The Securities and Exchange Commission charged a New York advisory firm and its chief executive on Sept. 30 with running five fraudulent schemes through private funds that each held a single pre-IPO company, most of them SpaceX, and with telling investors their capital was safe while it was being spent.
Meyer Global Management LLC and Owen E. H. Meyer, 35, raised at least $18.5 million from nearly 100 investors between 2019 and 2024, according to the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The funds were set up to hold interests in SpaceX, OpenAI, Neuralink, Destinus and Relativity Space, usually by buying into another fund rather than by buying shares directly. The Commission says the defendants violated the antifraud provisions of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and asks a court for permanent injunctions, disgorgement with prejudgment interest, civil penalties, and an order barring Meyer from working as or with a broker, dealer or investment adviser. The case is at its start, the allegations are unproven, and Meyer has not responded in court.
A pre-IPO fund is a chain of other people's decisions
MGM advised roughly 16 affiliated private funds, each formed to acquire an interest in one private company, and reported at most $34,331,748 in regulatory assets under management between 2022 and 2025. The structure is the ordinary one for smaller investors who want private-company exposure before a listing: the fund collects money from limited partners, then buys into a third-party fund that may hold shares directly or invest in yet another fund. That chain is what the investor is buying, and it is not visible from the statement the investor receives.
Governing documents for each fund limited the use of capital to the portfolio investment, management fees and fund operating expenses, and gave limited partners no role in management. MGM listed each fund as a private fund it advised on the Forms ADV it filed annually from 2022 to 2026 while claiming exempt reporting adviser status, and Meyer found investors through personal relationships, referrals and an online marketplace for pre-IPO stock, sometimes pitching small groups in person.
Every link in the chain is a place where a fund's only asset can fail, and each failure has its own paperwork: a transfer approval, a capital call, a default notice, a court filing. An investor three links away learns about those events only if the adviser says so.
One missed capital call cost a fund its entire SpaceX position
In early 2022, MGM raised about $3,125,000 from three outside investors for Starship X, a fund formed to acquire pre-IPO interests in SpaceX. On Feb. 3, 2022, it signed agreements with a third-party fund identified in the complaint as Fund Y to buy interests carrying SpaceX exposure. Those agreements required periodic capital calls covering expenses and management fees, and provided that failing to pay could mean forfeiting the investment.
MGM paid the calls for 2022 and 2023. It did not pay one dated Jan. 3, 2024, for $46,020. Fund Y sent notices of default on Feb. 9, March 22 and July 9, 2024, according to the complaint, and received no response. Fund Y sued Starship X in Florida state court on Oct. 1, 2024, and no one filed an answer or appeared for the fund. On Nov. 19, 2024, the court ceded all of Starship X's interest in SpaceX shares to Fund Y, leaving the fund with nothing.
What happened around the default shows how long an investor can go without knowing. On Oct. 29, 2024, a month after the Florida case began, the adviser charged Starship X's largest investor $10,000 to move shares into a family trust, and in December 2024 issued him new certificates without disclosing that the shares were worthless. That investor, who held 94.1 percent of the fund, learned of the litigation and the forfeiture only in December 2025, after hiring a lawyer.
On June 12, 2026, the day SpaceX went public, Meyer emailed investors in the Starship funds about the chance to take part in "one of the most important companies of our generation," and closed by promising further updates about their distribution of shares. The fund had held no SpaceX interest for 19 months.
Investors heard that their capital was safe
The Starship VI fund raised about $1.1 million from 13 retail investors in early 2021 to buy SpaceX exposure. In March 2021 Meyer signed a letter agreement to buy another company's interest in a fund that held SpaceX shares, and Starship VI paid $1,035,000 for it, but that fund's operating agreement required its own representative to approve any transfer. The representative wrote on April 2, 2021 to say the transfer could not be arranged. Nearly three months later, Meyer emailed investors under a subject line announcing the fund had closed, and told them its investment had closed.
The seller returned $500,000 in December 2021 and $100,000 in December 2022. Meyer Equity had funded about 5 percent of the original purchase, so the complaint calculates that it was entitled to keep at most $30,000 of the $600,000. The other $570,000 went to Meyer's personal account, to an investment in an exotic car company, to a payment to MGM, and to a different fund's portfolio company. Investors kept receiving statements showing unrealized gains, including a January 2023 statement citing the latest SpaceX tender offer round at $770 a share, with updates arriving as late as September 2024.
A second fund, MGP I, was formed in 2023 to buy Playstar, an online casino operator. Three investors wired $85,950 in late March, and the complaint says nearly all of it went to expenses unrelated to the investment: $35,000 and $30,000 to Meyer's personal account in April to pay legal fees, and on April 20, 2023, between 2:20 and 5:00 in the morning, about $18,000 to a strip club and its manager, with memo lines describing the payments as theatre and opera tickets. Meyer invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned about the $10,000 that went to the manager.
