NEW YORK – More than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing and access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) that is set to turn many of them into multi-millionaires.Elon Musk’s company is planning to go public as soon as June in what is expected to be the largest IPO ever, fuelled by his ambitions to dominate the markets for AI computing power and satellite communications, and ultimately settle other planets.SpaceX is reportedly looking to raise as much as US$75 billion (S$96 billion) in an offering that could give the company a valuation of at least US$1.8 trillion.The company’s S-1 filing said it places a “heavy emphasis on equity compensation” but did not specify how many of the company’s 22,000 full-time employees are included in the programme. Current and former employees have a complicated mix of stock options and restricted stock units, many of which will be unlocked on a staggered schedule after the IPO. Employees in line for IPO windfalls typically seek out their own wealth advisers. They are looking for tools that could let them tap the value of their shares without the tax hit that would come from selling them.The SpaceX group has considered more than 20 financial advisers and private banks, according to a May document summarising the effort that was viewed by Bloomberg.The document said they were “leveraging collective power” to get “significantly lower fees” for financial advice – with a goal of paying less than 0.5 per cent on all assets under management, rather than the traditional 1 per cent fee. The group has assets that will be worth as much as US$20 billion, the people said. The effort has been organised in a private Slack room and led by a former engineer at SpaceX, according to people close to the negotiations. The workers are crafting an IPO wealth playbook that could shape how OpenAI and Anthropic employees cash in with their own windfalls to come.Dominic Corabi, co-founder of Wedmont Private Capital, a wealth manager, said he believes these types of negotiations will become more common as more start-up employees come into sudden wealth.“Banding together into a cohort and negotiating from a position of strength is going to be, without question, the way to go,” he said. “They’re going to get better terms (and) better pricing from custodians and product providers.”The SpaceX staffers are seeking complex strategies such as equity-based lending and direct indexing, the documents show. That is in line with a broader rush by sophisticated investors, such as hedge funds and family offices, looking to defer capital gains taxes on their rapidly growing equity portfolios.The group has also discussed strategies to diversify their portfolios, given their heavy exposure to the value of SpaceX. Direct indexing would allow them to own individual stocks inside an index rather than a bundled exchange-traded fund, making it possible to avoid further exposure to SpaceX while also harvesting tax losses stock by stock. BLOOMBERG