SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
ft.com
ft.com
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nasdaq-che...
So, it's doing pretty well!
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500-ex-i...
Does the same rule work in crypto?
Yeah, I know why people _want to_ (betting), but it doesn't serve a broader economic purpose.
(under the assumption your broker is managing their risk if your losses from a short position potentially exceeds capital available for liquidation if the trade moves against you)
Elon Musk is politicized so you're going to have people wanting to short against him, for reasons other than it being seen as a rational and sound investment strategy. This is one reason brokers tend to restrict this activity to certain types of investors who are more able to appreciate the risks, to say nothing of baseline necessities like needing a margin account to cover potential losses. Shorting is just very different than buying a stock.
Plus there's option traders who naturally need to go short sometimes.
It’s all betting.
If someone wants to dress it up in jargon or talk about beneficial second order effects, they can. But if putting money on an outcome you can’t control isn’t gambling, I don’t know what is.
You’re not going to make up a silly low number because you actually have to buy the bananas yourself at some point, and you help price discovery because now that guy isn’t buying bananas at a higher price than someone is willing to sell them for.
What I'm getting at is when does it go from investing, "I think this entity is going to take my money and use it to build a profitable factory that will then return to me a share of the profits", to just gambling "I think this stock price will change by the end of the day and I'm going to bet on it", and what are the positives and negatives of that?
The distinction between investing vs gambling and positives and negatives sounds like more the subject of a PhD thesis than an HN comment! At some point the marginal benefit of smaller price spreads from very short term trade to actually allocating physical capital and labour to producing more valuable stuff might actually be lower than the amount it simply inflates asset prices, but that is much closer to microseconds than "you're not allowed to bet against this IPO, the insiders artificially pumping its value need to be able to cash out first"...
Producers that use commodity futures to lock in a sale price need a buyer or speculator to take the other side of the transaction.
I agree that hedging is real and useful. The comment I’m replying to isn’t trying to do that.
Lots of replies either personally benefit or just assume the "way things are" is the best, but the stock market has gotten highly abstracted from the original intention of providing capital to grow companies via means other than bank loans.
I get the argument that shorts and friends help make the price the stock is being sold at more accurate, and I believe there's some truth there, but also we constantly see stock prices fluctuate by 10+% in a single day and I have trouble believing the actual value of all these companies changed that much in a single 24 period.
None of us have that crystal ball, so market participants try to guess at the future. It's not difficult to believe that those guesses can swing a lot in a single day. Just trying to figure out whether or the Hormuz will be open next week can give you whiplash.
its a reasonable expectation that 3 months after an IPO the price will be lower than it was at IPO
not really a bet so much as that on average the prices at IPO are a local maxima
Schwab won't let you, because even if you're 95% right, you'll still probably lose 95% of your money...
It's quite difficult to be 100% right...
And if you are buying an instrument where you can lose more than you invested, the approach maybe wrong? :-)
This is precisely why shorting can lose more than you "invest", because you're not buying an instrument, you're selling it with the intent (or promise, depending on what kind of instrument it is) to buy it back later, hopefully at a lower price.
The risk is unbounded.
a company who says we'll have ai in space, meanwhile you can stick ai in the ocean and use ocean water to cool & still have access for upgrade cycles.
meanwhile china and japan and bezos all landing reusable rockets.
meanwhile maybe ai runs locally on phones (today's announcement of deepseek in the iphone in china)
ummmm. short in force!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(finance)
There are, as said, depending on juristic regime, products which do not let you lose more than you invested.
On top of this comes national regulation: E.g. in some EU countries, retail traders are exempt from s.c. "margin calls" and the broker is required by regulation to "just close and not ask for more"
Source: Im living in one of these EU countries
> the broker is required by regulation to "just close and not ask for more"
Some American brokers will also forcibly close your position instead of issuing a margin call. Do you mean that under those national regulations, the broker is required to eat the losses?
[0]: in quotes, since with a short position it's not really the case that you put something in.
The loss is implemented by a knockout value, depending on your leverage. In all EU countries there is no margin call allowed for retailers, but this is not relevant for turbos anyway. The loss is included in the deprecation of the price of the turbo, the issuer is just the middleman, being neutral. Compared to a CFD issuer, which can print whatever price it wants. With a turbo, the price of the turbo instrument is connected by a simple formula with the underlying price.
A turbo has an ISIN, and is highly regulated by the Financial Supervision Authorities.
Actually, turbos are a professoinal instrument but they are sold to retailers as well in most countries.
But nontheless, you as instrument user pay something, for sure.
The risk of a stock like spaceX gapping up 10x in an instant is virtually zero.
Note this has nothing to do with my feelings about SpaceX. I am Elon hater nr. 1 and hope SpaceX burns to dust, I only hope speculative investors burn down with it.
EDIT/CLARIFICATION: This post is fundamentally anti-capitalist. You may feel like I am mis-informed or misunderstanding. I am both of theses things if and only if Capitalism truly is self-evident.
My parent wanted to make some unearned money by making speculations and gambles. If they were allowed and if they were successful, they would have made a bunch of money while contributing nothing. Every single dollar they would have made in their speculative gamble would have come from somebody else who actually contributed and but didn’t get the full value from their work.
I am glad that my parent was denied the privileged to participate in this systematic exploitation. The ideal number of speculative investors is zero, and any movement towards that number is an improvement for workers.
You feel a stock is overvalued and you short it. You feel a stock is undervalued and you buy it. What's the difference?
there are easier ways to make money than betting against Elon Musk. See Tesla and how well it worked out for short sellers there.
I like SpaceX as a company (especially Starlink) but it's over valued in my opinion. In about a year when there's a little bit of public financial history and the dilution is over i'll probably buy in.
They did lower the free float rule
Source: https://www.crsp.org/crsp-market-indexes-changes-to-float-sh...
The very fact that they were asking the question is such a huge red flag.
Bought an air mattress recently. Way better than a sleeping bag on the ground, even though I can also manage that.
But we are thread is about corruption (probably with bribes, and stealing the money of people that didn't participate on the transaction), while everybody keeps pretending is a consensual sale.
dont believe me, look up how much a open loop DIY system costs.
Index and other funds are forced to buy as their contractual mandate is to follow the index or methodology set out by the fund.
I have a tiny minute slice of SPCX from owning VTI total market ETF but my 401K holds no SpaceX.
And guess what, your VTI which does track NASDAQ as part of it's index is effected by this inclusion rule.
Not only is he wrong that it doesn't impact him, because VTI is impacted, but the whole premise is wrong. "I'm not harmed" does not mean things are fine. If I go murder your neighbor, will you come to my trial and demand I go free because you weren't harmed? Should the judge let me go because he wasn't harmed?
Just because you don't understand the basics of the financial system, or the different indices, or the amount of money flowing into the funds that track each, it doesn't mean others don't. The impact if it had been included in the S&P500 would have been at least an order of magnitude more than just the nasdaq 100.
If you look at Fidelity mutual funds, the difference is even greater. FXAIX has $827B in it, USNQX has $9.6B in it.
