For Elon Musk’s company, that’s a rounding error on a valuation of more than $1.8 trillion: small enough that the stock will never trade on it, yet large enough to normalize the asset in a way that no dedicated vehicle can.
For years, onchain analysts estimated that SpaceX had around 8,300 bitcoin. The S-1 then revealed that the real figure was more than double that, meaning one of the most scrutinized private companies in the world had a billion dollar bitcoin position and the public’s best guess was halved until securities laws forced the answer.
Now the position lives under public company rules.
Fair-value accounting means that each quarterly report marks bitcoin to market and records gains and losses regardless of whether SpaceX trades the coin or not. Tesla showed what that looks like in one move, posting hundreds of millions in paper losses on a position it didn’t sell.
SpaceX arrives with bitcoin already 37% below its January high, though its cost base of around $35,000 means the stake is still up around 80% from its initial purchase.
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX — both Elon Musk-owned companies — have ever shown an appetite to trade their stack. These companies continue to hold (at least for now) bitcoin through public earnings cycles and analyst questions, while the position fluctuates, giving any Fortune 500 CFO a working example of a mega-cap treating bitcoin as a reserve asset, absorbing the earnings noise and moving on.
