• Harvard's endowment returned a five-year high of 27.1% in the 12 months to June 30, besting the S&P 500.
• The Ivy League college counted a $2.2 billion SpaceX stake as its top Q2 portfolio holding by far.
• Harvard's endowment grew to almost $68 billion after accounting for taxes, gifts, and distributions.

Harvard University delivered its best investment return in five years as its bet on SpaceX boosted its stock portfolio.

The elite college's endowment returned 27.1% in the fiscal year ended June 30, its annual financial report revealed on Thursday. That comfortably outpaced the benchmark S&P 500's 22.3% total return over the same period.

After accounting for taxes, distributions, and gifts, Harvard's endowment grew by $11 billion to nearly $68 billion.

Harvard Management Company's stake in Elon Musk's maker of Starship rockets, Starlink satellites, and AI chatbot Grok was worth $2.2 billion at the end of June, per its second-quarter portfolio disclosure.

SpaceX was its number-one holding, more than six times more valuable than its second-biggest position, a sub-$350 million stake in Taiwan Semiconductor.

Its next-largest positions — each worth over $150 million — were Cerebras, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Its 19 holdings at the end of June were together worth about $4.3 billion, more than double the portfolio's $1.8 billion value three months earlier.

Harvard said the strong performance of its endowment, which is nearly 400 years old and comprises about 15,000 individual funds, helped it weather the "abrupt termination of federal research grants" by the Trump administration.

It's worth noting that 13-F portfolio disclosures are a snapshot of a fund's US stock holdings on a certain date. They don't include foreign-listed stocks, non-stock assets like bonds or real estate, private investments, or stocks sold short.

Harvard said that as of June 30, 14% of its endowment was invested in public equities, 29% in hedge funds, 46% in private equity, 4% in real estate, and the balance elsewhere.

Harvard declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

SpaceX's valuation has whipsawed since the aerospace company went public on June 12. Its market capitalization topped $2.4 trillion on June 20, then tanked to $1.4 trillion by August 1, and has since rallied to around $2 trillion.

Musk's company posted a 92% year-on-year revenue jump for the quarter ended June, helping narrow its net loss from $1 billion to $541 million.

The world's richest man recently posted on X that he sees a path for SpaceX to be worth "orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy," implying its stock could rise at least 6,000-fold to $12 quadrillion over time.

He later clarified that wasn't a "statement of extreme confidence," but he believes the probability of achieving that valuation is "not zero." On October 14, he said he expects SpaceX to be worth more than $100 trillion in the next 10 years.

Harvard is one of several shareholders to reveal a sizable stake in SpaceX. Google parent Alphabet reported a roughly 4% stake valued at $94 billion as of the end of June. Longtime Musk associate Peter Thiel disclosed a 3.2% position worth $73 billion held by his Founders Fund and related entities. AI chipmaker Nvidia has a $21 billion stake.

• Apollo is delaying recruiting for its 2028 associate class, Business Insider has learned.
• This follows last year's delay, which helped slowed down private equity's chaotic recruiting process.
• Apollo said it wants young bankers to have more experience before making their next career move.

Apollo is delaying on-cycle recruiting again this year, after a similar move last year helped push back the recruiting timeline across the private equity industry.

The private equity giant told prospective candidates Thursday afternoon that it will not recruit its 2028 associate class this calendar year, according to an email obtained by Business Insider.

The memo, signed by David Sambur, co-head of Private Equity, and Antoine G. Munfakh, deputy global head of Private Equity, said the firm will wait until candidates who started their investment banking careers over the summer are "closer to completing one full year of professional experience."

The hope, the memo said, is that this will convince others in private equity to delay their process so both candidates and employers can make "better decisions." Last year, after Apollo CEO Marc Rowan said the firm would delay on-cycle recruiting, others, such as General Atlantic also decided to pause.

"We were encouraged that others in the industry took similar steps, and we hope more firms will do the same this year," the memo said.

On-cycle recruiting — the controversial process through which private equity firms hire junior investment bankers for associate roles a year or even two before they would start — had crept earlier and earlier in the years following the pandemic.

Competition among private equity firms to lock up top talent pushed recruiting earlier and made the process notoriously intense. It would kick off with little warning, with junior bankers sometimes calling in sick or interviewing in the middle of the night to avoid jeopardizing their day jobs. JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, has been a big critic of the process, calling it "unethical."

In 2025, amid rumblings that on-cycle recruiting could take place before some students even graduated from college, JPMorgan rolled out a policy that incoming analysts could be terminated for accepting future-dated private equity offers.

Apollo then decided to pause its on-cycle recruiting for 2027 associates, setting off a chain reaction that delayed the process well into this year.

Questions have swirled if the practice would kick off early again this for the 2028 class, but it appears with this latest move, Apollo is trying to slow down the recruiting timeline across the industry again.

Read the full memo below:

—-

To: Prospective Apollo Associate Candidates, Class of 2028

Subject: Apollo Recruiting, Class of 2028

Congratulations on beginning your career in investment banking. We know how exciting and demanding this period can be, and we hope you are enjoying the experience and learning a great deal.

Last June, we wrote to prospective candidates for our Associate Class of 2027 to explain why Apollo would be delaying its recruiting process. We believed then, as we do now, that young professionals should have the opportunity to develop their skills, gain meaningful experience and better understand their interests before making important decisions about their careers.

We were encouraged that others in the industry took similar steps, and we hope more firms will do the same this year. Young professionals still deserve more time to gather valuable life and work experience before making important career decisions.

We wanted to share with you that for the Associate Class of 2028, we will not participate in on-cycle recruiting this calendar year and intend to wait until candidates are closer to completing one full year of professional experience before engaging in formal recruiting for an Associate position. We believe giving candidates more time and experience before beginning the process leads to better decisions for candidates and employers alike.

In the meantime, we will continue to spend time with many of you, introduce you to our platform and share the diverse array of career opportunities available at Apollo. When our formal recruiting process begins, we intend to approach it thoughtfully and give candidates ample time to prepare, interview and consider their offers.

None of this changes our enthusiasm for meeting and recruiting exceptional young talent. Quite the opposite. Investing in our people has always been central to Apollo's success, and we remain committed to attracting and developing the next generation of investment professionals.

For now, our advice is simple: Focus on the opportunity in front of you. Learn as much as you can. Build relationships, develop your judgment, and take the time to discover what genuinely interests you. There will be plenty of time to make decisions about the next chapter of your career.

We look forward to getting to know you and hope many of you will consider building your careers at Apollo.

Best,

David Sambur

Partner, Co-Head of Private Equity and Head of Equity

Antoine G. Munfakh

Partner, Deputy Global Head of Private Equity

MEPs are pushing for an EU solidarity mechanism to help patients pay for treatment abroad, arguing that financial barriers are preventing Europeans from exercising rights they have had on paper for more than a decade.

The calls came as Parliament discussed a report commissioned to inform its own-initiative report on modernising patients’ rights in cross-border healthcare. The study found that cross-border care accounts for just 0.004% of EU public health expenditure, despite patients continuing to face upfront costs, complex reimbursement procedures and prior-authorisation requirements.

Tomislav Sokol (EPP, Croatia) called the proposed solidarity mechanism a potential “game changer” for vulnerable patients, but challenged Parliament to spell out how it would work.

“How would it work in practice? How would it be financed? Would this be part of the EU budget?” Sokol asked. “We need to know it now, so that we can also use this in negotiations on the future EU budget, in the next MFF.”