The other day I was thinking: "if Musk disappears tomorrow would the valuation still be in the same ballpark?". I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts. The coming IPOs and numbers are completely detached from reality and we are all in for a crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Not just forcing it into. Forcing the funds to fight for it betting the stock rice higher and higher in a runaway style - the effect created by limited float and high valuation as the funds tracking indexes would try to get the amount reflecting the proportion of the valuation of the company vs. the whole tracked index valuation, and with such huge valuation the limited float leads to the price rise (similar to the short squeeze) and the higher the price on the float the higher the valuation, rinse and repeat...
There are many dubious companies in the S&P500. I don’t see the point in getting selectively heated about this one when everyone seems to be okay with the others.
That’s the way indexes roll. I don’t invest in indexes for this reason.
There is a separate structural issue with indexes that is being ignored here. Indexes were never really designed to accommodate companies going public so late with high revenue growth. A couple decades ago companies went public when they were so small that they could grow into the index. This reflects changes in the nature and structure of the capital markets, these new IPOs are just a manifestation of this reality.
I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance. If you’re a long-term investor, this would just be a temporary blip. On the other hand, if this is thr opposite of a dud, you’ll get the benefit of that.
If one wants to gamble on the grift, that is what options are for. Otherwise, we might as well start adding NFTs to the indexes if fundamentals do not matter. Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/ ("XMAG, the first ETF designed to provide investors with exposure to the S&P 500, excluding the “Magnificent 7” (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla). XMAG offers a unique opportunity for investors to access the broader market while reducing concentration risk in these dominant tech stocks.")
In 2025 VOO returned 17.82% vs VOOG returned 22.11%. XMAG’s trailing 1-year return through late 2025 was around 9–15% depending on the measurement date, as the Mag 7 dragged badly in early 2025.
VOOG has returned 18.28%/yr over 10 years vs 15.63%/yr for VOO, a meaningful gap driven almost entirely by Mag 7 dominance. XMAG has no 10-year track record.
Patrick is my youtube finance news GOAT. Hilarious and deeply detailed videos on some of the craziest shit going on in finance. If you're interested in the nitty gritty details of portfolio management, he also has a bunch of lectures at the beginning of his channel pre-"content creator"-era that are like sitting in a university classroom. Very good stuff.
Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of the historical stock market and if this order of magnitude of bullshit valuation has ever occurred before.
Holy crap is that an amusing/depressing video. Assuming the financial shenanigans outlined in it are even partially accurate, how the heck is this getting allowed?
When it comes to dealing with the abuse of power by those who hold power, the question is not "who's allowing them to do this?", it's "who's going to stop them?".
I want to buy options against QQQ so badly -- but Tesla has traded at a crazy multiple of revenue/profits for a very long time, so I'm wondering if Elon/AI hype will keep these stocks high longer than I want to pay the risk premium for (options).
The SpaceX IPO has a tiny 5% float and only a $75 billion raise target. There are enough morons in the world that they will compete to buy and push the valuation up. It's all a stupid financial trick to make Elon a paper trillionaire.
Tesla is a meme stock like GameStop, but for a good fraction of America, so the market cap can be much larger. As long as TSLA owners don't care about the stock defying gravity, it will continue to do so.
> I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half
On the contrary, I think it certainly can. In the sense that productivity per person can be doubled. You could fire half your workforce and do nearly the same output.
Trouble is, everyone who does that will get outcompeted by everyone who didn't fore their workforce, and instead doubled their output.
We've seen it before with factories and computerization.
The fact that Tesla's stock price is so evidently detached from the performance of the company itself makes me wonder whether or not a public SpaceX will cause those investors who are just trying to ride the Musk train to exit Tesla stock and dump everything they can into SpaceX instead.
Same here. I’ve had an IRA and 401k since I was 21 and I’m 59 now (but still feel as smart as a 21 year old). I doubt I’ll see my lifetime of investment go up in smoke, just a big hill: up super high for a few years and then back to 2024 levels by 2030.
