New Delhi: Details from a list of private investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company reveal that its overseas investors included a businessman who had ties to Chinese military contractors, ProPublica has reported.The report says that Chinese investment in US military contractors is heavily regulated, which led SpaceX to bar investors from China and Hong Kong from its Initial Public Offer (IPO) offering last week that made Elon Musk a trillionaire on paper.The details accessed by ProPublica reveal at least a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who acquired stakes in SpaceX between 2018 and 2021 before its IPO. The report says that the investments ranged from $800,000 to $40 million and were made through a middleman firm in the US called Tomales Bay Capital. The documents accessed by ProPublica come from a corporate dispute in Delaware involving Tomales Bay Capital. One such investment in SpaceX, the documents reveal, came from an entity owned by David Su, co-founder of Beijing venture capital firm MPCi. The report says that Su’s entity invested $15 million in a SpaceX fund in 2020. The report says that MPCi has worked with Chinese government investment funds and Su’s firm has been listed as a partner last year on China’s Ministry of Science and Technology website in a state-backed effort to develop the country’s aerospace industry. Further, the report says that Su’s other investments in space include two satellite companies that have faced US government sanctions for allegedly assisting the Russian mercenary organisation, the Wagner Group. Another company was sanctioned last month allegedly for helping Iran attack US military forces.“If an investor has conflicts of interests with other companies in China – if they could feed that information to competitors — it could be a national security concern,” Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the US State Department scrutinising foreign investments was quoted as saying to ProPublica.There is no evidence that Su acted improperly. A statement by MPCi to ProPublica said that Su “has not received any nonpublic information of SpaceX.”Earlier, ProPublica and other outlets have reported on the existence of Chinese investors in SpaceX but the identities of most of the rocket company’s investors were not known in public.The report said that Tomales Bay Capital is run by an investor named Iqbaljit Kahlon. Kahlon’s firm bought SpaceX stock, packaged it into investment funds and then charged fees to investors who bought pieces of those funds. Some of the investors on Kahlon’s files include Congress MP and senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi, the report said. It also identified former US secretary of education Betsy DeVos and a British Virgin Islands company owned by Indonesian billionaires. It said that others on the list are shell companies with their owners remaining hidden.The ProPublica report further says that while the investments were very small percentages of SpaceX but would have generated windfalls as the company’s valuation has increased in recent years rising from $33.3 billion in 2019 to $2.7 trillion as of Wednesday (June 17) morning. The report further says that the documents accessed by it in the Delaware case show that SpaceX allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes in it by routing through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs.