---
title: "Harvard’s Rocket: A $2.2 Billion SpaceX Stake Lifts the Oldest Endowment Past the Market"
description: "The university’s bet on Musk’s company powered a 27.1% return, its best in five years, as federal grants were cut"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-16T14:58:02Z
modified: 2026-10-16T18:31:21Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/harvard-s-rocket-a-2-2-billion-spacex-stake-lifts-the-oldest-43afdf
language: en
tags: ["space", "endowment", "musk", "spacex", "harvard", "business"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Harvard’s Rocket: A $2.2 Billion SpaceX Stake Lifts the Oldest Endowment Past the Market

*The university’s bet on Musk’s company powered a 27.1% return, its best in five years, as federal grants were cut*

By Jan Sokol · October 16, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/harvard-s-rocket-a-2-2-billion-spacex-stake-lifts-the-oldest-43afdf

## In brief

- Harvard’s endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year ended June 30, beating the S&P 500’s 22.3%, its best result in five years
- The fund grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion; Harvard said it helped offset the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research grants
- A $2.2 billion SpaceX stake was Harvard Management Company’s largest stock holding, over six times its Taiwan Semiconductor position
- SpaceX’s market value has swung between $1.4 trillion and $2.4 trillion since its June 12 public listing
- Alphabet, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Nvidia also disclosed SpaceX stakes worth $94 billion, $73 billion and $21 billion

Cambridge, Massachusetts. The endowment of Harvard University is nearly four centuries old, a hoard of about 15,000 individual funds stitched together across the whole American experiment. Money like that is meant to be ballast, not sail. And yet the annual financial report published on Thursday shows a fund that has learned to ride the wind: a 27.1% investment return in the fiscal year ended June 30, the best in five years, comfortably ahead of the S&P 500’s 22.3% total return over the same stretch. After taxes, distributions and gifts, [Business Insider reported](https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-endowment-return-spacex-ipo-elon-musk-stock-portfolio-investing-2026-10), the endowment grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion.

The engine of that wind sits in Boca Chica and Hawthorne. Harvard Management Company’s stake in SpaceX, Elon Musk’s maker of Starship rockets, Starlink satellites and the Grok chatbot, was worth $2.2 billion at the end of June, according to its second-quarter portfolio disclosure. It was the fund’s number-one holding, more than six times the size of its second-biggest position, a stake in Taiwan Semiconductor worth under $350 million.

![A rocket carries gold coins and a red brick institutional building upward against a yellow background, trailing a plume of white smoke.](https://rews.cc/img/72e8c057b523c75cfe0811e17a5cd0bad2eac21c.webp)

## The ledger of a rocket age

Below SpaceX in the filing came Cerebras, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia, each position worth more than $150 million. All told, the 19 holdings listed at the end of June were worth about $4.3 billion, more than double the portfolio’s $1.8 billion value just three months earlier. The disclosure deserves its asterisks: a 13-F filing is a snapshot of a fund’s US stock holdings on a single date. It says nothing of foreign-listed shares, bonds, real estate, private investments or shorts. And the visible portfolio is a thin crust on a deep fund: as of June 30, Harvard said, only 14% of the endowment sat in public equities, against 29% in hedge funds, 46% in private equity and 4% in real estate, the balance elsewhere.

There is an irony here that the university itself does not deny. Harvard said the endowment’s strong performance helped it weather what it called the “abrupt termination of federal research grants” by the Trump administration. A government withdraws its money from knowledge; the rocket company of the president’s most prominent donor backfills the treasury. The university declined to comment when asked.

## The whipsaw and the prophet

Harvard’s windfall rests on one of the most violent charts in market history. SpaceX went public on June 12. Its market capitalization topped $2.4 trillion on June 20, collapsed to $1.4 trillion by August 1, and has since clawed back to around $2 trillion. The company posted a 92% year-on-year revenue jump for the quarter ended June, narrowing its net loss from $1 billion to $541 million.

![A red roller coaster car carrying a graduation cap climbs a cream-colored track with steep hills and dark blue supports against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/7837ca2a9833673bb73d1eada6feecd9db8a805c.webp)

Musk, for his part, values his creation in units beyond arithmetic. The world’s richest man recently posted on X that he sees a path for SpaceX to be worth “orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy,” a phrase implying the stock could rise at least 6,000-fold, to $12 quadrillion. He later clarified this was not a “statement of extreme confidence,” merely that the probability was “not zero.” On October 14, he said he expects SpaceX to be worth more than $100 trillion within the next 10 years. Every endowment chief carries a prophet on the books; few prophets quote their own multiples. One of them, the endowment chief at Washington University, has been making [his own very different wager on the AI age](https://rews.cc/a/the-man-who-bet-early-on-spacex-says-the-trillion-dollar-ai--885c23).

Harvard is not alone at the altar. Alphabet, Google’s parent, reported a roughly 4% stake in SpaceX valued at $94 billion at the end of June. Peter Thiel, Musk’s longtime associate, disclosed a 3.2% position worth $73 billion held through his Founders Fund and related entities. Nvidia, the AI chipmaker, holds a $21 billion stake. The oldest endowment in America, built to outlast kings and recessions, now rises and falls with the same ticker as everyone else.