Most weeks this spring, a team of Goldman Sachs bankers flew to Los Angeles, checked into luxury hotels (the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills was a favorite) and headed to work at the SpaceX offices.
There, the Goldman bankers often ran into their fiercest rivals, bankers from Morgan Stanley, who were also working at SpaceX’s open-plan office, helping Elon Musk and his team prepare their company’s then-secret initial public offering, according to four people who were familiar with both banks’ efforts but not permitted to discuss them publicly.
The two Wall Street firms were also jostling with each other to earn the coveted role as the lead bank on the I.P.O., hired to find investors to buy up SpaceX’s public shares and smooth out the gyrations of early trading.
On Wednesday, SpaceX revealed that Goldman had won that spot, known as “lead left,” a reference to the position on the I.P.O. paperwork where the bank’s name appears. That most likely entitles the bank to the largest share of what is expected to be more than $1 billion in commissions and associated fees.
Goldman will share that bounty with 22 other banks that Mr. Musk also hired. Morgan Stanley was listed second.
The other banks include Wall Street giants like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase and smaller firms like Cantor Fitzgerald, where the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hold leadership positions.
“I am sure this was a dogfight,” said Bryant Riley, executive chairman of B. Riley Securities, an investment bank not working on the I.P.O. “You’ve got the most high-profile guy out there picking you,” he added, referring to the imprimatur from Mr. Musk.
The role of lead banker is important not just for the public offering, which is expected on June 12, two people familiar with the matter said. It includes a potential halo effect, as the listing company typically taps primary banks to line up loans and advise on future transactions. Newly rich employees often become bank clients.
The fight for SpaceX’s banking business is part of broader maneuvering on Wall Street over what is likely to be a bonanza of tech deals this year. OpenAI is preparing to go public as early as September, and Anthropic is also expected to file for an I.P.O. this year.
On the 33rd floor of Goldman’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, where the heads of its investment bank work, there was a brief celebration when executives officially learned on Tuesday that they would lead the SpaceX offering, one person familiar with the gathering said.
Efforts to deepen inroads with the mercurial Mr. Musk go back years. Morgan Stanley’s efforts had been led by Michael Grimes, a top executive who returned to the bank from the Trump administration, where he helped Mr. Musk carry out cuts to the federal work force as part of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Stifel, a lesser-known bank that wound up with a role in the offering, has been toasting SpaceX investors and other start-ups — co-sponsoring a Los Angeles party on Cinco de Mayo that included some of the company’s earliest backers. The Chainsmokers, the electronic dance music D.J.s, showed up for a late-night appearance, several people who attended said.
SpaceX’s offering is a particularly lavish one. The company has been private for more than two decades as Mr. Musk has repeatedly raised money from friends and venture capitalists to fund rocket launches.
When it goes public, SpaceX is expected to raise as much as $75 billion and be valued above $1.5 trillion, according to people who were looped in on the plans but not permitted to discuss them publicly. Wednesday’s filing did not list such price targets, but the firm is expected to put out a range next month.
To find buyers for such a large amount of shares, the banks are expected to divvy up the work: Bank of America, for instance, is tapped with leading outreach to individual investors, while the Royal Bank of Canada will play point on that country’s deep-pocketed government investment funds, two people briefed on the strategy said.
In meetings with SpaceX executives, bankers have had to work through how to value a company that is part telecom, part artificial intelligence and part Mr. Musk’s dreams.
Like real estate agents, bankers aren’t paid until a transaction is consummated, so they have been toiling for months in the hope that SpaceX would select them to participate. Some banks agreed to spend tens of millions of dollars on contracts to use Mr. Musk’s fledgling Grok chatbot as a condition of being considered for the job, The New York Times has reported.
Wall Street is already onto the next bounty. Just hours before SpaceX’s offering documents became public on Wednesday, reports emerged that OpenAI, led by Mr. Musk’s competitor Sam Altman, is preparing to file for its I.P.O. The two main banks involved in that transaction are Goldman and Morgan Stanley. It is not yet clear who will lead.
Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The Times, writing about Wall Street and the banking industry.
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