The absolute dollars do matter, as do the risk characteristics of both baskets of stocks. If and when SPCX meets the S&P 500 index criteria it will be included.
Also, NASDAQ both operates the NASDAQ exchange and also decides what is in the NASDAQ 100. S&P decides what is in the S&P 500 but they do not operate an exchange. Allowing SPCX into the NASDAQ 100 was good for NASDAQ the exchange and it was legal, so it happened. The S&P 500 committee was not facing the same incentive so SPCX will have to wait until it meets the criteria for inclusion.
If you understand the incentives, you can predict the outcome. I agree that it sucks that QQQ holders had to swallow SPCX.
One last thing, if you reread my post, I explicitly acknowledge I have exposure to SPCX through VTI which I own in my Roth IRA. As of right now, 0.14% of VTI is SPCX which means I have $91 of exposure. I think I’ll be OK if it goes to zero :) I said I have no SPCX in my 401K which is just FXAIX, an S&P 500 index fund.
QQQ tracks the Nasdaq 100. It's an index fund. If the index includes a new ticker, then QQQ has to buy it.
Buying QQQ doesn't seem like going out of one's way. I don't understand your comment. "ETFs and chill" is a very common investment strategy.
Asked and answered. Whatever cute point you're trying to make is rendered moot by real market dynamics and index inclusion rules.
QQQ is more volatile and higher risk than the S&P 500, the people buying it should understand that.
https://etfdb.com/index/nasdaq-100-index/ are the ETFs that track that index.
So, who is being forced to buy that index?
Nobody has any idea what point you're trying to make, and the fact that you're repeating yourself and not being clearer makes everyone suspect that you don't have any idea either.
Quite likely that the only sensible one for most people (~global equities) will track S&P 500 internally. So essentially employees are being forced to hold whatever the index includes.
Hopefully it's less of a problem with Nasdaq, but it was a real worry.
So whether the index funds do or don't buy a certain stock has direct implications for real, non-millionaire, people.
Complete non sequitur. Can you explain what you mean? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong comment?
The Nasdaq 100 is just a fund. Its existence doesn't force you or anyone else to do anything.
People can choose to buy stocks, and people can choose to buy the Nasdaq 100. Or not. Nobody is making you.
I assure you I am not.
>The Nasdaq 100 is just a fund. Its existence doesn't force you or anyone else to do anything. People can choose to buy stocks, and people can choose to buy the Nasdaq 100. Or not. Nobody is making you.
This is irrelevant. QQQ is the one that's forced to buy all the constituents of the index, including SpaceX. This has been pointed out to you several times, but you seem unwilling to accept that fact.
These are all products that people and funds can choose to buy or not buy.
There's a cost to selling, the brokerage fee plus in many countries there's then taxes due on any profits. Many people would prefer to have unrealized gains where they can pay the tax years ahead, when they need the money.
(Also please don't make the same comment 4+ times.)
If I'm already invested, and they change the rules on me in a way I don't like, I have to sell, and that's a taxable event.
So if I have invested in a Nasdaq index, and I don't want a massive exposure to SpaceX prematurely, I am forced to close my position and immediately pay taxes on the profits. I pay the taxes, and now my investing capital is reduced because Elon wanted to force index funds to buy SpaceX stock, which indirectly forces all current owners to buy SpaceX.
It's not future buyers so much as people that are already exposed, and were probably not counting on getting rug pulled by the Nasdaq.
So no, you are correct that no one new to investing is forced to own SpaceX stock, but millions of existing fund holders are now exposed to a stock in a way that simply wasn't possible when they put their money in, and will be penalized if they don't want that.
I don't think that the claim of "the Nasdaq is misusing their institutional trust" is a controversial claim. Moreover, one of the things that people choose when they (401k, pension funds, passive investors) is institutional mechanisms that prevent potentially mispriced items from entering their portfolios.
>However, based on figures from the over 700,000 401(k) plans, allocation to Nasdaq-100 Index mutual funds makes up less than 1% of all 401(k) assets, which the firm suggests is a significant underrepresentation compared to the S&P 500 and other Large Cap Growth Indexes.
https://www.psca.org/news/psca-news/2025/4/should-nasdaq-100...
Its also a matter of principle. They had a seasoning period to allow for market price discovery over time, and they created a process to waive it for one company. Its not unreasonable to say that that is a bad thing.
And beyond that there is a lot of capital in active funds that use an index as their benchmark. So they don’t have to buy anything, but they are trying to beat their benchmark so not buying is an active decision with risk.
It is like saying that the worst thing about twin earthquakes in Venezuela was not the fact that there were two of them, because there could have been three.
Nobody would actually say this about these earthquakes, and that is my point.
I know people tend too see “index” and think it’s a rigorous financial instrument but on a lot of cases it’s not. This index excludes financials so it ends up being this mega cap/tech 100. No other rules historically.
This what your parent said:
> The worst about the SpaceX IPO is Nasdaq changing their inclusion rules for the Nasdaq 100.
And you replied with:
> It would be shocking if we were talking about the SP500.
My critique is that this is not a valid refutation of your parent’s original claim.
If you don‘t think this is constructive, then that is on you. In my mind you have not refuted your parent’s original claim, and I have explained why above.
Also let me repeat, since you seem to have missed it when I said it above: I am not comparing anything to earthquake. I am making an obviously ridiculous hypothetical claim I just picked earthquakes because it was more obvious. I could have as well made the hypothetical claim about the worst thing about coffee is that it is only lukewarm, and then the refutation saying: “no actually, it could have been room temperature, so lukewarm is not that bad.“
I love shaking up the firms. Gives normal people a chance to build wealth.
Buzz word filled posts like this are the most annoying to read on here
Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Defenders of capitalism unite!!! lol. Free market right?
Obviously this all falls apart when capitalism can buy legislation. We are seeing how the USA is currently eroded by a few oligarchs.
Society needs somethings to try to stop corruption wehther government rules or non government actions.
Under pure capitalism what stops this?
non-corrupt competitors will be beaten every time by corrupt ones
1. Capitalism where there is no government or regulatory interference, and the "invisible hand of the free market" produces some kind of utopian society based purely on every business abiding by rules enforced by no one, where somehow corporations don't take advantage of workers they way they do now despite there being no laws against it.
2. The same thing but sarcastically because it's obvious that that system would be demonstrably worse than the restricted version of capitalism that we have now.
Historical examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Remember kids: socialism is judged by how it failed in real life, capitalism is judged by how perfect it is in theory
It completely ignores the decades of external hostility toward any nation that attempted to build a socialist economy. Almost every attempt has been met with near immediate intervention from captialist super powers, particularly the USA. Nixon activeley worked to cause the military coup in Chile, Cuba has faced the longest trade embargo in modern history (and yet still managed to outperform its peers in the region in healthcare and literacy). Its unscientific to attribute these struggles purely to internal failure when they are subject to deliberate economic warfare.
Secondly, your definitions are being stretched to fit your thesis. Scandinavia is not "socialist flavored" it IS a social democracy, with free markets. Claiming China's success is from captialism is ignoring that its economy relies entirely on state owned land, state owned and controlled banks, and state owned companies, and mandatory five year plans coming from the state.
