I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
Yeah this is pretty shady. The S&P 500 in particular has fairly strict criteria (e.g. 4 consecutive quarters of profitability) and those criteria exist for a reason. They made me more comfortable buying the S&P 500 knowing I'm not buying pre-revenue companies. This is a bad precedent to set just to please Elon.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but has SpaceX not been profitable for the last 4 quarters? I understand they're investing a lot into R&D for Starship but I was under the impression they've been making a killing on Starlink.
Starlink itself is profitable but the insane valuation they're trying to get for the IPO is based on an assumed continued massive growth of users - and even then I don't think Starlink by itself makes SpaceX a trillion dollar company.
If Musk personally wasn't completely toxic worldwide, and if there wasn't all the other new space companies noticing the Egg of Columbus* that is cheap rockets and the potential for comm sat constellations that launch prices enable, I could believe 100e6 people would buy a $50/month service. A common rating for valuation is profit over 20 years, that revenue (not profit, IDK the margin) would be $1.2T.
Many seem to also be doing this with androids around the time he started talking about them, hence how we can buy them and put them to work even though Optimus still hasn't launched yet.
Past performance as a company is like 20% of the concern here.
The concern is ~80% that a brand new stock enters the market & immediately has to be bought by everyone. The market has no time to adjust & settle.
This is fleecing everyone & it's entirely unclear under what madness this would ever have been considered.
There's so many irregularities and abnormalities being considered here, and all of them seem like pretty straightforward safeguards. It feels like nothing short of a conspiracy that so many norms would be pushed aside to consider listing spacex so quickly in so many indexes. "The proposal could also remove the minimum Investable Weight Factor requirement for megacap companies." For fuck sake! https://x.com/Benzinga/status/2050244492335206911
We don't know. There is reporting that they have positive EBITDA, but that's not the same as profitable. Basically it would completely ignore launch costs.
They also aren't just the rocket and satellite company any more, but include Twitter and xAI, both of which would contribute heavy losses.
Absolutely, that's the main reason there's been a push for that for decades. It's a giant pile of poor people's money that rich people can't easily skim from, and they'd really, really like to. Once it's "in the market" they gain all kinds of options for turning some of that money into their money, some immediately, some with tweaks to laws or policy.
That’s literally not how it works.
You buy a share of stock and participate in their gains.
For example, I owned a bunch of Tesla stock since around 2017.
Now I have a ton in the stock as well as a new house and a model s plaid thanks to their greatness.
Did the same with Apple, that is my retirement and travel fund. it ain’t hard.
> You buy a share of stock and participate in their gains
That is "literally not how it works", as you missed "... and losses".
Since dividends aren't really a thing any more and gains are ~100% from stock prices increasing, existing holders of securities would really like a bunch more money to come shopping and drive that price up. Very helpful if you want to make sure a period where "... and losses" seems like a silly thing to be worried about keeps going for a while longer.
Bunch of folks out there would love to be taking management fees on funds that're required by law to receive 10ish% of every middle-class-and-under working American's paycheck (some at the higher end of the pay scale pay less than that, because of the cutoff, and of course anyone rich enough not to have wage income pays no FICA at all).
Others would like to game the system to make Social Security a huge, deep-pocketed buyer for their scams. This is for when "... and losses" starts really biting people.
Not to mention that they always harp on it being supposedly unsustainable and insolvent, while deliberately not mentioning that it is solely because the social security is the most regressive tax, where the more you earn the lower your rate.
If it was a flat tax where everyone paid the same percentage of instead of a regressive tax where only working people pay the rate, then social security would be well funded.
Obviously they don’t want to pay the same tax rate as working people, so theyd rather get rid of social security instead.
This is not correct. For people who earn less than the SS wage cap ($184.5k in 2026), Social Security is a progressive tax due to the bend points in the benefit formula. You explicitly get less benefit for each additional dollar you pay in tax.
But every dollar of income earned over the SS wage cap reduces effective tax rate. The more you earn, the less the effective Social Security tax rate is for you. At Elon Musk levels, it rounds down to zero. Therefore, there would be no motivation for super rich people to get rid of social security.
The only material reduction in tax rate would be for those relying on annual earned income of a few hundred thousand dollars or less (i.e. the bottom 95% of income earners).
That's what I'm saying, they pretend that the only way to fix SS is to cut services/replace it, because actually fixing it without cuts would involve removing the lobbyhole/cap that makes their rate close to zero.
Way better returns when you take charge of your investments rather than bitching about the government, anyone can be a millionaire with minimal effort, just being smart.
I learned just how bad of a deal Social Security is when an employer (a bootstrapped startup) offered a predatory 401k plan. It was free for my employer to setup but the employees were stuck with extremely high fees. It was so bad that John Oliver made an episode[0] about it!
