Monday, June 01, 2026

More Leaner And More Meaner

Rule changes for the SpaceX $SPCX IPO:

Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to 5.

This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months.

Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%.

The rules built to protect passive investors:

1. S&P 500 has required 12 months of trading and 4 quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both waived.

2. Nasdaq cut its inclusion window from 90 trading days to 15.

3. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing.
Fuck your feelings. And your 401k.
Let's be clear about what this actually is. Index providers didn't change their rules out of goodwill. They changed them because SpaceX is too big and too politically connected to exclude. A $1.5 trillion company going public and not landing in passive funds immediately would be embarrassing for the index industry.

But the consequence is real: $30 trillion in retirement money gets forced into SpaceX at whatever valuation Elon and the bankers set. No price discovery. No earnings track record requirement. No seasoning period to let the market find fair value.

The rules that protected passive investors since 2002 were waived in weeks.

If SpaceX is overvalued at IPO, every 401k in America owns it at the top.
The world's richest centi-billionaire oligarch used his power to change the rules, so he could dump his garbage company (which is cartoonishly overvalued, unprofitable, and incinerating cash) on retail investors, using trillions of dollars in retirement funds as exit liquidity, all in order to become the first trillionaire.

This is the perfect metaphor for the US economy as a whole, which is entirely based on bubbles and scams.
From the people who sold you on 401k’s in the first place. (The Lovely Wife had a 403b through her employer (a school district). Fortunately she also had a pension through the state of Texas. She actually put more in the 403b than it had when she retired. She rolled it into an IRA, where it is gaining value through prudent investment. Which will never include SpaceX. We won’t die rich, but it isn’t wasting away any more.)
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)