If we classify any successful state-led initiative as "capitalist" and any blockaded, intervened upon state as "purely socialist" then the argument is an unfalsifiable truism.
the soviet union also pushed humans into space
cuba produces a ton of doctors who then go on to heal people too poor to train local doctors
in terms of, how does socialism benefit jeff bezos and elon musk and the actual capitalism of epsteins and the like using money as power mad exption from the law, i guess musk built space x on soviet rocket designs, but otherwise not a ton.
does it need to benefit the ultra wealthy capitalists to be good though?
Try actually defining capitalism in a way that doesn't apply to basically any random society since the dawn of agriculture.
Stuff like people buying and selling items using a currency for a price the individual chooses has been common to basically every human society we have written records for.
The formalization of the process of buying shares in a company and receiving dividends/profits as a result is a bit newer, but the general concept of "I give you money, you use it to make something and sell it then give me money back" has been around for roughly the same amount of time as currency itself.
Anyways, my point is that there is a lot of things to criticize about our current world/economy, using the term "capitalism" while doing so is too vague to be useful in any way.
(Communism/socialism does have more of an actual definition, but very few people are aware of or use it, so it doesn't help all that much).
.. feudalism?
Which, AFAIK, lasted much longer, and is just not the same thing?
> Feudalism is a term often used to describe the social, economic and political conditions that existed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. At its core, it was a system in which a landowner, or lord, granted a piece of land called a fief to a subordinate known as a vassal. In return, the vassal pledged loyalty to the lord, providing labor, military service, payments—or a mix of these.
And then the next paragraph goes on to say that historians think this is way too simple to describe what real people were actually doing.
Either way, unless every single piece of property in the kingdom (including, like, plows and mill stones and spinning wheels) was granted by the king (or someone he had granted to) it seems like there's still a lot of room for buying/selling/investing.
I mean, it's an interesting answer but my basic point is that the "real world" is far too complex for a term like capitalism to be at all useful.
Even stuff like "free market", can a market be "free" if a government exists? What about monopolies? Etc etc.
I just want people to be more specific when they criticize systems!
That being said, if we're talking about the lord owning the mill you labor at, how is that different than tesla owning the car factory you work at?
A better comparison to support your "capitalism = feudalism" argument would actually be the era of company stores and truck wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
The distinction between that and some kind of stereotypical medieval serf living on a farm he was granted by a lord and producing crops that he uses to pay his rents and so forth seems somewhat minor.
Yes in general a modern american has more government enforced rights and protections, but at the end of the day a lot of rights aren't really all that relevant if you can't afford them in the first place.
Musk and I both have the right to build a factory to produce electric cars, but one of us is going to have a much harder time exercising that right.
(Not to say that we aren't living in a better world, we absolutely are, I would never trade places with basically anyone from "the past", but the point isn't that things aren't as bad as they used to be, the point is how do we improve what we have today)
If you don't understand the difference between a feudal lord an Elon musk I'm not sure I can help you. We live in a world where individual rights are orders of magnitude more significant that those of a feudal serf.
People who might qualify for the label "serf" had all sorts of differing rights and responsibilities and cultures across the literally thousands of years of history we have access to, anything from slaves in all but name to people who had (the equivalent of) bills of rights and legal protections for things they owned and produced and what duties and obligations they had were enforced by contracts laws and judges.
Musk and I both have "the right" to build a factory to produce electric cars for sale, but one of us is going to have a considerably easier time exercising that right.
It's illegal for both Steve Jobs and I to to park in a handicapped space, but when he gets a fine for doing so, it doesn't affect him in the slightest and he (used) his power to avoid suffering from any consequences, whereas I am meaningfully impacted by the punishment.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Are things better "now" than "then"? Yes, of course. I wouldn't trade places with basically anyone from more than 100 years ago. But that's irrelevant to the point that people like Musk and the thousands of similar but less famous people have too much power and that power is used to corrode our society.
Living in a house you rent and working at someone else's factory has a number of downsides. It's not all bad, but it's still worth actually considering what is good and what is bad so we can improve things.
What makes capitalism different is that the power is distributed along capital (as opposed to handpicked by the king under feudalism; or embedded in government monopoly under mercantilism).
In other words, in capitalism, the owners of capital (or the owners of the means of production; i.e the rich; the aristocracy; etc.) are the ones who get to dictate the living conditions of the rest of society. The rulers (be it democratically elected government; an absolute monarch; a military dictatorship) will legislate in order to maintain the interest of the owners of capital. The police (or military) will fight for the interest of the owners of capital, and will suppress any resistance against the interest of the rich, etc.
Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).
The problem is that extreme wealth imbalance leads to a power imbalance that tends to throw society into turmoil. The French Revolution being a canonical example.
Even if they perhaps work the same number of hours a year, Maria has more training and (maybe) some kind of rarer aptitude and as a result we have a lot more house cleaners than neurosurgeons (in america and other places there a whole bunch of other factors like who gets access to the training and so on that causes some of these imbalances, but that's a whole 'nother comment).
The people, in general, are probably considerably less happy with the idea that jk rowling the ultrarich author gets to use her money to try to pass laws taking rights away from people she doesn't like.
Look at the difference between Ellison and Musk. Ellison is probably has similar levels of power to Musk, but he (afaik) mostly uses it to buy giant yachts and annoy other fortune 500 companies, and as a result most people don't really care that he's a billionaire.
Musk, on the other hand, tries to use his power to screw with government services and publically attack minorities and so on.
That's a market economy, which may or may not be capitalist. Markets have existed for thousands of years under various economic systems.
Agree on your other points though, 'capitalism' was coined to just describe and criticize the system they saw emerging, one of private ownership of the means of production, combined with wage workers who do not own their tools or the product of their labor, but instead sell their time.
But its hard to have discussions around because too many people conflate "market economy" == "capitalism" but you can have markets in a feudalist, socialist, communist, any other society, that doesn't inherently make them capitalist. But I still think its useful as a term, but only to specifically describe who owns the capital.
The major issue is the "private ownership of the means of production". While some argue it's a recent development, others (like me) argue it has been present since the dawn of civilization and, ignoring the "free market" and "voluntary transactions" part, one could argue both feudalism and socialism are capitalistic systems, with the latter often receiving the term "state capitalism", instead.
And then there's the issue of "wage workers". Workers who own their means of production (i.e. freelancers) are still often considered "capitalists" themselves, as under the umbrella of "small capitalists", even if they rely more on their labor than their ownership.
American libertarians often imagine some kind of wonderland capitalism where everyone agrees to play by the rules that aren't enforced by anyone. To my knowledge this has never existed as a long-term equilibrium and it can't exist. I've yet to meet anyone who can tell me how their imaginary ideas go up against claims like
1. Encouraging infinite growth with no controls or limits will always lead to monopolism and is a one-way ratchet
2. Power vacuums are always filled (no public government leads to private companies stepping in and taking the dictatorial role, this time without any of the democracy)
3. Power always corrupts
That's not a free market economy.
"it doesn't seem like America has anywhere near enough regulations to be considered true capitalism."
