‘I’m Coming Clean’: Former UNC-CH Chancellor Says He Advised Against Investing in SpaceX

In the late 2000s, when Holden Thorp, then UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor, heard about the UNC Management Company’s plans to put more of the system’s endowment into SpaceX, he couldn’t believe it.

“Are you guys nuts?” he recalled telling the group.

Today, Thorp says he couldn’t have been more wrong and is glad UNC Management ignored his advice.

As SpaceX went public last month with the largest initial public offering in stock market history, university endowments around the country—and particularly the UNC System’s—stand to benefit. The Wall Street Journal reported before the IPO that the system had roughly 10% of its endowment invested in the aerospace company, an unusually large allocation.

UNC Management, which oversees the UNC Investment Fund, a pool of endowments and other assets across the 16-university system, did not respond to requests for comment about how much the endowment earned. The Fund’s assets were worth nearly $15 billion at the end of March, the last month for which data is available. 

Thorp said the decision to invest in Elon Musk’s company, and the windfall it likely produced, serves as a good lesson on why university administrators should not manage endowments.

He said the credit for how the Fund became tangled up in SpaceX goes to Jonathon King, who led the fund for more than two decades and retired in 2025, as well as Kevin Tunick, who managed the fund’s private investments for nearly 15 years and retired in 2023. Neither could be reached for comment.

UNC Management invested early in the Founders Fund, a Peter Thiel venture capital fund established in 2005 that began investing in SpaceX a few years later. Thorp said that around 2009 or 2010, the Founders Fund approached UNC Management with a proposal to direct more Fund money to SpaceX. Thorp opposed that increase.

Thorp said he thought at the time that SpaceX was a risky investment. He doubted that the company could raise enough money to manufacture rockets.

“There’s a saying in venture capital, or there was at the time, that you never wanted to invest in bending metal,” he said. “You wanted to invest in ideas and technologies that were cheap to do, and that would have outsized returns.”

Thorp wouldn’t say if anyone else shared that opinion. “No comment,” he said, adding that he would only issue a personal mea culpa: “I’m coming clean.”

“There’s a very good reason why you use a board that is not influenced by politicians or even university administrators to run these investments,” Thorp said. “They are solely basing their decisions on their expertise as investors.”

Despite the likely profits from the Fund’s investment in SpaceX, Thorp said UNC System schools are not suddenly going to be able to fund new projects or end cost-cutting efforts. Most of the endowment’s funds are in restricted reserves, meaning they must go to existing areas like financial aid.

“It’s going to mean good things for the purposes to which the endowment is obligated,” Thorp said. 

Now the UNC System faces a different challenge: how to hedge its exposure to SpaceX in case something goes awry in Starbase. The WSJ reported that UNC Management sold some shares toward the end of 2025. Robert Kelchen, a higher education professor at the University of Tennessee, encouraged universities to cash out on their gains now and rebalance their portfolios.

When asked whether he thinks UNC Management investors should be concerned about the size of SpaceX in the Fund’s portfolio, Thorp declined to offer an opinion, saying that’s a job for the investors.

“They certainly don’t need any advice from me about that. My first advice wasn’t very good,” he said.