Court-unsealed records reveal a dozen China, Hong Kong, and Russia-linked investors quietly held SpaceX stakes through a U.S. middleman — while the company was building spy satellites for the Pentagon. A Beijing venture capitalist who backed Chinese satellite firms later sanctioned for aiding Russia’s Wagner Group put $15 million into a SpaceX fund in 2020. Nothing in any SEC filing disclosed it. The public knows only because ProPublica went to a Delaware court and pried the investor list loose — prevailing against Tomales Bay Capital’s appeal all the way to the Delaware Supreme Court. These opaque offshore structures raise serious money laundering concerns that regulators are struggling to keep pace with.
The Middleman Who Promised “Special Access”
Tomales Bay Capital bought SpaceX shares, bundled them into funds, and sold stakes to foreign investors — while its founder pitched quarterly business updates and facility tours.
Iqbaljit Kahlon, who runs Tomales Bay Capital, bought SpaceX stock on the secondary market, packaged it into fund vehicles, and sold interests to outside investors, collecting lucrative fees at each step. His proximity to SpaceX was notable — a pattern that fits a broader history of tech scandals in which insider access is leveraged for profit. CFO Bret Johnsen testified in Delaware court that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have,” according to ProPublica.
In a 2021 pitch meeting with a potential Chinese investor, Kahlon reportedly promised quarterly SpaceX business-development updates, facility visits, and opportunities to interview the CFO — per court-filed meeting minutes. Tomales Bay’s lawyers insist investors received only basic financial reporting, never sensitive operational data.
The unsealed records document the following investors in Tomales Bay funds between 2018 and 2021, according to ProPublica:
- David Su’s entity (MPCi co-founder): $15 million. MPCi partnered with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology on a state-backed aerospace initiative. MPCi describes Su as a Singapore citizen; a 2024 profile noted he spent nearly 20 years in China.
- HAL9001 Partners Fund I: roughly $10 million. Named after Kubrick’s murderous AI, the fund is tied to Roman Sobachevskiy, whose other company was fined hundreds of millions by Treasury for managing a sanctioned Russian oligarch’s money.
- Bracket Capital: approximately $48 million. Manages money for the Qatari royal family, according to an email Kahlon sent SpaceX’s CFO.
- At least a dozen total investors carried addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Russia.
“That could be a national security concern.” — Sarah Bauerle Danzman, Indiana University professor and State Department adviser on foreign investment, on the risk of conflicted investors accessing non-public SpaceX details.
Banned at the Door, After the Fact
SpaceX’s record-setting IPO explicitly excluded China and Hong Kong — even as the offshore structures it once tolerated made that earlier access possible.
Underwriters on SpaceX’s roughly $75 billion IPO — reportedly the largest in history, valuing the company around $1.75 trillion — were instructed to reject all orders from China and Hong Kong, citing export-control risks, according to Bloomberg and Reuters. The IPO website was inaccessible from those regions. SpaceX declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about the investor list or its vetting practices.
The contradiction is sharp. Chinese-linked capital was acceptable when routed through Cayman Islands vehicles that obscured beneficial owners. Now it is formally banned. The New York Times reports OpenAI is already following the same playbook for its own fundraising, mirroring the ambitions of the Stargate Project. The regulatory gap around passive minority stakes acquired through offshore middlemen remains wide open — and parallel government health, financial, and legal data restrictions in Europe show how other regulators are responding to foreign tech access risks — SpaceX just showed how easy it once was to walk through.
