SpaceX’s CFO Is the Quiet VIP of a Wild IPOBret Johnsen, SpaceX’s low-profile chief financial officer, has tried to keep a grip over the most frenetic episode in his decade-plus at the company. It will only get crazier from here.
Over the last few months, SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, has been trying to pull off an intense two-part challenge: Fold xAI into SpaceX—the biggest merger ever—and then take the combined company public at $75 billion in the largest IPO ever.
Johnsen, 57, has gotten it done by keeping his customary cool. Inside SpaceX, colleagues say he’s less prone to getting worked up than other executives like CEO Elon Musk and President Gwynne Shotwell, and compared to those colleagues, he is less apt to drop an f-bomb. At the same time, Johnsen manages to stay loyal to Musk while knowing how to make his bosses’ impulses and visions presentable—and palatable—to investors, colleagues say.
“You wouldn’t want a cowboy hat–wearing sort of person to be your CFO when you already have that in Elon and Gwynne,” said a former SpaceX executive who has worked with Johnsen. “It makes you feel better about the company knowing that one of the officers is focused on steering the ship and isn’t saying, ‘Hey, this week we’re going to Mars! Next week we’re doing something completely different!’”
Another former SpaceXer described Johnsen in different terms: “He’s a boring suit.”
Still, Johnsen is no shrinking violet. Throughout this year, he repeatedly expressed frustration with media reports revealing details about the IPO before SpaceX had filed them publicly, telling advisers involved with the deal to shut up or he would fire them, people familiar with his comments said. Johnsen and spokespeople for SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Johnsen’s efforts are poised to reach a climax next Friday, the day when SpaceX shares are expected to begin trading. The IPO is a watershed moment for Silicon Valley that could greatly accelerate Musk’s many bold plans for the company, which include everything from building data centers in orbit to colonizing the moon and Mars.
The SpaceX IPO is expected to produce one of the greatest waves of wealth creation from a single company ever. Musk himself is poised to become the world’s first trillionaire, and the company has produced a wide swath of billionaires and centimillionaires: Johnsen is one of them. At the expected $135 a share IPO price, his stake in the company will be worth $1.3 billion.
Getting SpaceX to an IPO has resulted in a chaotic few months for Johnsen. During that time, he has slashed costs at xAI and assembled unconventional deals to sell compute to Anthropic and potentially acquire Cursor. And he has juggled relationships with the 23 banks involved in the IPO, among many other tasks.
Johnsen’s job as one of the most important executives at one of the planet’s most closely watched companies is only going to get more complicated from here. It will also force Johnsen, who has kept a low profile over his decade-and-half tenure as SpaceX’s first and only CFO, much more into the public eye. In the past, he has made only occasional appearances at finance or commercial space conferences and events for his alma mater, the University of Southern California, where he serves as a trustee. And in stark contrast to his boss Musk, he has totally eschewed X: Johnsen has fewer than 3,000 followers and no public posts. Only recently did he receive a SpaceX affiliate badge on the service.
To some degree, all high-ranking executives at companies going public face the challenge of contending with greater scrutiny. But what makes Johnsen’s task exceptional is the sheer size of his company’s ambitions and the fact that just a few months ago, SpaceX was a much different business. It didn’t yet have the burden of xAI’s billions of dollars in cash burn. Given Musk’s management style, Johnsen must manage the books for one of the most unpredictable people in modern corporate history.
“The challenge is incorporating aspects of being a public company—investors, conferences, analyst calls—while also having to deal with a lot more scrutiny since the company is spending so much right now,” said Franco Granda, a PitchBook analyst covering SpaceX. “It may be trial by fire for him.”
On Thursday, SpaceX published a 17-minute video in which Johnsen pitched the IPO to investors, one of the few times he’s appeared on camera for the company in a high- profile role.
How Johnsen handles the IPO won’t just affect SpaceX and Musk’s grand visions for the future of humanity. It will also set the stage for two other historic IPOs that may come within months of SpaceX’s debut: those of Anthropic and OpenAI. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao has kept a low profile but has learned to wield power behind the scenes, while OpenAI’s CFO, Sarah Friar, has much more recent experience than Johnsen as a public figure from her lengthy tenures as CEO of Nextdoor and CFO of Block.
Johnsen’s endurance will be tested. Most CFOs that have taken a company public generally only last for another two or three years: They generally tire of the greater grind of running a giant public company, said Granda. Already, Johnsen has been in the CFO role longer than his peers at Alphabet, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Another perspective: Since Tesla’s IPO in 2010, it has gone through four CFOs.
Muskworld is a place that sometimes attracts characters from unusual backgrounds who can rise as quickly as they fall. Johnsen’s background is comparatively straightforward.
A Southern California native, Johnsen received an undergraduate degree in accounting at USC and earned a master’s in finance at San Diego State University, then started his career with low-level finance roles at Qualcomm and Coopers & Lybrand, an accounting firm.
In the late 1990s, he worked as corporate controller at Classified Ventures, a joint venture between newspaper publishers including McClatchy and Gannett that ran websites such as Cars.com and Apartments.com. In 1999, Johnsen joined another chipmaker, Broadcom, where he eventually ascended to corporate controller.
