SpaceX makes its public debut on Friday and some investors who backed the company through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) still don’t know how many shares they’re entitled to or whether they’ll get any shares at all.
Investing through SPVs, where multiple parties pool their money to invest in a single company, has been around for a while. But SpaceX represents an unprecedented case of an IPO with multiple layers of these vehicles. Since demand for SpaceX allocations has been so high in recent years, investors in an SPV have occasionally formed a new SPV from their shares, creating a structure sometimes stacked four or five layers deep.