You can't regulate your way into capitalism because capitalism by definition means markets free from government interference. The more it interferes the less capitalism you have.
United Healthcare is a great example. The governments enforce these companies being a monopoly be restricting which companies can operate in which states, having an enormous amount of red tape and regulation, documentation laws, etc.
If it was truly "capitalism" the government wouldn't' get involved at all. Part of the reason that doctors are so expensive to see is because there is a board that the US Government certifies to allow them to control which hospitals are allowed to be teaching hospitals for doctors.
If it was true capitalism there would be no regulation there and any college could graduate doctors. This artificially keeps the supply lower than it would be. These are facts.
My dude, you're acting like Federal government is the only government that matters. It's a common mistake, but in this context it's fatal to your argument.
It's fatal because federal spending is the least relevant kind, since so much of it (and so much of its growth) is for the military, and military spending indicates very little about whether a country is socialist or capitalist on the inside.
In contrast, state/local taxes and programs are--even today--still a majority of the spending that actually tells us anything useful for a socialist/capitalist spectrum, the stuff that involves schools, libraries, policing, homelessness, property rights, etc.
So clearly you are pretty uninformed as the military spending is only 13% of the federal budget. Social Security (AKA a socialist program, IDK if anyone can deny that) is 22%, Medicare (another socialist program is 14.2%). Interest on our prior spending (a lot of it from SS and Medicare, etc, some military too. is 14%
So, if you add social programs you has (SS = 22.5%, Medicare = 14.2%, not counting education) that is 36% of the budget or nearly 3x miltitary spending.
A capitalist economy would NOT have those things are as they are not free market at all, they are the government forcing your to pay into them.
This is another aspect where your thesis is not-fully-baked. If you want people to receive what you meant, you have to stop writing it wrong.
1. You spoke about "the federal tax rate" and claimed it was "0" in 1900.
2. The most charitable interpretation of that is that you meant to say income tax: That's usually what people mean when they're too-vague; It would literally be $0 before it was introduced in 1913; You can't have meant all taxes because those were absolutely >0 and you wouldn't make that kind of math mistake, right?
3. When critiquing the growth and dominance of the income tax, that excludes the separate taxes (payroll) that go to SS/Medicare.
> capitalist economy
I'm not taking a stand on the "what the US is" conclusion at this point. What I'm saying is that your argument--how you're getting there--is unsound (can't ignore state/local level) and unclear (which numbers from where).
Also, note how super ok and welcomming libertarians are toward racists or even fashists. They do dislike pro-democratic center groups, they hate democratic left.
“True communism has never been tried”
Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations
It does not mean it is state-owned.
(For example, state ownership under an absolute monarchy doesn't seem like a proxy for public ownership.)
You could make a decent argument that capitalism will very likely end-game devolve into crony-capitalism as it's typical failure mode, but I don't think it's written in stone.
It's funny to me. Everyone rails about Atlas Shrugged being some libertarian fantasy story. I always read it as an allegory warning about crony capitalism and how it ruins society along with a story about trains and magical perpetual motion machines.
Which I’m surprised people don’t point out more. What does it matter which system is the best when at the end of the day the powerful people are going to make back room deals to subvert it and that always leads to a feedback loop
If a Pvt corporation fails to deliver a bid or lies in customer features, then CEO is caned (Singapore style) and taken out of the next pool for random selection.
If a politician fails to deliver an election promise in his term, then politician is caned and taken out of the next pool for random selection. Randomly selected judges decide the severity of crime and magnitude of punishment.
See QQNE and SPNE.
The real question is why are employers able to limit employee 401k investment choices and employee health insurance. This is not freedom.
Source?
He may have claimed this. But he has no power to. Once a stock is publicly listed, every exchange can trade it. Where Musk had influence was on to whom he paid his listing fee.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2026/04/25/spacex-...
Notice a listing on the board and an inclusion in an index are two different things. Nastaq changed the index to secure the listing of SpaceX on their board.
Nobody contested this. You said inclusion was “a prerequisite for trading the stock on the board.” That is incorrect.
New Milennium regulations don’t let listing boards or issuers say where their stock can and can’t be traded.
They got mostly the money SPCX paid them. It was a large payment but not out of the ordinary. And all that they risked was their index relevancy.
Much like how Wile E. Coyote is a "safe" customer for Acme Inc, even though he purchases dangerous explosives and deploys them in reckless ways.
The normal seasoning period is there for a reason. There is a massive downside to premature inclusion of a stock that is initially overvalued and then settles to a reasonable/sustainable value.
Define “massive”. SpaceX is only 1.2% of QQQ.
They are not questioning money exchange, they are questioning the "only" part, claiming this is significant.
Then they should buy a broad-market fund. The kinds in which new issues are a tiny fraction or, if it’s following something like the S&P 500, not included at all. Following the Nasdaq 100 and then complaining it has too many risky tech plays is a bit silly.
Like a Russell 1000 fund? Oh wait...
Yes. A fund that doesn’t choose what is and isn’t a good investment. Total market means total market.
If you don’t like that, the S&P 500 is bigger than those for a reason.
They did change their rules, they did it fairly specifically for spacex and it did drive inclusion in a major index fund (perhaps the biggest one).
Now me personally, as a holder of vti I am good with the change and my included exposure to spacex. Further I think mostly complaining about the inclusion/exclusion of a single name in an index _defeats the point_.
But for those decrying the shenanigans crsp and vti are the example to go with.
To the extent there is potential bullshit, it is here.
We are now at the point where companies can game the system of indexing. Investors need to wake up to this fact and realize this is likely a paradigm shift.
Also, what's up with this influx of very sheltered reddit-like comments? It's not even September yet.
not sure why people aren't getting this
The inclusion rules for indices change every couple of years. That’s why there is an index provider versus a mathematical formula. (There are also formulaic indices. They aren’t very popular.)
The Nasdaq 100 rule change covers multiple companies.
Like, there is so much wrong with the SpaceX IPO. It’s kind of weird, as someone who’s spent time in both the equity capital markets and private markets, to see this being the thing finance Twitter has fixated on.
I don't think that's relevant to the point you're responding to there. A rule change can apply to many parties while the content and timing nonetheless target a single player. The two things aren't at odds.
Fair enough. From what I understand, the decisions were timed to anticipate the cohort. It Anthropic made it out first, they’d have gotten the shade.
Some think the index deal was in exchange for Elon helping fund the midterm battle. Scott Galloway, for example.
Pretty much everybody know what it was about on day one, brokers were (and still are) operating in blatant bad faith for personal gain and they know they can count on the current US administration to get off scot free. It's like if Jordan Belfort was in charge of Nasdaq.
I cut out my nasdaq100 and have generally allocated towards ex us
If there's an issue I think it's earlier in the IPO pipeline.
Index investing is too high a percentage of total investing so the rules matter to the whole market.
The entire reason for these seasoning periods is to give the market time to determine what the company is actually worth to the market itself. Bypassing those rules to get it in earlier says to me that they don't believe it will settle at a price near its start.
If I IPO my lemonade stand at $1T valuation do I deserve to be in that "largest X companies" list? Or does it only make sense if I can maintain that valuation over time?
