James Murdoch may have reaped as much as $7.5 billion from his pre-IPO investment in Elon Musk’s SpaceX

James Murdoch appears poised to reap a fortune from his investments in SpaceX that could far exceed what he gained from his father’s media empire.James, the estranged 53-year-old son of Rupert Murdoch, invested an estimated $120 million in Elon Musk’s rocket company before it went public this year in the biggest IPO in history. James’ holding could now be worth as much as $7.5 billion, according to calculations by Pitchbook’s Franco Granda, senior research analyst for private company coverage. The valuation has not previously been publicly disclosed.His success could come as a rebuke to his father, who during an internal family fight once instructed a lawyer to suggest that his youngest son could never have succeeded without him.

Fortune reached out to Blair Effron, a partner at Centerview Partners, which has advised the Murdoch family on investment decisions. He said, “As a friend of James, I’ll pass on speaking.”  A representative for James Murdoch had no comment at press time.

The financials are based on details of James’ holdings found in public records. 

A 2023 court case brought by a Tesla shareholder challenging Musk’s controversial $56 billion compensation package revealed that James had bought three separate tranches of stock in SpaceX. Two of those tranches, worth $50 million each, were acquired in 2019 and 2020 via a private investment firm, thought to be Murdoch’s Lupa Systems, where he is the primary beneficiary, along with staff and partners. He separately bought another $20 million as a personal investment in 2019. Those stakes together are now estimated to be worth between $6.573 billion and $7.44 billion, according to the Pitchbook estimate. 

While the SpaceX S-1 document attached to its public offering, doesn’t mention James Murdoch, it details stock awards to its chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, that have an expiration date of 2030 and value the stock at $4.40—numbers that give clues as to the value of owned by shareholders before the IPO.

There are, however, a series of caveats. James Murdoch could have sold those SpaceX shares along the way, and there have been several........

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