Sarah Bauerle Danzman, associate professor of International Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies was quoted in a ProPublica investigation examining previously unreported foreign investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX before the company's record-setting initial public offering. The June 18 article, “Before SpaceX IPO, Investors in China Secretly Acquired Stakes,” drew on court records ProPublica obtained after a legal challenge in Delaware.
The reporting identified more than a dozen investors with addresses in mainland China, Hong Kong or Russia who bought into SpaceX through a middleman investment firm between 2018 and 2021, including a businessman whose venture capital firm has also backed Chinese satellite companies sanctioned by the U.S. government. Bauerle Danzman, who previously served at the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments for national security risk, told ProPublica that the central question for U.S. officials is whether China-based investors gained access to nonpublic information about SpaceX's technology or strategy.
“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,” she said.
Bauerle Danzman's expertise sits at the center of one of the defining issues in global affairs today: how governments balance open capital markets against national security concerns as investment, technology and geopolitics become increasingly intertwined. As director of the Tobias Center for Innovation in International Development and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, she brings that real-world policy experience directly into the classroom. Hamilton Lugar students can explore these questions in her courses on global business and economic governance, part of the school's broader commitment—alongside the College of Arts and Sciences—to preparing students to navigate the intersection of global markets, security and statecraft.
