Talk about the rich getting richer.
Alphabet, parent company of Google, has been one of the best-performing stocks of the year, up nearly 70%, and now has a market capitalization of $3.8 trillion.
The company also happened to make what could turn out to be one of the most lucrative startup investments of all time, which could finally bear fruit next year.
In 2015, Google invested around $900 million in SpaceX for a stake of around 7% in Elon Musk’s space company, which was then valued at $12 billion.
Now SpaceX is reportedly planning to go public next year at a valuation of $1.5 trillion, which would make Google’s stake worth around $111 billion.
Even for a company as big as Google, SpaceX’s success has already had a material impact on earnings.
Earlier this year, Google reported an $8 billion gain from “non-marketable equity securities,” which Bloomberg identified as SpaceX. That gain represented 25% of Google’s net income for the first quarter of 2025.
Google is one of the largest outside investors in SpaceX, along with VC firm Founders Fund and Fidelity.
Google and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
Google’s 2015 investment, which was focused on Starlink, now looks certain to be a towering success, but at that time, it was met with considerable skepticism.
“One big technical and financial challenge facing the proposed venture is the cost installing ground-based antennas and computer terminals to receive the satellite signals,” The Wall Street Journal wrote about Google’s investment at the time. “Another unanswered question is how SpaceX plans to transmit Internet signals to Earth. The company isn’t believed to control rights to radio spectrum.”
Most of those questions have been answered with Starlink, now used by everyone from the Ukrainian army to United Airlines.
Aside from just the paper gains, Google’s investment has also been a strategic advantage, as SpaceX has used Google Cloud to power Starlink.
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