He Spent 15 Years Quietly Buying SpaceX Shares. Now His Stake Is Worth $20 Billion.

While Elon Musk’s friends and board members are set to make fortunes from SpaceX’s IPO, Justin Fishner-Wolfson took a quieter path. His secret weapon was patience. His firm, 137 Ventures, made its first SpaceX investment in 2011, when the company was valued at just $1 billion. It has never sold a single share, according to the New York Times. That stake now exceeds 1% of SpaceX, worth roughly $20 billion at the company’s $1.77 trillion IPO valuation.

His faith in SpaceX nearly blew up on the launchpad. In 2008, as a 26-year-old junior investor at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Fishner-Wolfson watched a SpaceX rocket explode two minutes into liftoff. His firm had just put $20 million into the company. He asked SpaceX’s president what they would do next. She said they’d build another rocket and try again. They did, and that $20 million is now worth billions.

“This will most likely define my career,” Fishner-Wolfson said. Sometimes the best investment strategy isn’t rocket science. It’s simply refusing to sell.