Then in 2008, Johnsen became CFO of Mindspeed Technologies, a small publicly traded semiconductor company. He joined during the depths of the financial crisis, when the company’s shares plunged more than 75% during the last six months of 2008. Quickly, Johnsen started cutting costs by laying off employees, according to the Orange County Business Journal, while reworking some of the company’s debt and selling some of its patents. He was eventually able to rebuild Mindspeed’s stock by focusing on investor relations, wooing analysts and bringing in more institutional investors.
“We were headed into the worst economy of our lifetimes in the second half of 2008,” he told the Orange County Business Journal. “It gave me the chance to make a lot of changes that I thought really needed to be made.”
When a SpaceX recruiter contacted Johnsen in 2011, he initially thought it was a storage company. The recruiter corrected him—no, SpaceX built rockets. Still, Johnsen had his doubts about taking the job. His knowledge of outer space came largely from “Star Wars,” he recalled in a talk with USC students last year. Nonetheless, he decided to take a flier on the company, then valued at just around $1 billion.
When SpaceX announced his hiring, the company put out a press release with a quote from Musk touting Johnsen’s hiring as a step toward an IPO: “His experience will be invaluable to SpaceX as we implement the financial standards and processes needed to allow for the possibility of becoming a public company.”
Obviously, Musk’s IPO talk was premature. In 2011, SpaceX didn’t conduct a single launch, focusing instead on developing a space capsule for NASA and finalizing future reusable rocket designs that year. By the mid-2010s, though, the company’s Falcon 9 rocket was becoming a reliable workhorse, changing the economics of space by lowering launch costs for much of the industry. Starting in 2020, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service took off, and it has gained traction globally. Now, Starlink is the company’s biggest source of revenue and its most profitable business.
As SpaceX’s business expanded, Johnsen managed an unusual number of tender offers that allowed its employees to cash out some of their stock, completing one roughly every six months. Most startups do not do tender offers with such regularity.
A short distance from SpaceX’s Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters, Johnsen and his wife, Catherine, own a pair of mansions—one in Rancho Palos Verdes and another in Manhattan Beach—that cost more than $5 million each, according to property records. (Their two kids, daughter Delaney and son Kenton, both worked as SpaceX interns for a time.) And according to SpaceX’s IPO filing, Johnsen co-owns a private plane with Shotwell, his SpaceX colleague.
In Orange County, the Johnsens enjoy an active social life, hosting several extravagant events each year, including annual parties on Christmas and Valentine’s Day and a fete with various themes at the Del Mar racetrack, a ritzy venue founded by Bing Crosby. This February, the Johnsens hosted a “Magic of Love Valentine Party” at the century-old Culver Hotel in Los Angeles, which featured a magician, a fire breather and a burlesque dancer.
Johnsen is a prolific Republican donor, contributing to Republican senators including Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, as well as SpaceX’s political action committee, according to federal election records. And last year, the Johnsens held their Valentine’s Day party in Palos Verdes at a gilded hall within the Trump National Golf Club.
During many of his 15 years at SpaceX, Johnsen has had to repeatedly field the same big question from many of the Wall Street bankers he knows: When will SpaceX go public?
In 2013, his boss, Musk, said it would happen when a “Mars Colonial Transporter is flying regularly.” But late last year, he decided to pull the trigger on a 2026 IPO, hoping to finish it before his June 28 birthday.
In January, Johnsen started the process of picking bankers for the IPO. He initially discussed dividing responsibilities across a number of banks, according to people familiar with the discussions. That structure would have mirrored what Alibaba did for its 2014 IPO raising $25 billion, the largest in history at the time.
In the end, he went with two giant firms, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, as the most senior banks on the deal, advising SpaceX on pricing, valuation and how many shares to allocate to investors. He also brought in nearly two dozen more banks to sell the deal to investors around the world.
To streamline communications, instead of having every bank report to him directly, Johnsen put Citibank in charge of managing international banks like Barclays and UBS that are selling SpaceX shares in their home markets.
Still, Goldman and Morgan Stanley have continued jockeying for control over the deal, according to people familiar with the discussions. In the end, Goldman Sachs won the coveted left lead role, giving it more influence on pricing, valuation, the investor road show and how many shares SpaceX would allocate to Wall Street investors, according to people familiar with the details. Morgan Stanley is also leading the deal and plays a key role overseeing the early trading.
Investors and bankers say Johnsen and Musk defied many of their expectations for IPOs.
For one, Johnsen kept bankers hustling on the deal for months without formally hiring them until much later. He also asked investors to begin finalizing how much money they would contribute to the offering well ahead of the formal investor road show. (Typically, such discussions would happen during the show.) And Johnsen skipped the usual back-and-forth conversation with investors to discuss a range of stock prices. Instead, he simply told them the number they’d pay: $135 a share.
At the same time that Johnsen has been bringing SpaceX public, he’s been part of a strike force inside xAI looking for ways to cut the group’s gigantic costs. Shortly after SpaceX acquired xAI at a $250 billion valuation in February, Johnsen showed up at xAI’s data centers in Memphis with a small group of finance staff and investors, according to a person with knowledge of the visit. Within weeks of the visit, xAI’s CFO was out, the division was doing layoffs and SpaceX was nearing a deal to rent much of xAI’s computing capacity to Anthropic.