Personally I think the valuation is detached from the company itself. In theory Tesla's valuation is too high, but it doesn't seem to be coming down any time soon. Plus there seems to be ways to manipulate stock prices when you control such a highly valued company, to the extent that the stock price reflects actions taken in the stock market more than the underlying assets and balance sheets.
The original “revenue thesis” was that SpaceX, with landing orbital rocket boosters, can undercut all competitors and essentially have a monopoly on payload-to-orbit, and that their lower prices would massive increase the market.
Seems a fine business.
But then a couple years ago they say “actually with this brand new technological edge we can spin up a monopoly on an entirely NEW industry, Space Internet” and within a short timeframe they’ve got billions in revenue off this entirely new service.
It’s hard to predict the future but if Starlink is the last “new space industry” that spacex has borderline-exclusive access to, I’ll be shocked.
The valuation is speculative, yes, but they have such an incredible cost advantage in a nascent space that id be hard pressed to bet against them.
It’s reminiscent of everyone claiming Uber could never succeed, citing the size of the existing taxi market. TAM can change radically when costs move down orders of magnitude, in ways that are hard to predict.
I think this comes down to a disagreement about what "long term" means. In finance, I would suggest a _lower_ bound on long term is 10 years. More comfortably, I'd suggest something like 20-30 years. This is long enough to ride out most depressions, and it is still fits within a persons working life-time. It also roughly matches the scale at which people should be planning for retirement and long-term care (imagine if you started your retirement planning just 10 years from retirement, it would be very difficult). So I think neither BTC's not TSLA's hype has reached long-term yet. They have been around long enough to meet some of these timelines, but the excessive hype really hasn't been so long -- maybe 5 years or so.
Can we stop just repeating quotes like those over and over. If you have thoughts, please articulate them, its pretty frustrating to see the same exact quotes repeated over and over whenever there is a submission stock related
The irrational exuberance around Tesla was at least somewhat grounded in reality. There were some possible future(s) where it was really going to take off and completely redefine the auto industry. Then of course things went really off the rails with the Cybertruck, pivot to robotics, and just seemingly giving up on their existing line of business to go chasing whatever bong fueled dream Musk is having this quarter.
SpaceX is on a whole new level of bullshit. I think all these guys know how to do is double down. If the hype isn't working, its not stupid and big enough, so you start talking about transhumanism and singularity and other BS in your SEC filings.
That's going to be interesting to see if others follow this as an anchor or buy more into the hype. Regardless it's still a large multiple of earnings...
The risk here is severely overblown. Low earth orbit is self-cleaning with atmospheric drag. There’s comparatively little in MEO and even in a catastrophic Kessler syndrome scenario it’s still safe to transit through. Polluting higher orbits is so far beyond our current capabilities that it’s not even worth discussing.
Low earth orbit includes orbits that take from hours to centuries to decay, depends a lot on altitude/apogee/perigee. Starlink for multiple reasons places satellites in the range where it takes ~5 years to decay, thankfully. Kessler syndrome is real though, and satellites do collide or break apart in LEO.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone downplay Kessler syndrome so matter-of-factly. Has anti-doomerism spread to nearly every topic, or is Kessler syndrome really something whose severity has been massively overstated? Opportunity to shift my priors I suppose.
Kessler syndrome is way overstated. One way to tell is talk about it closing off space. That can't happen, it is possible to cross debris bands with low danger.
People also don't talk about different orbits. We can use higher low earth orbits if lower orbits are blocked.
Also, it is possible to clean up debris. The low cost launch means lower cost cleanup. My understanding is that big objects are most dangerous cause they would cause a lot of debris.
I keep seeing this comment on all these spacex posts, can someone ELI5 to me why the pension funds are going to be forced to buy this? (do they not have free will on what they buy?)
SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed. Nasdaq changed its index rules so that instead of having to wait months to a year, SpaceX can enter an index after 15 trading days.
Index funds track an index mechanically. If you run an S&P 500 fund, you have to mirror the S&P 500. If a company gets added to the index, every fund tracking the index must buy it to match the index -- there is no discretion. Pension funds hold a lot of index funds.
