In the Money , Issue 1678
Individual investors in the UK acquired around £270m-worth of shares in the float, with far more as yet unknown amounts picked up by major investment funds in which the nation’s pensions and savings are invested.
All was achieved without the requirement for a UK prospectus giving details of just what investors were getting into, thanks to relaxations earlier this year in rules aimed at helping growing companies raise capital.
Not that, in the case of SpaceX, anybody could have been in much doubt that they were buying into a company relying on unprecedented and apparently impossible growth – most of which needs to come from the xAI artificial intelligence arm of the company, not the rockets – to justify its $1.75tn valuation at flotation, which has now topped $2tn.
Ask Reeves
The prospectus changes are part of wider deregulatory changes in which chancellor Rachel Reeves has also relaxed rules for those who control a listed company without owning the majority of it (in the way that Musk has around 85 percent of SpaceX voting rights while holding just 42 percent of the stock).
More changes to make life easier for the boardroom big dogs can be expected in a promised “modernising corporate reporting” consultation which, business minister Blair McDougall said, will contain “proposals to reduce burdens on business... including for quoted companies”.
Service plan
Meanwhile, in an attempt to produce the UK’s own SpaceX, business secretary Peter Kyle announced “a new concierge service to help companies of the future in our quest to nurture the UK’s first trillion-dollar firm”.
This is a value somewhere between Tesla and Meta, and more than three times the size of HSBC, presently the UK’s most valuable company, and would be by far the world’s largest company if adjusted for the size of its home nation’s economy. So a tad hyperbolic, perhaps.
To get there, Kyle says he is “partnering directly with high-growth firms to give them the support, finance, talent and connections they need to scale here in the UK”.
Reeves followed with the entirely different and not-at-all-AI-generated statement: “We are backing the UK’s most ambitious firms to start, scale, and stay here – with the finance, talent and support they need to succeed.”
Active Verbe
To assist in this, in comes a new “scale-up adviser”. Penny Verbe boasts of having “founded and grown businesses in the UK and internationally”.
She did co-found a successful film production company in the 1990s before selling it on within a few years when its turnover hit a few million pounds. Which is the kind of thing ministers don’t want those UK “scale-ups” doing.
If management speak could propel companies into the corporate stratosphere, success would be guaranteed – not least by 20 uses of “scale”, “scaling” and “scale-up” in the short press release announcing the concierge service. This included a welcome for the measures from the chief executive of the ScaleUp Institute, Irene Graham.
The ScaleUp Institute is backed by companies led by Goldman Sachs. Graham said the government proposals “should lead to more proactive and structured engagement with scaleups and high-potential scaling firms – an approach we have long evidenced”.
Watch out, Elon, the Brits are coming! Or at least moving forward in the scaling-up journey space.
COLUMNISTSIssue 1678
With Bio-Waste Spreader: “A significant minority of those who voted to leave in the Brexit referendum in June 2016 regarded the UK’s opportunity to control its own agricultural and food trade policies as a deciding factor. A decade later, how have these policies changed, and what has been the impact of those changes on consumers, taxpayers and farmers? For consumers, the impact on food prices from leaving the EU and its Common Agricultural Policy has so far been limited…”
With MD: “Doctors’ strikes planned for last week were called off after the British Medical Association’s (BMA) resident doctors’ committee agreed to put a government offer to its members. If accepted, pay will increase, on average, 6.6 percent across all grades by April 2027. There will also be between 4,000 and 4,500 additional specialty training posts to start to tackle the 2025-26 bottleneck, when nearly 50,000 doctors (including those from abroad) applied for 13,000 spaces…”
With Dr B Ching: “The government cites its target of 75 percent more rail freight to assuage jitters as its railways bill passes through parliament – but last year fewer goods trains ran than ever before. Stats published this month show a 7 percent year-on-year drop in the number of freight trains in 2025-26, when the total was ‘lower than any previous year’. Tonnage loaded on to trains fell 5 percent. Britain’s biggest freight-train firm is planning redundancies…”
With Lady Liberty: “Call it good cop, bad cop – or maybe spineless cop, insane cop. As he met Iran’s negotiators in Switzerland, vice-president JD Vance said he hoped to ‘turn over a new leaf’ with their country, while Donald Trump reportedly threatened to ‘bomb the shit’ out of Iran and ensure they personally didn’t make it home. Not a classic diplomatic strategy, but then Trump has been refreshingly open about his approach to the Iran peace deal…”
With Remote Controller: “Romantic drama depends on placing obstacles between would-be lovers: class, race, faith, cash, sexuality, location, jail. In a culture that has removed most taboos, though, it’s increasingly hard to find reasons why Jack and Jane, Jack and Jack, Jane and Jane or any throuple or foursome within should not be together. Religion can still be a useful unglue…”
With Old Sparky: “After nine months of investigation into whether tree-burning power company Drax made culpably misleading statements to investors, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has concluded that it didn’t. In a short press release, the FCA emphasised that its self-imposed remit was narrow – looking at three specific annual reports – and apparently ‘there’s nothing to see here, move along’. So that’s all right, then. Doubtless the FCA was able to reconcile Drax’s statements to shareholders…”
With Lunchtime O’Boulez: “The 2026 Proms season is likely to open next month to the usual complaints from the BBC: that more than a fifth of the Albert Hall’s 5,000 or so seats are unavailable for it to sell because they’re privately owned. Private owners face no effective scrutiny for flogging seats in competition with the BBC (‘ticket touting for posh people’, as some have put it in parliament). The hall is a charity, run by a council of trustees…”
Letter from Lima
From Our Own Correspondent: “Machu Picchu, the stunning jungle mountaintop Inca city discovered in 1911, is these days fairly easily reached from Cuzco. The problem is getting an entry ticket. The ruins have been sequestered lock and stock by locals of a scrubby adobe-shack village deep in a neighbouring quebrada, still swept by landslides. Top up your life insurance if you go in the rainy season…”
Next issue on sale: 9th July 2026
