It’s the ultimate Wall Street fantasy: hung LBO debt financing graduating into investment grade territory, while the company itself is poised to enter the Nasdaq-100.
But in the Elon Musk ecosystem, the improbable is par for the course. Just last week, SpaceX priced a $25bn IG bond offering, hot on the heels of its blockbuster IPO earlier this month.
The mega-bond deal refinances a $20bn bridge loan raised in March — a bridge that, in turn, extinguished roughly $18.9bn of expensive legacy debt across X Corp and xAI, including:
- $12.5bn of X Corp B-1 and B-3 term loans
- $1bn xAI 12.5% Fixed Rate Loan
- $1bn xAI Floating Rate Loan
- $3bn xAI 12.5% Senior Secured Notes
For the lenders who held the bag on X and xAI debt over the past two years, the refinancing marks an unusually lucrative exit from what was once branded as one of the market’s riskiest credits.
“We invested in both xAI and X, so we were beneficiaries when SpaceX rolled it all together,” said one high yield investor.
Per 9fin’s analysis of public data, investors that committed to the 9.5% fixed-rate X term loan during the Morgan Stanley-led February 2025...
