A company that builds spy satellites for the Pentagon quietly accepted millions from investors in Beijing and Moscow, then barred them from its IPO.

"At the end we can just send Yalda to talk to big guy. We need a bail out lol."

— Iqbaljit Kahlon, founder of Tomales Bay Capital, texting about SpaceX investments

SpaceX went public last week in the largest initial offering in history, sending Elon Musk past $1 trillion and putting his rocket company on the Nasdaq alongside Apple and Microsoft. But new court documents obtained by ProPublica reveal a far murkier chapter from the company's private years: Chinese and Russian investors were buying into one of the most sensitive defense contractors in America, with SpaceX's apparent blessing, as long as the money was routed through offshore secrecy hubs.

The records, unsealed this month after ProPublica fought Tomales Bay Capital all the way to the Delaware Supreme Court, detail at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Russia who acquired stakes between 2018 and 2021. The investments ranged from $800,000 to $40 million. SpaceX's own CFO testified that Tomales Bay's founder, Iqbaljit Kahlon, "has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have."

Translation: whoever was managing SpaceX's investor pipeline had a front-row seat at the table.

The most consequential name on the list is David Su, co-founder of MPCi, one of Beijing's largest venture capital firms. An entity owned by Su invested $15 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020. At the time, MPCi was also backing Chinese satellite companies that are now sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for allegedly assisting the Wagner Group, Russia's notorious mercenary organization. One of those same companies was sanctioned again last month for allegedly helping Iran attack U.S. military forces.

MPCi was also named as a partner by China's Ministry of Science and Technology in a state-backed aerospace development program. In other words, Su's firm was simultaneously investing in SpaceX and in the Chinese government's effort to build its own space capabilities.

There is no evidence that Su did anything illegal. But Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments, told ProPublica the arrangement raises obvious national security questions. "If an investor has conflicts of interests with other companies in China, if they could feed that information to competitors, it could be a national security concern."

MPCi responded by calling Su "a Singapore citizen who resides in Singapore" and insisting he "has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX." A 2024 profile contradicts the residency claim, noting Su "spent almost 100 per cent of his time in China over the last 20 years."

Kahlon did not just passively sell stakes to foreign investors. Court records include meeting minutes from a 2021 pitch to a potential Chinese investor in which he promised quarterly updates on SpaceX's business development, "visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X's CFO."

A lawyer for Tomales Bay Capital denied providing any non-public information, calling the investors "passive limited partners" who received nothing beyond fund financials and quarterly valuations. The same lawyer insisted that "the vast majority, if not all, of the investors included on the unsealed Tomales Bay investor list are not citizens of any foreign adversary."

The problem is that the documents themselves list addresses in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Moscow. Whether those people were actually living there or just using mailing addresses for convenience, SpaceX accepted their money through the same pipeline that Kahlon described to the CFO as having been part of the company "longer than I have."

SpaceX did not respond to ProPublica's questions.

The investor list also turned up connections that extend well beyond China. A Delaware LLC called HAL9001 Partners Fund I invested roughly $10 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020. Its incorporation documents were signed by Roman Sobachevskiy, a venture capitalist whose co-owned company was recently fined hundreds of millions of dollars by the Treasury Department for managing investments on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Sobachevskiy has not been personally accused of wrongdoing and did not respond to questions about who put up the money.

On the Qatari side, funds affiliated with Bracket Capital, an investment firm with offices in Los Angeles, London, and Doha, invested approximately $48 million through a series of deals from 2017 through 2020. An email from Kahlon to SpaceX's CFO indicated the firm had money from the Qatari royal family. The ledger also lists a mysterious entity called AM FIG Cayman Limited, with an address in Doha, which invested around $10 million in 2020.

The investments were tiny fractions of SpaceX. But they generated enormous returns. The company's valuation exploded from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion as of last week. A $15 million investment made in 2020 would now be worth roughly $1.2 billion.

Last year, ProPublica reported that SpaceX had a specific workaround for accepting Chinese money: allow it, but only if routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy jurisdictions. The company's rationale was that as long as the ownership passed through an intermediary, the direct connection between Beijing and the rocket company could be obscured.

Then last week, when SpaceX finally went public, the company barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying IPO shares, citing "regulatory and compliance risks." Bloomberg reported the exclusion on June 5th. The irony was immediate: having quietly accepted Chinese capital for years through offshore channels, SpaceX suddenly found national security concerns urgent enough to enforce a ban.

The timing suggests the company was less concerned about who owned its stock and more concerned about who would know about it. Private investments through Cayman Islands shell companies stay off the public record. An IPO forces disclosure.

The full investor list adds hundreds of names to the picture of who owns SpaceX. Some are easy to identify: the Indian politician Abhishek Singhvi, Betsy DeVos, a British Virgin Islands company owned by Indonesian billionaires. Others remain hidden behind layers of Delaware LLCs and offshore entities whose ultimate beneficial owners have not been traced.

What the documents make clear is that one of the most valuable defense contractors in the world, a company that builds spy satellites for the Pentagon and launches military payloads, accepted investment from people and entities with ties to Chinese state aerospace programs, Russian oligarchs, and sanctioned satellite firms. The money was funneled through a middleman whose founder described himself as having been part of SpaceX's orbit longer than the company's own CFO.

The question is not whether any of this violated the law. The question is why a company that manufactures intelligence-gathering hardware for the U.S. government considered offshore Chinese investment to be business as usual, until the IPO made it impossible to pretend otherwise.