Nasdaq 100 has always been marketed as a tech-forward index. It would be a bit ridiculous if they didn’t include the most value tech companies on the market.
There was a potential scandal at S&P. But it didn’t happen. My personal guess is a lot of finance influencers latched onto this story. When it didn’t pan out they tried to maintain credibility by shifting it onto the Nasdaq 100, where it doesn’t make sense.
You are the biggest simp for the rich.
They pay you to post here in their defense?
Discourse on this site is no better than Twitter or Reddit, just another flavor of stupid.
The timing isn’t great. But this was being discussed for a while. If it were only SpaceX, I’m doubtful the rules would have changed. But a tech index not including SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and SK Hynix is a bit silly. And in the end, on index inclusion, the stock still fell.
> simp…Twitter or Reddit
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm
I mean the planets would fly off orbit
...such thoughtless justification is not really disproving comparison to "anything goes" discourse of other platforms with a nonsense appeal to empty normalization
100% designed to offload an empty bag onto retail investors
SpaceX is propped up entirely by government subsidy
It has no real sustainable business unlike SK Hynix, very much like OAI and Anthropic
What's silly is propping up ephemeral companies that burn resources and produce nothing
This was a popular meme on Twitter and Reddit and YouTube, granted. The math doesn’t make sense with an index like the Nasdaq 100. But I’ll admit it’s a good story.
> SpaceX is propped up entirely by government subsidy
This is also true of every defence contractor.
Super intelligence is a good story
These companies are built on little more than "a good story" for politicians to sell to voters ..."i voted in Congress for that!"
You're arguing semantics
Economic math is being leveraged against innumerates as euphemism and obfuscation of same old avarice and political corruption. Biology is self selecting. There's no using rhetoric to wave off the ground truth is just a minority of the total population ensuring their own lived experience is put above everyone else's
That’s a new use of that term!
Ignored the other points and redirected to the least salient. Will take it as acceptance you realized how silly your carrying water for people who don't know or care you exist is.
Age of account makes it clear you need the social system to remain solvent as you're likely rich on paper. Nothing more.
In this comment [1]? Seriously, what salient points were you trying to make?
Nobody is arguing anything is fairly valued. That's your straw man. There's a bit ironically complaining about innumeracy in a series of comments with zero numbers. Then a general appeal to Twitter tropes around sheeple and whatnot.
If anything, the quality of this comment thread sort of points to the quality of the argument for SpaceX being included in the Nasdaq 100 being corrupt. It's based on vibes and feels. Which is a good story–it's clearly convinced a bunch of people to watch another video, click on another ad.
> Age of account makes it clear you need the social system to remain solvent as you're likely rich on paper. Nothing more
...genuine question, how are you connecting that observation to that conclusion?
You set a low bar out the gate. I merely met you down there.
Numbers don't make a difference. They can be shaped to any argument like English or German because they're picked by the biases of the author.
You seem to live in a rhetoric derived neural hallucination and are completely detached from physical reality, meaningful thresholds for verification.
Will stick to the skills I picked up studying applied physics and electrical engineering for checking hypothesis and formal verification. No interest continuing a conversation with a functional illiterate who cannot reason outside their native cultural bubble.
To paraphrase Feynman, doesn't make much sense to get hung up on the syntax and their semantics.
Read the room, you can't chuck a rock around here w/out hitting two.
Can you prove the so-called experts know better? Or are you just deferring as you have been socially trained to? Maybe economists have over complicated things and you're too ignorant to know.
Society runs on hearsay. Heard that's how it works as kids, now say that's how it works.
Stats are just euphemism for what happened. For history. They’re not a meaningful basis for next steps. They cannot predict exactly the future; what stats showed covid would occur in 2020 exactly? Not just general appeals to stem a future pandemic.
Why then are economists analysis of history meaningful to future needs?
Like gibberish population forecasts saying 12 billion by 2100! while birth trends now show a halving of population by 2080, a whole lot of priors need to be revisited.
Strong, weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism; the fundamental forces of physics that give rise to all we see and know; do not mandate a whole lot of the crap ideas humans babble on about.
Who should be at the gambling commissioner that allows such things? Should people be made Wards of the state and finances placed in Trump's noble stewardship?
(And the influencers pitching day trading and whatnot, lo and behold, are probably also selling the corruption of indices and why you should buy their crypto to not be a "simp" or whatnot.)
Therefore they are offended that private individuals can allocate as they choose, and make losing gambles on other private institutions.
Some of these people were taught indexes are safe havens, and recoil at the idea they might not be safe as milk.
I’m not impressed by the other account. But I respect your opinion. Why do you think they have convictions? (Versus waffling on memes.)
That sombody should fix all these messy distrubted market process by replacing it with an engineered solution.
The obvious counterpoint is to direct them to who would be directing that top down system.
Everyone can get behind an omnicient and benevolent central planner on paper.
Grammatically correct sentences you can come up with are not at all guaranteed to be accurate.
Sincerely... stop it. Get some help. You're a typical human dimwit. Your grasp of contemporary economic language is not a sign of correctness. Just your own limited vocabulary and literacy. You're repeating language you memorized. You're not solving the gap in information.
Surviving this long does not mean you are especially
Indirect realism or the distinction between noumena and phenomena does not mean a model is inaccurate, and it certaianly doesnt mean your hot take is the correct one.
Real big brain stuff wrapped in copy paste of philosophical twaddle.
Not really disproving other posters point HN discourse is better than anywhere else. Random comments about others that might be wrong are not really focus on truth.
What if they floated only .01%? What's the cutoff for it being ridiculous not to include?
You’d probably still include it, at least for a tech index. But you’d underweight it relative to float for indices published for funds. (The pure play index would weight it wholly because informationally it’s still a whole company.)
Why, no employer's 401K or retirement plan offers QQQ as an investment choice. Anyone buying the Nasdaq 100 is doing so by choice?
My best guess, it makes it harder to get loans in the future.
That can snowball: wider spreads → higher borrowing costs → more stress → wider spreads. The existing bonds' coupons are fixed, so the real bite is on future issuance and refinancing.
Lots of capital-intensive companies (SpaceX is definitely in this category) lean heavily on debt markets to fund ongoing investment and roll over maturing debt, so losing cheap access is a big deal.
That article compares them to Oracle. Who are, as it goes, pretty similar: run by rich people with a media empire who have their teeth deep in government systems.
These bonds could get worse and worse but if US state and federal governments continue to put thumbs on scales it doesn't matter. The US free market isn't uniformly free.
Q: Why is this stock so valuable? A: Duh, because Musk is worth a kajillion dollars and everything he touches is gold!
Q: Why is Musk worth a kajillion dollars? A: Because he holds so many shares of extremely valuable companies, silly!
What is to say that SpaceX and Oracle won't get these benefits? (Government buying bonds, trashing ratings agencies, leaning on banks to lend etc.)
Nothing obvious, I posit. So what is the value of a bond when a government is increasingly likely to manipulate the market for it?
And that is putting aside the second order of government interference: foreign governments putting their thumbs on the scale with their own investment funds and influenceable buyers, to buy influence over a government that favours these firms.