So the causal chain is that pension funds track indexes, indexes have to buy the companies in the index, SpaceX got a fast path to the indexes. SpaceX will launch and pension funds will buy the stock, presumably propping up the stock price.
It would take a lot for pension funds to undo this and would be the opposite of index investing.
And to try and expand on why an index would include a waiting period in it's rules, my limited understanding is it's to give the public markets time to follow the company and review several quarters of financial results to stabilize the valuation in relation to those results before getting included in the index.
By bypassing the rules this way they are making people doubt the security of index funds, which would damage the market just by association. Anyone who cared about the stability of these instruments would categorically deny such a request. It seems to say a lot about the market makers in general that this is being allowed.
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
A lot of people in the US only have a 401k which is their pension for this discussion (there are very important differences, but for this discussion we can ignore them). In their 401k an index fund is almost always your best investment, so you should be concerned with anything that makes an index fund a worse investment since it harms you.
Pensions have strong and weird investment rules, and you have no control over what they do other than law. This makes them generally a worse investment (but if you live longer than average they are great anyway) so a 401k is better for most.
Pensions buy big indexes in part because of the exact policies that were reversed to let SpaceX in; the behavior is not an immutable law of nature.
OTOH, the changes may expose them to SpaceX before they could reasonably rebalance their holdings, even if they were to stop buying the affected indexes immediately.
A lot of them have rules forcing them to have some amount of exposure to indexes of a market, or all entries in a market.
There are MAJOR rule changes made to allow them to do this (90 day wait-time reduced to 5 days, financial stability requirements lowered or removed), which is why automated rules like that were created ("oh, if they make it to X, they were already vetted for Y, Z").
A lot of people are throwing a lot of trust and reputation on the bonfire to make this happen.
So I don't fundamentally care if SpaceX is overvalued or not. Like, that's on you for whatever you want to invest in or not.
What I object to is all the rule changes by NASDAQ to essentially fix the IPO so massive pension funds and index funds are forced to invest in it. There have been multiple submissions about this but in short small floats are normally prohibited for index inclusion (not anymore), the trading days required for price discovery have been dropped to almost zero, the voting share structure would be an issue, the insider lockouts have been fixed and on it goes.
There should be extra scrutiny for a trillion dollar company.
SpaceX does have the Falcon 9, which is the completely dominant launch platform and first-stage reusability gives it an almost unbeatable advantage. Starlink has a lot of potential if satellite handsets can get small and cheap enough to compete with 5G effectively. Obital data centers are bullshit. Starship is going to be a significant drain on finances and the program as a whole faces significant headwinds.
The big problem is xAI. It's a significant drain on SpaceX (costing allegedly $1B+/month). SpaceX would be a better company without it. But it's only there to rescue Elon from his disastrous Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from Elon's first bailout (of himself).
There's almost no point in trying to figure out what a valuation should be because in many cases, nobody cares. Tesla is the posterchild for that.
Ultimately it was inevitable that as passive investing got more and more popular, people would seek to game it. Not that I'm happy about it, but if this works, it is probably just the beginning of sneaky ways being found to trick passive money into taking on way more risk than it intended to. And of course passive investors are passive, so they may not even notice, and probably won't fight back until the inevitable crash.
I think there's going to be blowback from this because this is "every other horse can only use three of their legs" levels of fixing.
I looked into the how the rule-changing works. NASDAQ is what's called a Self-Regulating Organization ("SRO") in the legislation so it has a lot of power. Were it a government agency, it would be more difficult. Technically, the SEC has to approve all rule changes by SROs but in this administration in particular, that's just going to be a rubber stamp. By the way here's a speech the head of the SEC previously gave about deregulation of capital markets [1].
I was also curious if Loper Bright had changed anything here but it appears not. The sstatuory language here is clear rather than intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous.
So the funds can technically challenge any such rules. They have standing. But the bar is difficult and I don't see it happening.
But if this goes badly, what I think you'll see is changes in governance by pension funds that'll be reflected by Vanguard and Blackrock, which is "index-like" funds that have stricter governance with rules closer to what was the case before these rule changes were rammed through. I could be wrong. I hope I'm not.
