SEC accuses Meyer Global of five schemes targeting SpaceX and OpenAI investors

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint in the Southern District of New York on September 30 against Meyer Global Management LLC, a New York fund advisor, and its sole owner, accusing the two of running five schemes that allegedly defrauded investors who believed they were buying pre-IPO shares of SpaceX and OpenAI. The filing alleges at least $1,270,000 misappropriated from private funds and nearly 100 investors deceived over five years, across vehicles that took in from $85,950 to roughly $5.6 million, and InvestmentNews first reported the complaint.

Meyer Global raised at least $18.5 million selling interests in funds designed to hold pre-IPO shares in companies including SpaceX and OpenAI, the complaint says, and the alleged conduct runs from December 2021 to the present. That window is the same five years in which private-market access has been built out for advisors and their clients, from custodians putting pre-IPO positions beside the client record to investment banks assembling direct-stake and secondary-trading desks for wealthy families.

The first alleged scheme centers on a SpaceX-linked fund in which Meyer Global raised roughly $1.1 million from 13 retail investors, the complaint says, but a third-party fund refused to approve the transfer. The defendants told those investors the investment "has been closed" and sent statements showing "unrealized gains" on shares the fund never acquired, according to the filing. Of the capital that came back, $570,000 allegedly went to a personal bank account, to an investment in "an exotic car company," and to a different fund.

Three investors put $85,950 into a vehicle formed to invest in the online casino operator PlayStar, and the complaint characterizes the money as "an undisclosed, months-long $85,950 interest-free loan." The firm's principal allegedly spent more than $18,000 of it in a single night on personal entertainment at a strip club, including a $10,000 transfer to the club's manager with memo lines reading "movie tickets and theatre performance" and "opera." He invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege when asked about the transfers in sworn testimony, according to the filing, and the fund account reached a $0 balance after an investor was told "your capital is safe in the fund."

In the larger of two artificial-intelligence funds, six investors put approximately $1,097,500 into an OpenAI vehicle, and the SEC alleges roughly $168,000 was wired to a personal account, about three times the agreed management fees. The OpenAI deal allegedly fell through in March 2024, the complaint says, and investors were not told for six months; as of the filing, the account held approximately $15,600 and three investors were still owed approximately $195,000.

The fourth alleged scheme involved SpaceX-linked funds that had raised approximately $5.6 million from about 45 investors, and a court-appointed receiver wired $13,829,158.01 for distribution. The complaint describes five schemes; the account available here details four.

According to the complaint, Meyer Global claimed exempt reporting advisor status starting in 2022 and reported at most $34,331,748 in regulatory assets under management between 2022 and 2025, a book small enough that the checking likely fell to individuals rather than to an institutional gatekeeper. Nothing in the account suggests the firm ever reached a size that would have put it on a platform's radar. The coverage does not say how the defendants have responded to the allegations.

Demand for the underlying names is not the problem. Eighty-nine percent of advisors plan to hold or raise their alternatives allocations, iCapital's Gallagher said at a conference this summer, and the buyers pushing in have been mid-sized RIAs rather than only the largest firms. Platforms have answered by moving the access point inward: Altruist has put pre-IPO access where the client record lives, selling process rather than access, and Goldman has gathered direct stakes and secondary trading into one private-markets unit for wealthy clients and family offices. For an advisor, the appeal is a record and a diligence trail that do not rest on the client's own correspondence with a fund manager.

Retail-facing versions of the same trade carry their own noise. Destiny Tech100's 44% three-month loss, which PWD covered in August, was a listed wrapper behaving the way a listed wrapper behaves when late-stage private marks meet a public market. And the retiree routing 30% of his net worth into pre-IPO Anthropic through eight brokerage accounts was improvising an on-ramp no institution had built for him. Thirteen investors in one alleged fund, three in another, six in a third and about 45 in a fourth: those are the head counts of people who went looking for the names on their own.

The diligence question the complaint sharpens is narrower than whether private markets belong in a portfolio. It is who holds title, and what document proves the transfer cleared. The SpaceX-linked fund that allegedly generated "unrealized gains" on shares never acquired failed on the second question before it failed on the first, and the SEC's account of it turns on statements an investor could not check against a custodian's books. Client statements and custodian statements are different documents; the distance between them is where the entire alleged scheme lived.