I am old enough to remember Long Term Capital Management.
There may be important factors that the bond market isn't aware of, just like most of them didn't know about the problems with mortgage-backed securities in 2008. But anything you and I are aware of, they probably are too.
This is something that seems like it should be true but the subprime crisis (which didn't at all come out of the blue — anyone with any instinct at all should have understood when they first saw someone get given insane mortgages) argues against.
SpaceX bonds are just plain ol' corporate bonds, the same stuff these investors have been analyzing for a very long time.
If you want to suggest the subprime crisis as a mechanism for SpaceX bonds getting mispriced, you need to propose a model for how bond evaluators could be operating under a perverse incentive to under-rate it and somehow reap profits from doing so.
I don't? I'm just observing that the bond market got something wrong — through an absolutely industry-wide blindness - that was indeed observed, years beforehand, by non-experts. Not my example, even. Just responding.
and now back to being an adult
After all, if you truly believe what you say with conviction, the sensible thing to do would be to buy up as many SpaceX bonds as you can if you think they're so undervalued.
Spacex will raise more money again, they have no known path to structural profitability.
Which is pretty important! It's my understanding that from all that money they raised during their IPO, a good amount of it went right back out the door again to pay off misc loans for the twitter acquisition. They may only have bought themselves 6 more months of time given their purported burn rate (mostly driven by AI investment), so they're going to need more loans really soon, or another major stock offering.
If they had only ~6 more months they (+auditor) had to issue a warning. The 6 is not a hard number, AFAIK, but surely a point where it must be reported.
So honestly, I doubt it's the case.
Currently 4.9% of the company is on the market.
Mid Aug... 15%...
40% by December.
Elon unlocks next June. Could be quite academic by then.
It's better described as "it increases operational risks to SpaceX". When they face some future difficulty, the odds they can come out of it are lowered. Which is itself a factor that partners consider, including employees, because obviously people prefer to bet their livelihoods on more of a sure thing.
Could you imagine the abuse of power that could happen if one person held over 50% of the voting power at such a company?
The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.
IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.
The theoretical arguments against socialism (or, more specifically, centrally planned state production) given by Hayek is that pricing is information and markets are computers on that information, ergo changing the information gives you a bad result. This certainly applied to the kinds of production the Soviet Union loved to engage in, but there's no particular reason why it can't apply to capitalist enterprise as well. I mean, Facebook's headcount or market cap alone is larger than some actual nation-states' population or GDP.
Just like how the USSR was nominally socialist but practically engaged in exactly the same state-controlled mode of production as feudalism, today's corporate entities are nominally capitalist but practically feudalist. The medieval historians in the room would probably balk at me using the word "feudalist" to describe either, so to be clear, what I mean is "an economic system in which the majority of profit goes to landowners / platform owners / the state / etc". In this economic mode, companies can warp markets to their whims in exactly the same way Congress can.
Except, Congress is democratically controlled. Joint-stock corporations are inherently oligarchial in structure: control of the company is assigned based on how many shares you can afford to buy, so the company answers to the amount of money that has capitalized it, and not any other concern[0]. The "innovation" in Facebook's IPO was to go from internal oligarchy to internal autocracy - to install Mark Zuckerberg as God-Emperor of Facebook and largely depose the shareholder class that normally runs publicly-traded entities.
You'd think markets would have priced in this risk, but Facebook IPO'd at the peak of its hype and was able to get away with this. The funny thing about Hayek's distributed market computer is that it does not actually reach perfectly efficient price computation. If it did, you could crack RSA keys by placing a sufficient number of suitably complex options trades. Markets can put a bounty on fixing incorrect pricing information, but they can also just refuse to accept corrected pricing. Everyone rushing into Facebook stock counteracted the few people concerned about the ridiculously autocratic governance structure. And now that it's obvious that such a thing was a problem, it's too late to challenge it, because now Facebook has platform holder money. Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control.
The history of state intervention is very fraught, but there's one subset of interventions that has a better track record than most: those intended to stymie autocrats of trade. The state cannot correctly set prices better than a market can, but it absolutely can prevent other state-like entities from doing the same thing. Likewise, it would behoove the world's competition law and securities regulators to investigate and regulate the use of dual-class shares to retain control over companies you do not own.
Unfortunately, the current administration is unlikely to do anything about this.
Actually, to make matters worse, Texas is deliberately trying to pour gasoline on the problem by disenfranchising minority shareholders. I believe this was done specifically to give Elon Musk even more control over SpaceX, because Delaware made the mistake of actually entertaining a shareholder lawsuit over Musk's pay packet. If Facebook was an autocracy that bribed its shareholders into compliance, then SpaceX is an autocracy that says, "Fuck you, pay me". If there's one thing that gives me hope, it's that the markets are rightfully rejecting this obvious attempt at offloading Musk's toxic junk onto retail. But this is mainly because Elon failed to generate suitable hype to get the market to buy into his trash, not because markets are actually good at pricing in this specific kind of risk.
[0] In fact, this is part of why you see companies go to great lengths to fight unions, even when negotiating with a union would be cheaper. The shareholder class considers democratic control (one worker, one vote) to be an existential threat.
> Zuckerberg can bribe the shareholders to not care about their lack of control.
Monarchies had to please the aristocracy, etc.
I would say that "democracy" happens on party level not voter level. Party members are way more into the details than even the most engaged voters. You need to be at the meetings to know who is pushing what. It is all in subtle things. Most people I speak to have the most naive view on how parties work internally. Like it is a person. Goomba fallacy..
And party members more understand power hierarchy. All the drama is about that internally. Commité of whatever doing whatever having a say in whatever and delegate count of whatever county level org. to distict congress org. etc.
I think a big problem is that far too few people are engaged in politics nowadays. Active party members are aware of power structures and how they work.
Think things like right-to-repair, or data centers. A lot of people want right-to-repair, but a lot of politicians think IP law is untouchable and don't want to burn political capital on a battle they know they will lose when they can just sop up donor money to strike down or water down R2R bills. Same with data centers: they're unpopular with the electorate but politicians will do the scummiest tricks in the book to try and get a data center built. Eventually these kinds of issues do get some political wins, but they're swimming uphill both ways.
The problem isn't that democracy does not happen anymore, it's that our democratically elected representatives are unwilling to yield to democracy when the people wish to overrule them. The point of representative democracy is that the representative is supposed to do things in my best interest even if I don't particularly understand all the nuts and bolts. But a lot of representatives just think they got elected king and that my voice doesn't matter the moment I exit the polling place. This is, in effect, a deliberate attempt to disengage voters.
There's an old political cartoon from the post-Brexit era that goes something like, "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane"? The obvious joke being that no, randos are not qualified to fly the plane. But at the same time, the people who bought tickets are the ones who ultimately deciding where to fly. If the pilot said, "I know you bought a ticket for Miami, but I don't like Florida weather, so we're flying to Houston", you'd be right to be pissed off. The fact that you don't know how to fly the plane is not a moral vindication of the pilot's decision to override your travel decisions. Or, in this case, the fact that party leaders can out-organize their members does not mean they should overrule them.