Yet, even for the worst 401K plan in America, the projected retirement returns were 1600% of the Social Security returns. Even America's worst 401K would be better for the average consumer than the federal debacle
Uncle Sam should sunset SSI and allow citizens to select from and move freely between a number of accredited funds.
Are you aware that SSI is an insurance (or lifetime annuity) not an investment?
SSI covers disability, and supplements income no matter what happens. Disability? You're covered. Live to 105? You're covered. Market dips 50% in a period you have a lot of expenses? Your benefits are unaffected.
Tax advantaged 401k is already the vehicle of choice for retirement funds.
Insurance is an effective tool for managing unlikely risks -- few people will be rendered unable to work early in life, so with a large pool we can cover these cases with only a small per-person contribution. What makes SSI ineffective is that it is also liable for a broad eventuality: most everyone will age.
When any self-interested person plans for a far-off expense, they will save up principle, and manage it to yield interest as well. But the government isn't looking out for your interest; instead of investing or growing funds on behalf of the people, the congress and administrators spent down the SSI nest egg leaving no principle to manage. Today it makes payments only as money comes in.
SSI is run worse than Enron. Citizens should be allowed to invest their own earnings elsewhere.
I like this comment because it seems well thought outA couple of points:
> When any self-interested person plans for a far-off expense, they will save up principle, and manage it to yield interest as well.
The reason the current system came about is that people were unable or unwilling to save. Half the money that goes into SS comes from your employer, a hidden benefit to most. You think you're gonna get that money in returned wages? Do you think that people are MORE likely to save today than they were in the early 30's? My parents outlived their nest egg. Even SS isn't completely keeping up. How many people dying on the streets are you willing to tolerate. This isn't theory, this isn't being dramatic, this is what is starting to happen today with medical expenses. It's largely hidden, but it happens NOW. We need more social insurance, not less.
> ..instead of investing or growing funds on behalf of the people, the congress and administrators spent down the SSI nest egg leaving no principle to manage. Today it makes payments only as money comes in.
It is not strictly the case that SS doesn't invest, even today. It just chooses low risk investments. Copy pasta - (Social Security does not invest in private stocks or bonds because it operates on a pay-as-you-go system designed for security, not high returns, and is restricted by law to investing only in special-issue U.S. Treasury bonds. The system acts as insurance against poverty, requiring a guaranteed, non-volatile asset base to pay promised benefits.The combined Social Security trust funds have approximately $2.56 trillion invested entirely in special-issue U.S. Treasury securities. )
Fundamentally, if you have a problem with the way the government manages the money, fix the management, don't blow up the system. We've been blowing up the system for decades, doesn't seem to be helping at all.
it doesn't cover you getting disabled so you can't work anymore at the age of 30 after working 8 years.
1600% higher return is great when you work from yours 20s to your 50s/60s and can essentially self insure yourself at that point with it, but as the person you are responding to you is (I believe) trying to say, that's not everyone.
Fair, but given that we're talking about a hypothetical government program, "index-based retirement fund" doesn't imply you're the only one contributing to said fund.
> Uncle Sam should sunset SSI and allow citizens to select from and move freely between a number of accredited funds.
But how does the government actually do that? This feels like one of those ideas that sounds OK right up until the point where you try to map out an actual plan with more detail beyond the word "sunset".
If current Social Security taxes fund current payouts, how do you redirect those taxes anywhere without cutting off current Social Security recipients who spent their entire lives paying into the system? Even those still working have spent some portion of their career paying Social Security tax. Do they get a lump sum payout they can invest (from where?), a limited annuity in retirement (paid for by who?), or is that just money down the drain?
I'm not even necessarily opposed to the idea of changing Social Security into something else, but I'd love for any proposal for doing so to come with something that looks even remotely like an actual plan.
I am a non billionaire and I would prefer Social Security to go away.
Mathematically, there is no alternative to the purchasing power of my Social Security benefits being reduced, simply due to the changes in the population age histogram.
It has to become more and more of a wealth transfer from the working to non working, which means my kids will benefit less and less from their work.
Who knows, I mean it would certainly make it easier for them to turn the entire population into their bag holders. Don't even have to hype the company any more or spin up a bunch of bullshit about space.
The reason we have social security like it is is twofold: 1) current retirees are paid directly from our contributions. There is no pot of money to be invested and 2) we want to be able to guarantee a defined benefit that is not below a certain number. You can't do that with the market.
Between the pyramid scheme nature of social security, the high inflation potential of the USD, and the ability for politicians to leverage social security for short term approval boosts
You definitely can't do it with the government either...