6 ms·
The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
- 400thecat 4mo agoAn S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
- whateveracct 4mo agoit'll be a small from our pockets individually. but it'll add up to what elon needs. this is the new playbook.
- overfeed 4mo ago> this is the new playbook. Same as the old playbook, just scaled up. Tesla got billions from state subsidies and selling carbon credits.
- ryandvm 4mo agoSame recipe as the Mars colonization. There is absolutely zero chance of a self-sustaining colony on Mars in the next 50 years, but boy will he get rich if we try...
- Zigurd 4mo agoThat whole foolishness will stop when we or the Chinese try to dig a hole in the moon to shield a moon station from radiation. Space is not for humans. Even super fit humans can't tolerate space for more than a few months.
- saltyoldman 4mo agoThis is just eds. Same guy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSLAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSLAQ He's got some kind of beef with Elon and has predicted TSLA stock will crash many times.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoIt is reasonable to predict TSLA stock will, someday, drop to something roughly reflective of the value of the company. It has a long way to fall to reach that point, but, there's no reason to think it won't happen eventually. The market can remain irrational for a long time, but the facts are what they are.
- saltyoldman 4mo agoThis is like ANY company. What company will last forever. Not many.
- SwellJoe 4mo agoNot every company trades at 387 PE on 2%-3% growth. I can't name any that do. F sells an order of magnitude more cars (~$190 billion in revenue), and has a market cap of $62.8 billion vs TSLA market cap of $1.59 trillion. TSLA is ridiculous. Any sane investor would look at those numbers and run as far and as fast as they can.
- othomp 4mo agoSomehow people will read this fact and say it's not overvalued because it hasn't crashed yet.
- system2 4mo agoApple and Microsoft seem to be doing okay after many decades. Edison is 200 years old and is on the stock market. It is about finding the right product that will last. Tesla could be one of them if it can survive the next decade.
- robbomacrae 4mo agoAAPL and MSFT have a P/E an order of magnitude lower than TSLA whilst both having revenue growth % yoy in the teens. They both make over a $100b in PROFIT a year. TSLA's? $4b and shrinking btw. Their highest P/E's since 2005 was under 50. AAPL reached 100 in June 2003 (around the time of the iTunes Store release.. mid iPod era but pre iPhone). Comparing with MSFT and AAPL makes TSLA look even more insane.
- tick_tock_tick 4mo agoThis is just the dude that's famous for getting Tesla wrong constantly? If he's convinced it's going south it's probably an easy 100% gain from the IPO.
- avaer 4mo agoThat's not an argument for. Maybe we don't want to live in a world of thievery, or be thieves ourselves.
- sschueller 4mo agoThe point-to-point travel with starship is the one that urks me the most. It is completely unrealistic and will never happen. They have Zürich, Switzerland as a destination. There is no place in all of Zürich to facility such a thing, you will blow out every window in the city at each launch. Absolutely ridiculous that anyone would take this serious. Also don't get me started on data centers in space idea... When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?
- dogwalker5000 4mo ago> When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract? In all likelihood, neither.
- WildProxy 4mo ago[dead]
- duskwuff 4mo agoAnd even that pales in comparison to their estimate of a $22.7T (T!) market for their AI "enterprise applications". As a point of reference, the GDP of the United States is roughly $30T.
- ryandvm 4mo agoI dunno, data centers in space seems even more outlandish than P2P space travel. The math on the orbital data center idea indicates that these things would need hundreds of thousands of square meters of radiative cooling. Absolutely bonkers that anyone is falling for this shit.
- Zigurd 4mo agoSpace manufacturing is in there too. The international space station is 27 years old. One reason to spend tens of billions of dollars on ISS was the idea that it would be used to run experiments that would make space manufacturing practical. Space manufacturing is a perennial project on ISS. Still no space factories or space products, much less profits. But there's Starlink. What's a telecom provider worth per customer? Value starlink double or triple that, maybe. And that's about it.
- readthenotes1 4mo agoSpaceX a failure at 83% of mass to orbit. Yoikes.
- bdamm 4mo agoThe launch business is impressive relative to the launch industry, but in terms of company capital value, it is a very small part of the company. I'm rooting for SpaceX, but even I can see that there's some extremely dicey work being done to mask the enormous sinkhole of XAi (and Twitter).
- Ekaros 4mo ago83% mass to orbit of a market of what size? The valuation should absolutely reflect the size of market company operates in.
- Zigurd 4mo agoIf Nvidia was buying 80% of their own chips, we would have the same criticism of Nvidia as we have of SpaceX. Nvidia's valuation is rational because they sell to real customers and get real cold hard cash from those customers.
- riv991 4mo agoI liked Matt Levine's take in his latest podcast. You buy an index because you want to own the market. If you want to own the market in 2026 you want to own SpaceX and Anthropic, and probably OpenAI too. That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
- ChadNauseam 4mo ago> That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy. The price at IPO will obviously be influenced by expectations of a future purchase by index funds... as an analogy, if it became public knowledge that next week, 1,000,000 people would all be required to buy gold, the price of gold would go up today, not next week
- andsoitis 4mo agoBy making inclusion near-certain and fast, the rule changes may actually reduce the post-IPO inclusion pop (it gets priced in at IPO) while increasing the IPO price itself and the volatility on rebalance day due to the float constraint.
