[mattmaroon]

Everybody is upset about the rule change, but to be honest, they would’ve just ended up in the same position a few months later. Elon has kept Tesla’s market cap at 5-10x what any reasonable investor would think it should be for the better part of a decade. It’s not like SpaceX is going to tank in the next 3 months and they’ll be left holding the bag. It’s not like it wasn’t going to end up in every index in a year.

And to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I just don’t think it matters so much.

[ribosometronome]

Moving to have 401ks investing in it when 5% of the stock is publicly available versus 30-40%+ that would have been available on the previous timelines seems like it could have pretty dramatic effects on its price.

[loeg]

The relevant indices (S&P500, Vanguard) buy in proportion to available float -- i.e., its market cap is weighted by 5%. Only Nasdaq 100 ignores float, stupidly, but almost no money, especially 401(k) money, is in that.

[nrmitchi]

This may be true (I'm sure it is, but I haven't verified) but the large majority of people do not know this, which is why hearing "my retirement account is going to be forced to by a bunch of spacex at a $2.5T valuation" makes them.... uneasy.

[mschuster91]

Oh there are ETFs that track Nasdaq 100.

[nradov]

There are ETFs that track pretty much everything you can imagine. How much retirement money is in those?

[keernan]

Musk tried mightily to get S&P to change their 12 month rule to 15 days but they refused. Nasdaq, however, caved to Musk and agreed to change the rules of its Index - from a 12 months wait to 15 days - in exchange for Musk agreeing to list SpaceX on Nasdaq's exchange.

There are ETFs that were issued tied to the Nasdaq 100 which are therefore legally bound to buy SpaceX. But the biggest immorality is the SEC allowing Musk's attempt to manipulate the market by: 1. Setting an IPO price for SpaceX (which absorbed xAi and its money guzzling losses) at unsustainable, incredibly inflated prices; and then 2. Putting incredible pressure on SP500 and other index makers to change their rules to force the purchase of SpaceX at those sky high prices (in an IPO, company gets to set the IPO price).

It's legal. At least in the eyes of the SEC which, of course, is an institution that is controlled by the wealthiest who control the markets, so of course it's legal.

But it is outrageous market manipulation that is fraudulent in its intent to enrich the wealthiest man on earth at the expense of ever wage earner putting her money into Index Funds.

Thank goodness the S&P and CRSP refused to change their rules. Otherwise the shifting of risk from Musk onto the shoulders of every working American would have been complete.

[nradov]

I don't understand your comment. The SEC doesn't control IPO prices. No one was forced to buy $SPCX at the IPO price.

[Retric]

Without rapid purchasing by indexes SpaceX’s stock would likely to tank as ever more people would be able to sell over the first year.

It’s a 24 year old company with a current high flying stock price based on very questionable numbers.

[pclmulqdq]

We all said that about Tesla for years, and a lot of people got burned on the trade. This time may be different, but it also may not be.

[Retric]

Tesla’s numbers looked vastly more reasonable.

“In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue, with its Starlink satellite internet service accounting for $11.39 billion, or 61% of total sales.”

Tesla had higher revenue number in at the start of 2019, when it had a market cap of ~0.06 trillion. Further Tesla was highly volatile in 2021 despite huge earnings growth with some people bank when it fell from 1.2T to 0.34T before recovering.

[rayiner]

I also remember lots of people saying Uber wasn’t a $100B company.

[nullstyle]

With several large bets on the table with starship that have yet to play out.

Remember mars by 2024? I think that was around the time they started accepting deposits on tesla semi.

[saturn8601]

They shipped the Semi though. Yes the situation is bad but its not vaporware. Musk had to scam the markets to survive in late 2017/2018

[shigawire]

The problem is the stock is not valued based on the space part. It's sky-high valuation is based on absurd projected AI revenues.

[Panzer04]

Depends, they've gone to pains to ensure the indexes will buy as share lockups end. It's dodgy no matter how you look at.

The one saving grace is s&p isnt changing anything, and they were by far the biggest index.

[sidibe]

The whole IPO was designed to be like a short squeeze where index funds have to buy soon but there's not enough shares. For the little float that's available they are weighting it significantly more than they should by previous rules. They need to have tens of billions worth of what was 70 billion by next week, and retail investors who got in on the IPO were told by their brokers if they sell early on they will not get to participate in future IPOs.

There were not enough shares actually trading for the index funds to fulfill their requirements that's why the price keeps going up

[HWR_14]

They probably won't be on the S&P for years, because of profitability requirements.

[redox99]

If they can keep google and anthropic deals, they're already profitable.

[stackskipton]

That's huge IF, both of them have 90 day exit clause, and it's not like it's a long-term business.

Those deals are doable because xAI failed and SpaceX has a bunch of spare compute lying around they can rent out. However, SpaceX doesn't make the hardware or software so moat is nonexistent.

If compute capacity increases or AI demand decreases, Google/Anthropic will likely skip SpaceX and just buy their own hardware in their own datacenters or go back to their own datacenters.

[wolvoleo]

Bubbles always blow. Maybe not in 3 months but eventually someone will figure that those trillions can't possibly be made back ever again.

And then the fall down is hard.

[asveikau]

I got a good investment vehicle for you. How would you like to purchase shares in the Brooklyn bridge? You could see returns in the form of tolls.

[mschuster91]

> It’s not like SpaceX is going to tank in the next 3 months and they’ll be left holding the bag.

A stock's value can disappear in a matter of days to a degree it leads to a complete collapse. It has happened before, see Enron or Wirecard.

> It’s not like it wasn’t going to end up in every index in a year.

Sure, but it's still not wise to let unripe stocks into most American and RoW retirement funds. There's a reason why many complex software projects keep some sort of "staging" tree, and the stock markets should do so as well.

[downrightmike]

China enters the chat https://spacenews.com/china-conducts-4-launches-in-3-days-bu...