By Brazil Stock Guide – BTG Pactual has been named among the banks participating in the highly anticipated IPO of SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company controlled by billionaire Elon Musk, in a deal expected to rank among the most closely watched listings in Wall Street history. The offering, internally dubbed Project Apex, could value the company at around $1.75 trillion, according to sources familiar with the matter cited by Reuters and independently confirmed by Brazil Stock Guide.
The transaction is being led by a core group of global investment banks — including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi — with an additional 16 institutions, such as BTG Pactual, joining in supporting roles. The unusually large syndicate, totaling at least 21 banks, reflects both the scale and complexity of the deal, people familiar with the process said.
SpaceX is expected to use the IPO to formalize its capital structure, broaden its investor base and fund the next phase of expansion, particularly in its satellite internet division (Starlink), reusable rocket program and deep-space ambitions. The listing would also provide liquidity to early investors and employees, while creating a public market benchmark for one of the most valuable private companies globally. The size of the syndicate suggests a multi-channel distribution strategy, targeting institutional, high-net-worth and retail investors across multiple geographies.
Beyond traditional institutional distribution, banks are expected to divide responsibilities across high-net-worth channels, retail investors and different geographies — a structure increasingly common in mega IPOs. Comparable precedents include the listing of Arm in 2023 and Alibaba’s record-breaking debut in 2014, both of which relied on similarly broad underwriting groups.
For BTG Pactual, inclusion in the syndicate goes beyond symbolic participation. The bank is a consistent leader in equity capital markets in Brazil and has built a track record of executing large and complex transactions across cycles. Even in 2025 — a year with virtually no IPOs in the country — the bank remained highly active in ECM, structuring follow-ons, block trades and secondary offerings in a market that continued to move tens of billions of reais.
BTG did not disclose full-year investment banking revenues in absolute terms, but said the division delivered record results in 2025, with revenues rising 18.9% year-on-year, supported by strong activity in DCM and M&A and solid ECM performance despite a virtually shut IPO market. In the fourth quarter alone, the unit generated R$692.4 million in revenues, growing 7.7% sequentially, highlighting the resilience of fee generation even in a more restrictive capital markets environment.
At the group level, BTG reported record total revenues of R$33.0 billion and net income of up to R$16.7 billion in 2025, with a ROAE of 26.9%, underscoring the operating leverage embedded in its diversified platform. Investment Banking remains a relatively smaller — but strategically important — contributor within this structure, acting as a catalyst for client origination, cross-selling and balance sheet deployment across other segments such as Sales & Trading and Corporate Lending.
The combination of record IB growth, resilient ECM execution and a still-constrained IPO backdrop suggests that BTG is gaining share in a normalized — and more technically demanding — capital markets environment. In that context, participation in a transaction as complex and globally distributed as the SpaceX IPO reinforces the bank’s positioning not just as a domestic leader, but as an increasingly relevant cross-border player in equity underwriting.