OG SpaceX is growing at 7% YoY. That is not a business that commands a 150x revenue multiple. xAI is arguably shrinking. StarLink has a bunch of heavy lifting to do and unless it keeps growing 40% YoY for 10 years, law of large numbers be damned.
The other day I was thinking: "if Musk disappears tomorrow would the valuation still be in the same ballpark?". I don't think so at all. In this context, it feels like even 150 Billions would be a big stretch considering revenue and forecasts. The coming IPOs and numbers are completely detached from reality and we are all in for a crash that will make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
IMHO, still too much. Someone posted this link [1] recently.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
Additional concern is the push to get it added to indices immediately. Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
>Forcing it into our retirement funds, 401ks and IRAs.
Not just forcing it into. Forcing the funds to fight for it betting the stock rice higher and higher in a runaway style - the effect created by limited float and high valuation as the funds tracking indexes would try to get the amount reflecting the proportion of the valuation of the company vs. the whole tracked index valuation, and with such huge valuation the limited float leads to the price rise (similar to the short squeeze) and the higher the price on the float the higher the valuation, rinse and repeat...
The best you can do is avoid the exposure with changes to your portfolio composition while everyone else gets grifted. It's regrettable.
There are many dubious companies in the S&P500. I don’t see the point in getting selectively heated about this one when everyone seems to be okay with the others.
That’s the way indexes roll. I don’t invest in indexes for this reason.
There is a separate structural issue with indexes that is being ignored here. Indexes were never really designed to accommodate companies going public so late with high revenue growth. A couple decades ago companies went public when they were so small that they could grow into the index. This reflects changes in the nature and structure of the capital markets, these new IPOs are just a manifestation of this reality.
I think this is poor advice. Its share of the index will be relatively small and if it is indeed a dud, the index will organically rebalance. If you’re a long-term investor, this would just be a temporary blip. On the other hand, if this is thr opposite of a dud, you’ll get the benefit of that.
Nothing wrong with finding a low-cost large cap ETF that matches your investing preferences.
If one wants to gamble on the grift, that is what options are for. Otherwise, we might as well start adding NFTs to the indexes if fundamentals do not matter. Luck for some, risk management for others. Regardless, informed consent is important imho. Relevant precedence is ETFs that exclude Big Tech.
https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/ ("XMAG, the first ETF designed to provide investors with exposure to the S&P 500, excluding the “Magnificent 7” (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla). XMAG offers a unique opportunity for investors to access the broader market while reducing concentration risk in these dominant tech stocks.")
https://www.aboutschwab.com/mss/story/how-investing-and-gamb... ("Investing and gambling can both be fun. But they are not the same.")
(none of this is investing advice, educational purposes only)
In 2025 VOO returned 17.82% vs VOOG returned 22.11%. XMAG’s trailing 1-year return through late 2025 was around 9–15% depending on the measurement date, as the Mag 7 dragged badly in early 2025.
VOOG has returned 18.28%/yr over 10 years vs 15.63%/yr for VOO, a meaningful gap driven almost entirely by Mag 7 dominance. XMAG has no 10-year track record.
Patrick is my youtube finance news GOAT. Hilarious and deeply detailed videos on some of the craziest shit going on in finance. If you're interested in the nitty gritty details of portfolio management, he also has a bunch of lectures at the beginning of his channel pre-"content creator"-era that are like sitting in a university classroom. Very good stuff.
Best comment below: (15k likes)
>> In space no one can hear you scam
I knew it was going to be Patrick Boyle before I even clicked.
It was either that or Casual Finance.
300B given its revenues would be a huge stretch. 780B is ridiculous. 1.5T is science fiction.
Have you seen teslas EPS?
Unfortunately I have very little knowledge of the historical stock market and if this order of magnitude of bullshit valuation has ever occurred before.
Holy crap is that an amusing/depressing video. Assuming the financial shenanigans outlined in it are even partially accurate, how the heck is this getting allowed?
It's allowed because the people in charge are making a ton of money and the people who aren't have been convinced that regulating the market is bad.
