But with shares down sharply since June's IPO, can the rocket gains hold?
Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan earned 9.5 percent in the first half of the year, and a US$8.7bn stake in Elon Musk's SpaceX ranked among the biggest reasons why.
The Toronto-based fund called the holding a significant contributor to the first-half gain, with venture growth investments, public equities, and inflation-sensitive assets also lifting returns, Jo Taylor, the fund's chief executive officer, said in a statement Monday, according to Bloomberg.
Net assets climbed to $303.2bn.
Taylor told Bloomberg in an interview that the pension manager has been "taking slightly more risk, looking for better returns" through a venture growth unit that has leaned into artificial intelligence.
Ontario Teachers' held about 50.7m SpaceX shares as of June 30, or roughly 0.7 percent of the company, per public filings and data compiled by Bloomberg, a position worth US$8.7bn at the time.
The fund first backed SpaceX in 2019 with more than US$200m, its inaugural venture growth investment, CNBC reported.
SpaceX went public in late June in the largest initial public offering (IPO) on record, closing its first day worth about US$2.2tn.
The shares have since fallen from a June peak of US$201.80 to US$133.11 as of Friday, Bloomberg reported.
Reuters, meanwhile, said investors have questioned whether a valuation of 77 times expected revenue can hold.
Venture growth now makes up 9 percent of Ontario Teachers' assets, up from 6 percent at the end of last year, Bloomberg reported.
The fund has also put money into Anthropic and Databricks, and in June it co-led a US$750m round for the fintech Ramp.
The gains came as Ontario Teachers' reworked its private equity approach after that asset class lost money in 2025 for the first time in 16 years.
Private equity now accounts for 16 percent of the portfolio, down three percentage points from year-end, while public stocks have risen to 21 percent from 18 percent, per Bloomberg.
Higher interest rates have weighed on the buyout industry since the US Federal Reserve began lifting rates in 2022, slowing dealmaking and squeezing the cash returned to fund investors.
The private equity strategy "is still going through this kind of adjustment to the environment that we're in," Gillian Brown, chief investment officer for public and private investments, said in the same interview.
Even when companies improve operationally, Taylor noted, that does not always translate into higher valuations. "A lot of the adjustments we made, I think we're still trying to get ahead of that issue," he said.
Ontario Teachers' is not the only large public investor riding SpaceX.
Reuters reported that Norway's sovereign wealth fund, valued at about US$2.3tn and the world's largest, disclosed for the first time this week that it held a 0.05 percent stake worth US$1.22bn as of June 30.
The fund posted a record first-half profit of 1.75tn Norwegian crowns (US$184.3bn), which Nicolai Tangen, its chief executive officer, tied largely to Asian technology stocks.
That SpaceX position is small next to the fund's other technology bets. It held a 1.28 percent stake in Nvidia worth US$62bn and a 1.24 percent stake in Apple worth US$52bn, among holdings across about 7,100 companies, fund data showed.
Tangen said the top 10 companies now equal 20 percent of the fund's value, most of them in tech, and flagged the concentration that its index-based strategy has built up.
"It's chips, chips, chips, chips, chips ... we've never seen such concentration before," he told reporters, as reported by Reuters.
Speaking earlier in the week at a political conference in Arendal, Norway, Tangen went further, warning that a market collapse could wipe out much of the fund's value.
He said he wanted to strengthen the country's mental readiness by asking whether the oil fund could vanish, according to Reuters.
He answered yes, adding that such an outcome is not completely improbable in the world today, he said.
Any shift away from the index-based approach would need approval from Norway's parliament, a process that usually takes years, Reuters noted.
Beyond the two funds, SpaceX's debut handed paper gains to a range of institutional investors, according to CNBC, among them the money manager Fidelity Investments, Ron Baron's Baron Capital, and Cathie Wood's Ark Invest, along with venture firms including Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.
University endowments shared in the windfall too.
Washington University in St. Louis invested about US$50m nearly a decade ago, CNBC reported.