The fund's account held a zero balance from May 3 to Aug. 3, 2023. On July 5 and July 8 of that year, Meyer told the fund's largest investor that the capital was safe in the fund and would be returned the following week. The money went back to all investors on Dec. 28, 2023, and the fund never acquired any Playstar shares.
The same fund was repurposed for OpenAI in March 2024 and raised $1,097,500 from six investors in April, on documents describing a vehicle formed for the sole purpose of investing in OpenAI and charging 5 percent upfront with 20 percent carried interest. By his own testimony, Meyer knew the deal had fallen through that March and did not tell investors for about six months. Between April 9 and July 1, 2024, the complaint says, he wired about $168,000 net to his personal account with memo lines referencing management fees, roughly $114,000 more than the fees investors had agreed to, and spent part of it on landscaping at his home and on legal fees for a person facing drug charges. By March 2025 about $15,600 remained, against the roughly $195,000 it would have taken to repay the three investors who never got their capital back.
The largest payment arrived in 2025, minus $686,636
Three earlier funds, Starship IV, V and VII, raised about $5.6 million from about 45 investors to invest in SpaceX. They were liquidated in early 2025, and a 2025 settlement with another advisory firm routed the proceeds through an escrow account and a receiver who apportioned management fees and carried interest between the two firms. On Oct. 17, 2025, the receiver wired Meyer $82,081 for his share of carried interest. In mid-November 2025, it wired $13,829,158.01 to Meyer Equity for distribution to the funds and their investors.
Investors received about $13,142,522 of that. The complaint says the remaining $686,636 went to two places: $50,000 to a person who had invested in an unrelated MGM fund, and about $636,406 to Meyer's personal account in transactions between November 2025 and July 2026. Before any of the distributions went out, the adviser required investors to sign releases accepting its calculation of their final capital account as the sole and authoritative determination of what they were owed. According to the complaint, that calculation was about 5 percent below what Meyer's own worksheet had told the receiver investors were entitled to receive.
The SEC has to prove all of it
The complaint brings three claims under the Advisers Act: sections 206(1) and 206(2), which cover fraudulent schemes and courses of business by an adviser, and section 206(4) with Rule 206(4)-8, which covers fraud against investors in a pooled investment vehicle. The Commission asks for a permanent injunction, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with interest on a joint and several basis, civil penalties, and an order barring Meyer from associating with any broker, dealer or investment adviser. It demands a jury trial.
None of this has been tested in court. The Commission filed the case on Sept. 30 and Meyer has not answered. Two features of the record will shape it: the largest sums moved through third-party funds, an escrow account and a receiver, so much of the paper belongs to other advisers and a court-appointed intermediary, and Meyer's own evidence is limited, because he declined to answer questions about the transfer to the club manager and refused to sit for testimony about the spending from his personal account. That account rests on bank records and other witnesses.
The scale is a feature of the structure, not of any single transaction. A $46,020 capital call ended a fund holding $3,125,000 of investor money. A transfer a third-party fund declined to approve turned into $570,000 in personal spending. A receiver's wire of $13.8 million arrived $686,636 short.
What the two pre-IPO cases say together
This is the second case this month about retail money reaching private companies before a listing. The federal charges against Linqto's founder described a platform that set the price of the shares it sold while telling customers the price came from a market. That case was about price discovery. This one is about custody and control: whether the thing the investor bought still exists at the other end of the chain, and who is in a position to notice when it does not.
Single-company vehicles are a standard way for investors who cannot write a $5 million check to hold a private company, and the complaint does not allege that the structure itself was a sham. It alleges that in five instances the person controlling every link used the position. The documents investors signed limited what the money could be used for and left the decisions to the adviser. The statements that told them how they were doing came from the same office that made the decisions.
SpaceX's listing on June 12, 2026 gave its shares a public price for the first time and a lockup calendar for the investors who held them, which is the moment every pre-IPO fund was built to reach. The shares traded through a lockup and the company's first public earnings came in August. For the investors in Starship X, the exit had happened 19 months earlier, in a Florida courtroom, without them.
Primary sources
- Securities and Exchange Commission, Complaint, SEC v. Meyer Global Management LLC and Owen E. H. Meyer, No. 1:26-cv-08607 (S.D.N.Y. filed Sept. 30, 2026), for the five schemes, the fund structures and offering documents, the Starship X capital call and forfeiture, the Starship VI transfer and misappropriations, both iterations of MGP I, the Liquidated SpaceX Funds distribution and releases, the claims under the Advisers Act, and the relief sought.
- Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC Charges Meyer Global Management and Its CEO With Defrauding Retail Investors in Private Funds That Held Interests in SpaceX and Other Pre-IPO Securities, press release 2026-98, Sept. 30, 2026, for the Commission's summary of the case and the statement of the Enforcement Division's Asset Management Unit.
- Investment Advisers Act of 1940, section 206, 15 U.S.C. 80b-6, and Rule 206(4)-8, 17 C.F.R. 275.206(4)-8, for the antifraud provisions the complaint charges.