- 400thecat 4mo agoyes! Michael Munger expressed it beautifully: "anything that is going to happen has already happened"
- simonjgreen 4mo agoThis IPO marks and inflection point where a fund that tracks whole market value shifts in definition, because of the forced rush value nature of the rule changes. If the fast entry rule changes hadn’t happened I would agree with you entirely.
- chii 4mo agoThe rule change where nasdaq adds a weighting factor to spacex's float is what causes distortions - it artificially increases the size of spacex's cap weight without actually having more shares. Fortunately, this only affects indices that follow nasdaq, and from what i know, no other index is following this. That means it's "safe" to purchase a globally diversified, cap weighted index fund (safe as in the float isn't manipulated). People talk of the demise of passive investing due to this, but most of the commentary fail to mention it's a specific, nasdaq thing and not a general change.
- khazhoux 4mo agoHow can a public sale ever be a theft?
- avaer 4mo agoMaybe you didn't know this but: - many funds owned by the public will buy this, so people will be indirectly invested and could lose money - if this affects the economy, it will affect everyone
- andsoitis 4mo agoAll investments in equities carry risk of losing money. You also have a choice how much, if any, you are in the stock market and which stocks. As the market conditions change or the economy changes, it is your responsibility to manage your own investments.
- l23k4 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mordae 4mo agoMost have their pension automatically track index. Nasdaq changes rules so that the pension funds are forced to buy stock while very volatile and likely overpriced.
- l23k4 4mo agoThose poor pension funds, unable to make their own decisions. Forced to keep all of their money in $NDX forever. It must be terrible to be so utterly powerless.
- Pooge 4mo agoPension funds use (you guessed it) index funds like your average passive investor. Sure we can hate pension funds but fuck the management of those indexes.
- henry2023 4mo agoIt's hard to know if SpaceX will flop in a week or in a decade but what I'm pretty confident on is a lot of retail capital allocated in Tesla will be redistributed to SpaceX. So my trade on IPO day will be long $X SpaceX, short $X Tesla. Wait 1 month. Wish me luck.
- CactusBlue 4mo agoHow do you know that this isn't already priced by quant firms?
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoMore like: why would you think it's not already priced in. Answer: I'm super special!
- henry2023 4mo agoI'm not special, this is a pretty basic idea so there's no edge here but that doesn't mean there's no trade. Also, you'd be surprised at how simple the most profitable Quant strategies are.
- henry2023 4mo agoEven if it's expected most can't do the trade because we're Pre-IPO. Also, realized move always carries more value than expected because of uncertainty.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoMusk's plan is to merge Tesla and SpaceX into one company.
- amai 4mo agoNew name: Stark Industries?
- 4mo ago
- michaelt 4mo agoThe other stuff is bad, but surely "insiders who will pocket millions" is normal for an IPO?
- UncleMeat 4mo agoThey will pocket millions at an inflated stock price because index funds will be forced to compete at an inflated price with low availability in order to meet their institutional obligations because of the changing rules by the indices themselves.
- l23k4 4mo ago[flagged]
- Nykon 4mo agoI doubt your sentiment. Index funds are for people who don't want to know about the details and put the work in. They go by general recommendations. Now the underlying rules got changed, undeniably in favor and through pressure of few individuals. Where I come from, we call that a rug pull
- l23k4 4mo ago[flagged]
- bogdan 4mo agoHow does one simply reject it? You make it sound oh so easy. As if the taxman is a made up idea.
- l23k4 4mo agoWhat are you even trying to say? Where does the taxman enter into this?
- gorgoiler 4mo agoWhy do index funds follow the exact companies in the index itself? Is it simply a branding thing? I’m buying into S&P500 because S&P500 is a highly recognized term used to mean “The US Economy”? I feel that what this article is telling me is that passive funds are becoming active funds by way of manipulating the index itself. Kind of like if you’re passively invested in Brazil winning the World Cup but you can’t adjust the team or tactics, so instead you move the goal posts to where they’re about to kick the ball? Pension funds seem more selective on the other hand. It’s always been the case that you can adjust your palette based on personal preference eg green energy, no weapons, tech stocks, etc.
- stuxnet79 4mo ago> Why do index funds follow the exact companies in the index itself? The fund itself is a financial product with a fee attached. Regardless of an index's perceived "quality" funds will always be created as long as there is investor demand. In recent years there has been an explosion of exotic "thematic" ETFs with exaggerated returns & comparatively higher fees. These tend not to attract the most sophisticated crowd. You can be sure they won't perform well into the long term. > Is it simply a branding thing? I’m buying into S&P500 because S&P500 is a highly recognized term used to mean “The US Economy”? Absolutely, it is 100% branding. For better or for worse S&P500 is the barometer of US economic health. There's every incentive to manipulate it to score political points.
