglomerate that now owns a rocket manufacturer, a social media app, and an AI chatbot developer will instantly rank among the world’s top 10 largest publicly-traded companies.
On Wednesday, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote to the US Securities and Exchange Commission urging it to scrutinize SpaceX’s IPO preparations. The company’s shares are likely to end up in the retirement accounts of the union’s 1.8 million members who come from education, health care, and government. “I have significant concerns about the degree to which this extremely large offering will comply with the securities laws’ requirements concerning full disclosure of material information and fair treatment of investors,” Weingarten wrote in a letter shared with WIRED.
The union is one of several organizations and activists advocating for greater oversight of SpaceX’s IPO. Some are going as far as calling for investors to boycott the IPO for many of the same reasons they outlined when pressuring Tesla shareholders to dump their stock last year.
The IPO “will bring an infusion of cash that Musk will control and tap for personal and political gain,” says the loosely organized activist group Divest From Tesla. “Just as he has tapped Tesla to access tremendous wealth that he used, not for the greater good, but to sow seeds of chaos and fascism, so he will with SpaceX.”
Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers want SEC chair Paul Atkins to direct his teams to closely check SpaceX’s IPO filings as part of a routine review that is currently underway. She cited concerns about the company’s business plans potentially relying on “nonexistent or speculative technologies,” the reported thoroughness of its accounting, and the adequacy of its board of directors. Members’ pension funds are likely to hold SpaceX shares within days—not months—of the IPO under newly enacted stock exchange rules. But whether SpaceX can ever deliver the profits necessary to justify its outsized valuation is questionable, meaning the value of the stakes could fall precipitously and harm retirees.
“The commission must demand ironclad disclosures, independent oversight and safeguards against forced investment—or risk consigning workers’ life savings to the whims of a company that operates more like a Musk family venture than a transparent, publicly traded enterprise,” Weingarten said in a statement.
Last year, she urged state and local officials and six big investment funds to review their holdings of Tesla shares.
AkademikerPension, a retirement plan for teachers and other government workers in Denmark, considers SpaceX’s rumored valuation target “very rich and would in isolation make us cautious in participating,” says the fund’s head of global equities, Dan Wejse. As SpaceX reveals additional details closer to its stock market debut, Wejse also plans to scrutinize the company’s financials and shareholder structure. AkademikerPension has been divested from Tesla since last year over concerns about a lack of independence on the automaker’s board and Musk’s involvement in politics.
Lehigh County, Pennsylvania’s retirement board paused new investments in Tesla last year. County controller Mark Pinsley says the board hasn’t discussed a potential SpaceX investment yet, but he’s concerned that it will automatically become part of the county’s portfolio through index funds that generally hold stakes in the largest companies. “SpaceX is going to be supported by pension funds not because it has good fundamentals but because it lands in an indexable range,” Pinsley says. “It’s going to do OK even if it shouldn’t. Tesla was losing revenue hand over fist as [Musk] was talking to Trump, but barely did Tesla shares fall.”
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment for this story. While testifying last week in his trial against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Musk described the goal of SpaceX as making it possible for humans to live on other planets “to ensure the long-term survival of life and consciousness as we know it.” Musk, who is CEO and self-described chief engineer, described SpaceX as “life insurance for life as we know it” and added that offering the possibility of living among the stars was important to excite people. “Life cannot just be about solving one miserable problem after another.”
DOGE Protests
Musk became ever more the globally polarizing figure after helping lead President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and overseeing mass cuts to jobs, contracts, and grants across federal agencies.
The political activity prompted numerous campaigns against the automaker Tesla, where Musk is CEO. Tesla Takedown, for instance, demonstrated by Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations to pressure people to reconsider the company’s cars. The group also encouraged individual investors and big investment funds to sell off their Tesla holdings. “Hurting Tesla is stopping Musk,” Tesla’s Takedown website states. “Stopping Musk will help save lives and our democracy.”
Tesla shares fell about 40 percent amid the backlash, and the company reported lackluster sales last April. Musk acknowledged the pressure tactics as a “big deal” and ended up stepping away from DOGE. Since then, Tesla shares have surged back up, and Musk has talked up the company’s increased focus on developing robots. But activists feel they successfully delivered a message last year and are hoping to repeat that with SpaceX, even if it’s unlikely that they derail the IPO in a significant way.
Last month, environmental activists demonstrated outside of meetings with investors that SpaceX held in Tennessee, where it has a key data center, and Texas, home to SpaceX headquarters. They fear the company’s growth could fuel further pollution and other unwelcome effects. Tesla Takedown helped promote the protests.
“SpaceX wants the public to buy into the myth of the final frontier—but this is really a desperate cash-out before the cracks in Musk’s empire become impossible to ignore,” Tesla Takedown tells WIRED. “Exploding rockets, a militarized Starlink, dangerous xAI outputs: The risks aren’t hypothetical, they’re mounting, and the era of the blank check for Elon must end.”
So far, big investment managers have been quiet about their plans for the IPO. For example, the financial services giant Blackrock excludes Tesla shares from a couple of exchange-traded funds such as GBAL and XUSR that take into account a company’s environmental, social, and governance policies. It declined to comment on whether it plans to exclude SpaceX shares from those or other funds.
ABP, a Dutch pension fund that sold off a stake approaching $600 million in Tesla in 2024, declined to comment on potential future investments in SpaceX. The fund’s policies bar investments in companies involved in serious controversies related to the environment or corporate integrity; activists could make the case SpaceX is in the midst of both.
Aarian Marshall contributed to this story.
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