> how the heck is this getting allowed
When it comes to dealing with the abuse of power by those who hold power, the question is not "who's allowing them to do this?", it's "who's going to stop them?".
I want to buy options against QQQ so badly -- but Tesla has traded at a crazy multiple of revenue/profits for a very long time, so I'm wondering if Elon/AI hype will keep these stocks high longer than I want to pay the risk premium for (options).
The SpaceX IPO has a tiny 5% float and only a $75 billion raise target. There are enough morons in the world that they will compete to buy and push the valuation up. It's all a stupid financial trick to make Elon a paper trillionaire.
Tesla is a meme stock like GameStop, but for a good fraction of America, so the market cap can be much larger. As long as TSLA owners don't care about the stock defying gravity, it will continue to do so.
I'm with you on this. I think the market bubble can stay alive and well a lot longer than you can survive an open short position.
I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half.
> I think we're still a ways away from CEOs admitting that AI actually can't cut the cost of human capital in half
On the contrary, I think it certainly can. In the sense that productivity per person can be doubled. You could fire half your workforce and do nearly the same output.
Trouble is, everyone who does that will get outcompeted by everyone who didn't fore their workforce, and instead doubled their output.
We've seen it before with factories and computerization.
The fact that Tesla's stock price is so evidently detached from the performance of the company itself makes me wonder whether or not a public SpaceX will cause those investors who are just trying to ride the Musk train to exit Tesla stock and dump everything they can into SpaceX instead.
Man I'm so eager to find out how all this unfolds and when does the music stop for Elon and his shenanigans.
Same here. I’ve had an IRA and 401k since I was 21 and I’m 59 now (but still feel as smart as a 21 year old). I doubt I’ll see my lifetime of investment go up in smoke, just a big hill: up super high for a few years and then back to 2024 levels by 2030.
Which is still 10x what it is worth
Based on what?
Revenue. (Or forecast revenue, take your pick.)
revenue has been "rockets - good. starlink - great. ai - big loss"
Just make your point. You think it’s appropriately valued or undervalued, right?
Personally I think the valuation is detached from the company itself. In theory Tesla's valuation is too high, but it doesn't seem to be coming down any time soon. Plus there seems to be ways to manipulate stock prices when you control such a highly valued company, to the extent that the stock price reflects actions taken in the stock market more than the underlying assets and balance sheets.
Or 0.1x of what it’s worth if you actually care about what they’re doing and have accomplished.
Idk…
The original “revenue thesis” was that SpaceX, with landing orbital rocket boosters, can undercut all competitors and essentially have a monopoly on payload-to-orbit, and that their lower prices would massive increase the market.
Seems a fine business.
But then a couple years ago they say “actually with this brand new technological edge we can spin up a monopoly on an entirely NEW industry, Space Internet” and within a short timeframe they’ve got billions in revenue off this entirely new service.
It’s hard to predict the future but if Starlink is the last “new space industry” that spacex has borderline-exclusive access to, I’ll be shocked.
The valuation is speculative, yes, but they have such an incredible cost advantage in a nascent space that id be hard pressed to bet against them.
It’s reminiscent of everyone claiming Uber could never succeed, citing the size of the existing taxi market. TAM can change radically when costs move down orders of magnitude, in ways that are hard to predict.
As is the case with Elon's companies (and a bit of the market itself), it feels like any logical valuation has no impact on the actual stock price.
The market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent.
In the short term the market is a popularity machine but in the long term it is a weighing machine.
> in the long term it is a weighing machine.
This has not been the case for a long time.
What do you suppose is BTC's correct valuation? How about TSLA?
> > in the long term it is a weighing machine.
> This has not been the case for a long time.
I think this comes down to a disagreement about what "long term" means. In finance, I would suggest a _lower_ bound on long term is 10 years. More comfortably, I'd suggest something like 20-30 years. This is long enough to ride out most depressions, and it is still fits within a persons working life-time. It also roughly matches the scale at which people should be planning for retirement and long-term care (imagine if you started your retirement planning just 10 years from retirement, it would be very difficult). So I think neither BTC's not TSLA's hype has reached long-term yet. They have been around long enough to meet some of these timelines, but the excessive hype really hasn't been so long -- maybe 5 years or so.