As for the USSR, I had written a whole explainer on the French Revolution and how it neatly mirrored the Russian one before I realized it was distracting from my main point. It's easier to say "Russia is good at resisting change and coopting economic systems".
But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves. The infighting proceeds to burn through and kill all the true believers, leaving a hollow shell of people who played the power game well enough to survive. Thermidor[0] comes, and a coalition of surviving old guard and revolutionaries enjoy the spoils of a system whose dead wood just got killed off. And Russia did this twice: first, the Bolsheviks turned Communism into a dictatorship; second, the oligarchs turned "liberal" capitalism into an aristocracy. Inferring anything about the properties of the underlying economic system from how it was coopted by Russia is useless.
[0] The French Revolutionary Calendar month that covers late July through early August. Since nobody uses that calendar anymore, "Thermidor" generally means "the moment when the revolution is coopted".
Yeah this is a big problem. Essentially I feel there is to few "the child in Emporors new clothes" that can call out obvious BS.
I.e. somewhat emotional members that don't know the unspoken rules.
> But if you want a stronger argument: The general pattern is that revolutions that intend to depose the ruling class of a country run the risk of turning on themselves.
Sure. You could generalize to violent brutes should not run things if you want a nice society and they are let loose in bloody revolutions.
Berkshire Hathaway is possibly the most famous from the 80s/90s. The class A shares are significantly more expensive and proportionately even more powerful than the class B shares. The lower price version was important back when physical exchanges didn’t support fractional shares as they do today.
Copied from google's response to "new york times governance"
Google's AI also says that the NYT has had that structure since 1957.
Ford has something similar from the 1930s. (Dodge did too until it was bought.) Raylon (synthetic textiles) did it in the 1920s and the company behind Jack Daniels did it right after Prohibition.
Google says that the NYSE banned dual-class between 1926 and 1986; I don't know how to reconcile that with Ford.
That rule was dropped sometime in the 80s.
Meta would be an excellent example of that.
You could just, I don't know, fund infrastructure and social programs without developing cults of personality around leaders or letting them torture opponents to death.
2. If his claims are incorrect and poorly sourced, feel free to call them out. But his research appears to have been rather exhaustive on this topic.
3. If there are other sources that contradict these claims and are well researched, links are welcome
1. SpaceX issued long-term bonds whose coupon (ie, "interest rate") was 6.5%.
2. Those bonds are now trading for less than their face value. That means that if you buy one of those bonds on the secondary market, you will get a return (yield) of 7.387% (if the price of a bond goes down, but the coupon stays the same, the yield goes up).
3. This doesn't affect SpaceX directly, but it tells you that if SpaceX were to issue new bonds today, they would have to offer 7.4% coupon on them, not 6.5%. Note that even though that was caused by a 10% drop in the bond value, it's a 13% increase in cost of borrowing!
SpaceX is a cash-flow negative company that depends on debt and selling equity in order to pay the bills. They will have to issue bonds again, and those bonds will be more expensive.
Note that the shortest maturity bonds don't have to be repaid for 5 years, so the impact on cash is not going to manifest for a while...at least 5 years time (assuming they did another bond offering tomorrow). In that sense it's a nothingburger.
The immediate impact it could have is if spacex depends on issuing new, shorter-term debt (lines of credit, etc) whose price could be impacted by the market's perception of their riskiness.
That's your return if you buy one of those bonds and the bond is paid on schedule. Presumably the market consensus is there's some risk that payment may arrive late or not at all since the yield to maturity has increased since issuance and not as a result of underlying interest rate changes.
For a spread of 300 basis points that's still a very low probability, probably under 5%.
You'll probably get that, but you might not.
1. 401Ks were introduced in 1978, making mainstream the concept of automatic payroll deductions that funded an investment account. Trillions more dollars moved into pension funds that might otherwise have been spent elsewhere.
2. Bloomberg Terminals went online in 1982, kicking off an ever-growing information assymetry between investment professionals and retail investors.
3. Electronic trading didn't take off until 1992 with Globex, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's platform
4. High-frequency trading didn't take off until 2005 or so
5. Finally, the Nasdaq changed its rules in 2026 in a way that directly benefited new IPOs like SpaceX, triggering automated purchases from investment funds, propping up its price beyond what its business fundamentals might have justified.
He said he aimed to have 5000 Optimus robots out by end of 2025, 50000 by 2026 and 10 times that in 2027.
He promised in 2015 that full autonomous driving would arrive in 2 years and we aren't there yet 11 years later. He even said in 2016 that there would be coast-to-coast autonomous driving in 2017.
He promised manned missions to Mars by 2024-2025 in multiple interviews between 2011 and 2016.
He promised in 2016 that there would be solar roofs expansions by 2017 that didn't pan out, he promised AGI by 2025 in 2024.
Elon Musk has repeatedly lied about outcomes of his ventures, gotten crazy valuations based on those exaggerations and now people are starting to finally wake up that he isn't as good as his ego.
Name 3 accomplishments he made and I'll show you world class work done elsewhere by other companies. The only thing he did which was notable was Starlink and I'll gladly grant you that. China is about to eat Starlink's lunch with their own tech.
Again I think people overestimate Musk's contributions to the world.
2. Made the modern EV relatively commonplace; no other manufacturer was taking it seriously until Tesla succeeded, and took many years to catch up, although they have
3. Re-usable rockets / higher launch cadence leading to significantly cheaper costs to put things in space. No major competition yet.
Profitably reusable rockets were a major accomplishment. People like to argue against this. Every argument I've seen is either saying it doesn't actually save money or it wasn't new, neither of which is correct. It's very hard to argue with the numbers here; SpaceX is now launching more into orbit than every other launch provider combined.
I think the main reason people downplay these things is precisely because his own claims are so exaggerated. Doing 165 orbital launches in a year just doesn't sound impressive when he promised we'd be sending people to Mars years ago.
There's also the bit about people talking shit about other people they're not even close to, to feel like they matter. Ahh well
Hey guys Elon Musk sucks haha high fives all around, great
Autonomous driving is the clearest counterexample: by March 2026 Waymo had logged over 220 million rider-only miles with nobody in the driver's seat, and was doing 400,000+ rides per week across six US metros. Tesla's consumer product is still officially "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)," and Tesla itself says it does not make the car autonomous. Mercedes has Level 3 certification. Tesla has none.
Optimus missed the stated 5,000 robots in 2025. As of July 2026, Tesla still isn't selling it and is only preparing manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile Agility's Digit is in commercial warehouse deployment today. Solar Roof is worse: Musk targeted 1,000 installations per week, and Wood Mackenzie estimated Tesla averaged about 21 in 2022. Tesla's disputed the number but offered no replacement count.
SpaceX is the real exception. It genuinely leads, and the engineering is remarkable. But it's still a decade overdue on "crewed Mars by 2024." That's the point: on the one venture where "more progress than anyone else" is actually true, the promise is still failing by over a decade.
The criticism isn't that nothing comes to pass. It's that concrete near term promises repeatedly fail and get replaced by bigger ones. When a valuation depends on being uniquely far ahead, competitors catching up erases that premium fast.
