Gracias heads up Valor Equity Partners, an investment firm with more than $15 billion in assets under management. It accumulated that pile of cash in large part through early bets on companies related to Elon Musk, most notably through being one of Tesla’s earliest institutional investors back in 2005, and then a major investor in SpaceX.

Those early bets on Musk generated huge returns, as well as loyalty: Gracias has been described as “the most hardcore of Elon Musk’s loyalists”. When the world’s richest man was trying to line up loose change to acquire Twitter, Gracias passed the hat around his network, and once Musk took control of the social media platform Gracias’ firm, Valor, acted as something of an outsourced finance division, helping devise and implement Musk’s sweeping job cuts and project its future financials.

Since his early investments in Tesla and the like, Gracias has invested broadly via Valor, with some major allocations in the biotech field. Those investments include companies spawned by his pal Jeff Aronin such as Marathon Pharmaceuticals and, later, companies produced by Paragon Biosciences, a biotech company incubator that Aronin came to found.

Aside from being an investor in many of Musk’s ventures and among his most ardent supporters, the pair also appear to have enjoyed drugs together, including psychedelics. Last February, a media flurry described concern among Tesla board members regarding Musk’s alleged drug use with other members of the Tesla board. The two board members mentioned at the time were Steve Jurvetson and Antonio Gracias, both major psychedelics advocates and donors.

On that note, Gracias has funnelled tens of millions of dollars into the psychedelics field through philanthropy. Those donations include $1M to MAPS back in 2020 via its Capstone Campaign, and $16M to Harvard in fall 2023, via his family foundation, to establish the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture. He has also funded work at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai…