Harvard Endowment Hits Record High, and SpaceX is Why

Background

Harvard University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, also happens to run the biggest university endowment in the world. An endowment is basically a school's investment account. The money gets invested, and part of the gains get paid out every year to cover things like financial aid, professors, and research. So when the endowment has a big year, the whole school benefits.

Now, when you look at Harvard's biggest stock position, it's not what you'd . You'd expect a school's money managers to be conservative and stick with safe, long-term companies like Apple, Nvidia, or Microsoft. But that's not the case for Harvard, whose top stock position is SpaceX. Instead of only sticking with the usual tech giants, they made a huge bet on Musk's rocket company.

This past spring, I wrote a piece about SpaceX getting ready to go public. People were bullish, but also worried, since it was being valued at an insane $1.75 trillion. While people went back and forth between bullish and bearish, Harvard was already in. They had been investing in SpaceX for years while it was still private, and when it went public in June, that bet paid off big. Harvard now holds a $2.2 billion position in the company, and its endowment returned 27.1% this year, more than double last year's 11.9%, bringing it to about $68 billion.

SpaceX Overview

Most people hear SpaceX and only think about Elon Musk and his rockets, but they don't know what's actually inside his trillion dollar company. SpaceX has three main parts: rockets (Falcon and Starship), Starlink satellite internet, and a new AI division from merging with xAI. The money maker and most successful part of SpaceX is Starlink, their satellite internet service. Basically, they have thousands of satellites flying around Earth that beam internet down to people, even in places where normal internet can't reach. Starlink brought in about $11.4 billion in 2025, and its subscriber count doubled in a year to over 10 million people. It's growing fast, and it's what pays for everything else SpaceX is trying to do.

But SpaceX isn't just Starlink. A lot of its future success depends on Starship, their next big rocket. It's way bigger than the Falcon 9 they use now, and it's reusable, which should make launches a lot cheaper over time. Musk is really optimistic about it, and if it goes to plan, they'll use it to launch bigger Starlink satellites, go to the Moon and Mars, and possibly even put data centers in space. They've already spent over $15 billion building it. It's a huge bet on the future, and that's exactly the kind of bet Harvard seems to like.

Harvard's Big Bet

So how did SpaceX ultimately help Harvard get here? First, let's look at what Harvard holds and how. Harvard holds a $2.2 billion SpaceX stake, its largest single stock, with TSMC second at just under $350 million. That's a pretty huge gap between the top two. But out of the $68 billion endowment, only about 3% is in SpaceX, which is super big for one stock, but not all in. Where Harvard really had an edge was getting in early. They had a stake in SpaceX as a private investment for years before it ever went public, back when the company was worth way less. As recently as 2023, SpaceX was valued at $137 billion. So when it went public in June at around $1.75 trillion, Harvard's stake suddenly became worth a lot more, and it jumped straight to the top of their holdings.

And SpaceX helped a lot. An analysis from Markov Processes International credits more than 10 percentage points of Harvard's 27.1% return to SpaceX, which is over a third of the return from one company. That's a big reason the return more than doubled from 11.9% the year before. It also helped Harvard beat both the median big endowment, which returned about 18.9%, and the S&P 500, which returned 22.3%. And Harvard isn't the only school that cashed in. Stanford returned 31.7% and Penn 27.4%, both boosted by SpaceX.

Bullish vs. Bearish

Even though Harvard got a big return, that doesn't mean SpaceX is a sure thing going forward. SpaceX went public at around $1.75 trillion. It made $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 but still lost $4.9 billion. As mentioned earlier, Starlink is what's driving that revenue. The losses come from spending on Starship and AI, which are more about building for the future than making money now. When you're trying to build the biggest rocket in history, there are a lot of failed tests, and those cost billions. AI is even more expensive. SpaceX's AI division alone lost about $6.4 billion in 2025 while only bringing in $3.2 billion in revenue.

For the bullish people, Starlink is their main reason, which has already shown it's making real money and growing fast. It doesn't have much competition yet and gives them steady cash. This has lots of upside, and if Starship works, it will result in massive growth. On the other side, bearish people like Morningstar think it's worth only about $780 billion, which is less than half the IPO price. Morningstar values the rockets and Starlink pretty highly, but doesn't give much credit to the AI and space data center plans since they think there's a real chance those never work out.

Even Harvard is being careful. N.P. Narvekar, who runs Harvard's endowment, warned that "Outsized returns can sometimes portend subdued, or even negative, returns in the near term." Said simply, a huge year can be followed by a bad one. Harvard is in a good spot though, since they bought in early at a much lower price, so if SpaceX drops they will still be way ahead. Harvard's year shows how much one early bet can pay off. Whether it keeps paying off depends on if SpaceX can actually grow into its price.