Lies. Waymo beats Tesla in FSD. Optimus is nothing while China has full fucking martial arts robots. It's 2026 where's that 2025 manned Mars mission? Where's that 2025 AGI promise (currently running itself in circles.) His solar roof tile idea was a bunk plan and any regular roofer could've told you that.
China made a fucking electric car that can KITT jump. The only way Teslas get off the ground is when they hit curbs at batshit insane speeds.
Elon and his companies, outside of SpaceX, are generally frauds. Down to PayPal, which thinks it has a right to YOUR MONEY if you even so much as sneeze wrong (theft by contract.)
And before people jump in to say "have you tried it, it works" yes I have a Tesla and FSD has tried to kill me multiple times already. Including jumping a damn red light after slowing down to a stop so I was absolutely unprepared to react.
Credit where it's due, it's a pretty nice car and even the self-driving technology is decent, despite being hobbled by Elon's nonsensical allergy to LIDAR or other sensors. But it is being marketed as "FSD" and it is very much not FSD, and I can't believe more is not being done to prevent the needless deaths that are inevitable because of this.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-...
It’s a variant of the people who pick “Jay-Z” in the meme question “would you rather have half a million dollars or lunch with Jay-Z?”
Lots of rational people kept shorting, thinking sanity would prevail, and ended up losing bigly.
I think it's a way some businesses just do business and the market has not issued a correction to that. Maybe it should?
He is obviously a liar, a conman and morally suspect. But he has mastered the art of lying in a way that people want to believe. So much so that he can separate fools from their money to the tune of billions.
When you can do that, every economic institution on the planet wants a piece. It's a firehouse of ill gotten cash, and those supporting his staggering rise to power are there to grab a bit of filthy lucre for themselves. It's a wealth transfer than comes along maybe only a few times in a generation.
Everyone knows he's a complete fraud even as they enable him to pull off all these stunts.
For such people, lying comes as easy as breathing. No wonder they do it all the time.
https://github.com/aspenmayer/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-m...
https://github.com/aspenmayer/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-m...
Oh well… the article probably hasn't anything useful or important to say anyway. Time to move on.
It is now on sketchy Russian forge due to DMCA takedowns
These things have a way of working themselves out. But look at almost all IPOs and the next 12 months the stock is down 50+% so I'd rather wait. And honestly when I buy, it's to hold 10+ years, not make a quick buck and it's because I believe in the value. You can believe in SpaceX but also still believe the market and the dynamics of IPOs is almost criminal for retail investors.
It's almost as bad as crypto token sales tbh.
The business fundamentals are rarely sound for modern IPOs, especially anything Elon adjacent. His companies are just as bad as crypto token sales in terms of their hype. Heck, some of the stock price appreciation of Tesla _was_ driven by their ownership of crypto for a year or two.
It really is weird market from outside. Like millions of cards waiting to be encapsulated in plastic with tiny label on them naming a number. Depending on number the value can go up multiple times. Each of these paid at least something like 20 dollars...
https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/
And his data shows that IPOs for the most part perform about as well as their respective market. That is large multi-billion dollar IPOs perform about as well as the broad market, and smaller IPOs (which constitute the vast majority of IPOs) perform about as well as other small-cap companies.
In other words, investing in IPOs doesn't give much of an advantage or disadvantage compared to investing in other similarly sized companies.
What's true is that most stocks, including IPOs, don't do well in the long run. The half-life of a publicly traded company is something like 10 years.
I was very surprised to read this and from a quick Google search, what you imply ("don't do well in the long run") is not supported by that "half-life" statistic.
"We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. [...] While liquidation is often responsible for firm deaths, a much more common cause of death relates to the disappearance of companies through mergers and acquisitions. Thus, in our definition, firms may ‘die’ through a variety of processes: they may split, merge or liquidate as economic and technological conditions change."
"Is the company market cap low? Do they have a decent product? Is it plausible they'll 10x? Yes -> Buy some amount I can afford loosing"
For example, Tesla IPO'd at $5B cap, it was perfectly plausible to believe they'd be worth $50B some day. Shopify IPO'd at $1.3B, Square at $3B, 10x was perfectly believable. Uber IPO'd at $75B, I did not believe they'd be worth $750B any time soon, or ever. Do I believe SpaceX will be worth 20T in like 10 years? Lol. Fmao even.
Today's IPOs at $1T+ means that private money figured this out and cut the retail public out, IPOs seems to be a really terrible deal these days.
Elon musk is the Elondyssey to himself.
So I wouldn't really give too many points to "the general public" for this one.
And now they report that investors, many of whom are their customers, are suffering...
2.31% spread over treasuries is heading for junk bond status?
We'll see what ratings agencies think of the health of the company.
Their S-1 projects $28 trillion TAM, with 93% of that attributed to AI, ~6% to connectivity via Starlink, and only ~1% for space launch capability.
Of their $20 billion CapEx spent in 2025, 60% was spent towards AI data-centers, 20% was spent towards Starlink satellites, and ~20% was spent towards actually building Starship and Falcon 9. That's gone up to nearly 80% towards AI in Q1 2026.
Of course, "AI" makes up only ~20% of their current revenues.
So... this company is priced as an AI startup but it's actually a satellite internet and space launch business.... or is it? Shame to see the coolest thing that Elon did be eaten by the AI monster.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
Market capitalization takes into account the future value of the business, while equity (an accounting concept) only looks at present day cash & liabilities.
When a company gets liquidated, the future growth/value of the business is, pretty obviously, zero, so the "market cap" is irrelevant. What matters is what is left over once all debts are liquidated.
SpaceX's equity at the time of their IPO was $34 Billion (it's in the S1!). You can also see in their S1 that their cash decreases by about $8B a year, so unless things change they should be underwater in about 4 years.
In this case the gap between the value bond market and equity markets assign to spacex is equal to market cap ie a trillion.
If equity markets are right there is a trillion of spare equity buffer ( ie equity in the enterprise value sense not accounting equity) before endangering bonds and the bond people are idiots for marking their bonds down. If bond market is right equity is worthless and equity people are silly to push it to a trillion market cap.
Either way someone is wrong by a trillion.
Here's the key point in the article: A month ago, the bond was priced at +175bps yield above treasuries with similar maturity, now it's priced at +231bps.
The company has plenty of revenue, and if needed can just turn off the r&d tap and become a boring company. Terrible for the shareholders obviously, but the bond holders will be fine.
I mean the bond yield is 6.65% over US Treasury returns of 4.75% so it's not like everyone's running in fear of their imminent collapse either. But they're less confident than they were when Elon company valuations looked immune to gravity.
Yep spacex can afford to have a declining value of equity… its talent who are mostly paid with stock will leave for its competitors - increasing the probability of bankruptcy. Putting the company in a tail spin heading for default.
So how are the bond holders gonna get paid in the event that happens? Oh in bankruptcy court? Lmao.
Raising equity is not a loophole either - ebit and ebitda drive measures of default risk.
Most of you on here should never ever talk about finance. It’s like you learned how to discount a cash flow and have it all figured out lololol