Can we stop just repeating quotes like those over and over. If you have thoughts, please articulate them, its pretty frustrating to see the same exact quotes repeated over and over whenever there is a submission stock related
That’s like 90% of this site. Roll with it.
If the scales are only checked after the heat death of the universe, does it even matter?
If the market can’t actually detect crooks and charlatans until long after they have stolen investors money, its ability to be “correct” is worthless.
The irrational exuberance around Tesla was at least somewhat grounded in reality. There were some possible future(s) where it was really going to take off and completely redefine the auto industry. Then of course things went really off the rails with the Cybertruck, pivot to robotics, and just seemingly giving up on their existing line of business to go chasing whatever bong fueled dream Musk is having this quarter.
SpaceX is on a whole new level of bullshit. I think all these guys know how to do is double down. If the hype isn't working, its not stupid and big enough, so you start talking about transhumanism and singularity and other BS in your SEC filings.
Can you image how much better Tesla would be doing if musk was no longer involved?
That's going to be interesting to see if others follow this as an anchor or buy more into the hype. Regardless it's still a large multiple of earnings...
There's a finite supply of space before we lock ourselves in with trash
The risk here is severely overblown. Low earth orbit is self-cleaning with atmospheric drag. There’s comparatively little in MEO and even in a catastrophic Kessler syndrome scenario it’s still safe to transit through. Polluting higher orbits is so far beyond our current capabilities that it’s not even worth discussing.
Low earth orbit includes orbits that take from hours to centuries to decay, depends a lot on altitude/apogee/perigee. Starlink for multiple reasons places satellites in the range where it takes ~5 years to decay, thankfully. Kessler syndrome is real though, and satellites do collide or break apart in LEO.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone downplay Kessler syndrome so matter-of-factly. Has anti-doomerism spread to nearly every topic, or is Kessler syndrome really something whose severity has been massively overstated? Opportunity to shift my priors I suppose.
Kessler syndrome is way overstated. One way to tell is talk about it closing off space. That can't happen, it is possible to cross debris bands with low danger.
People also don't talk about different orbits. We can use higher low earth orbits if lower orbits are blocked.
Also, it is possible to clean up debris. The low cost launch means lower cost cleanup. My understanding is that big objects are most dangerous cause they would cause a lot of debris.
While I love this, Morningstar isn't a fiduciary
Honestly this sounds about right for an innovative spaceflight/ISP company saddled with a failing AI lab and a toxic social media website.
Related:
Michael Burry says neither SpaceX nor Anthropic is worth $1T
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368187
Doesn't matter, as soon as they can they'll shove it into the indexes, meaning pension funds all over the world will be let holding the bag.
I keep seeing this comment on all these spacex posts, can someone ELI5 to me why the pension funds are going to be forced to buy this? (do they not have free will on what they buy?)
SpaceX made fast index inclusion a condition of where it listed. Nasdaq changed its index rules so that instead of having to wait months to a year, SpaceX can enter an index after 15 trading days.
Index funds track an index mechanically. If you run an S&P 500 fund, you have to mirror the S&P 500. If a company gets added to the index, every fund tracking the index must buy it to match the index -- there is no discretion. Pension funds hold a lot of index funds.
So the causal chain is that pension funds track indexes, indexes have to buy the companies in the index, SpaceX got a fast path to the indexes. SpaceX will launch and pension funds will buy the stock, presumably propping up the stock price.
It would take a lot for pension funds to undo this and would be the opposite of index investing.
And to try and expand on why an index would include a waiting period in it's rules, my limited understanding is it's to give the public markets time to follow the company and review several quarters of financial results to stabilize the valuation in relation to those results before getting included in the index.
That’s my understanding too, it’s for price discovery
By bypassing the rules this way they are making people doubt the security of index funds, which would damage the market just by association. Anyone who cared about the stability of these instruments would categorically deny such a request. It seems to say a lot about the market makers in general that this is being allowed.