- l23k4 4mo ago>I feel that what this article is telling me is that passive funds are becoming active funds by way of manipulating the index itself. It's wrong. They're undoing a previous manipulation and making the index more accurately reflect the market.
- orwin 4mo agoExplain to me how adding weights to the float is undoing a previous manipulation and not manipulating the numbers.
- 4mo ago
- prolly97 4mo agoSo this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something. They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana_skeptic_known_twitter_tesla_bear_deletes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana... Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive. They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.
- dozerly 4mo agoTo be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoOr maybe that's just what value is, what someone else would pay for something.
- zygology 4mo agoand it turns out people can be convinced to overpay for hot air and "futurism" does that make it truly valuable?
- prolly97 4mo agoWhen I followed TeslaQ, the valuation was around 60b. Today Tesla has 39b in accumulated retained earning (pr latest 10k, not q). If the thesis was that Tesla would be unable to create a system that would churn out cars that could be sold at scale with an economic surplus, then we have to reject it.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- 4mo ago
- itskokeh 4mo agoFalcon 9 proved SpaceX can deliver on hard engineering promises. Why isn't that track record factored into the business case here? Is the argument that SpaceX the business fails, or just that the IPO price is disconnected from reality? How much of the index fund manipulation concern applies to any mega-cap IPO, vs. something unique to SpaceX?
- rich_sasha 4mo ago> Falcon 9 proved SpaceX can deliver on hard engineering promises. Why isn't that track record factored into the business case here? Toyota, NASA, many people have done it many times. They have also failed many times. Failure happens, even after successes. Starship has come a long way but it can still fail on so many ways. They may simply not progress. The rockets may prove too expensive to reuse, or not reliable. The market might not be there. But the valuation is as if they have already achieved it and will definitely make a fortune out of it. > How much of the index fund manipulation concern applies to any mega-cap IPO, vs. something unique to SpaceX? Fair question. Index inclusion typically happens when stocks have reached some equilibrium, in particular they have been trading for a while and have a fair price. Also they need a substantial amount of shares trading in public, not held by insiders. SpaceX will be neither. The concern is that the IPO price is hugely inflated (which is possible to rig but only short term) inflating its market cap and thus it's weight in the index. Then all these index funds will be forced to fight over the small amount of shares inflating the price further. This happens in micro scale when normal stocks enter indices, but nowhere near to this extent, and it's typically for a established, well priced securities.
- itskokeh 4mo agoThanks. This clarifies a lot
- throwfaraway135 4mo agoThere is no good financial advice which works for everyone[1]. A lot of people may make enormous money on the short term and bail out before the crash. Or it may be exact opposite. [1] Psychology of money
- mamonster 4mo agoMy only real issue with SpaceX is that Elon has mastered the art of hiding real jewels (in this case the Starlink business) behind a whole pile of shit, and then forcing you buy the whole thing as a package. Having X and Grok be bundled with SpaceX (muh datacenters in space) is like SolarCity on steroids. With regards to the index discussion, my over/under on an ETF that tracks the index minus SpaceX is like two months post IPO.
- Zigurd 4mo agoReal jewels aren't trying to grow into a shrinking TAM that's being whittled away by the expansion of terrestrial wireless farther into the not yet served, but rich enough to be served countryside in places where that demographic exists.
- mamonster 4mo ago>Real jewels aren't trying to grow into a shrinking TAM Why do you think TAM is shrinking? It's pretty clear, to me at least, that Starlink is basically one of a kind military contractor that has a freeway to both raise prices and expand offerings. Civilian market sure, but it's pretty clear the milltech path is going to be a money printer for satellites and it looks like you have a clear moat (i.e European sattelite companies won't be able to bid on those contracts).
- orwin 4mo agoNo. The future pedo-island in Albania, ex-protected island where the Trump family promised to only develop 8% of it before developing everything, skirting every environmental rules, every foreign investment rules to destroy what was a natural park where at most you could anchor next to is the theft of the century. This is just american capitalism in america.
- defrost 4mo ago> before developing everything Have they cleared all the landmines and UXBs already?!? That was fast. * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/trump-family-kushner-undeveloped-island-mediterranean-sazan-albania https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/24/trump-family-k...
- sbayg 4mo agoOnly the rich own stocks. Most Americans have either no assets or debt.
- orev 4mo agoThis is about how 401ks and pensions are going to be forced to buy into (or very close to) the IPO. That affects “most Americans” whether they want to participate or not.
- pseudosavant 4mo agoThis line seems to sum up the Musk Inc. situation perfectly: > Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong. > Someday, someone, somewhere will make a lot of money shorting Tesla or SpaceX. But it’s unlikely to be you. > For now, Tesla remains better understood as a religion than a financial investment, and we can now add SpaceX to that category.
- FeloniousHam 4mo agoI've never understood Tesla's valuation as greater than the entire automotive industry combined. But as a 95% FSD user, I'm living (and loving) the Full Self-Driving lie.
- gaws 4mo agoHow do we minimize our exposure to this IPO?