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
People confuse pension funds with index funds. Index funds will buy SpaceX once it is added to the index.
A lot of people in the US only have a 401k which is their pension for this discussion (there are very important differences, but for this discussion we can ignore them). In their 401k an index fund is almost always your best investment, so you should be concerned with anything that makes an index fund a worse investment since it harms you.
Pensions have strong and weird investment rules, and you have no control over what they do other than law. This makes them generally a worse investment (but if you live longer than average they are great anyway) so a 401k is better for most.
The big indexes will buy SpaceX soon. If pensions buy big indexes, which they do, they will own SpaceX indirectly.
Pensions buy big indexes in part because of the exact policies that were reversed to let SpaceX in; the behavior is not an immutable law of nature.
OTOH, the changes may expose them to SpaceX before they could reasonably rebalance their holdings, even if they were to stop buying the affected indexes immediately.
A lot of them have rules forcing them to have some amount of exposure to indexes of a market, or all entries in a market.
There are MAJOR rule changes made to allow them to do this (90 day wait-time reduced to 5 days, financial stability requirements lowered or removed), which is why automated rules like that were created ("oh, if they make it to X, they were already vetted for Y, Z").
A lot of people are throwing a lot of trust and reputation on the bonfire to make this happen.
So I don't fundamentally care if SpaceX is overvalued or not. Like, that's on you for whatever you want to invest in or not.
What I object to is all the rule changes by NASDAQ to essentially fix the IPO so massive pension funds and index funds are forced to invest in it. There have been multiple submissions about this but in short small floats are normally prohibited for index inclusion (not anymore), the trading days required for price discovery have been dropped to almost zero, the voting share structure would be an issue, the insider lockouts have been fixed and on it goes.
There should be extra scrutiny for a trillion dollar company.
SpaceX does have the Falcon 9, which is the completely dominant launch platform and first-stage reusability gives it an almost unbeatable advantage. Starlink has a lot of potential if satellite handsets can get small and cheap enough to compete with 5G effectively. Obital data centers are bullshit. Starship is going to be a significant drain on finances and the program as a whole faces significant headwinds.
The big problem is xAI. It's a significant drain on SpaceX (costing allegedly $1B+/month). SpaceX would be a better company without it. But it's only there to rescue Elon from his disastrous Twitter purchase and the xAI investors from Elon's first bailout (of himself).
There's almost no point in trying to figure out what a valuation should be because in many cases, nobody cares. Tesla is the posterchild for that.
Ultimately it was inevitable that as passive investing got more and more popular, people would seek to game it. Not that I'm happy about it, but if this works, it is probably just the beginning of sneaky ways being found to trick passive money into taking on way more risk than it intended to. And of course passive investors are passive, so they may not even notice, and probably won't fight back until the inevitable crash.
I think there's going to be blowback from this because this is "every other horse can only use three of their legs" levels of fixing.
I looked into the how the rule-changing works. NASDAQ is what's called a Self-Regulating Organization ("SRO") in the legislation so it has a lot of power. Were it a government agency, it would be more difficult. Technically, the SEC has to approve all rule changes by SROs but in this administration in particular, that's just going to be a rubber stamp. By the way here's a speech the head of the SEC previously gave about deregulation of capital markets [1].
I was also curious if Loper Bright had changed anything here but it appears not. The sstatuory language here is clear rather than intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous.
So the funds can technically challenge any such rules. They have standing. But the bar is difficult and I don't see it happening.
But if this goes badly, what I think you'll see is changes in governance by pension funds that'll be reflected by Vanguard and Blackrock, which is "index-like" funds that have stricter governance with rules closer to what was the case before these rule changes were rammed through. I could be wrong. I hope I'm not.
[1]: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2026/04/22/speech-by-chair-a...
OG SpaceX is growing at 7% YoY. That is not a business that commands a 150x revenue multiple. xAI is arguably shrinking. StarLink has a bunch of heavy lifting to do and unless it keeps growing 40% YoY for 10 years, law of large numbers be damned.