frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The SpaceX IPO Will Be the Theft of the Century

https://montanaskeptic.substack.com/p/the-spacex-ipo-will-be-the-theft
69•400thecat•2h ago

Comments

400thecat•2h ago
An 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•1h ago
it'll be a small from our pockets individually. but it'll add up to what elon needs.

this is the new playbook.

overfeed•22m ago
> this is the new playbook.

Same as the old playbook, just scaled up. Tesla got billions from state subsidies and selling carbon credits.

sschueller•1h ago
The 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•43m 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.

duskwuff•4m ago
And 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.

michaelt•31m ago
The other stuff is bad, but surely "insiders who will pocket millions" is normal for an IPO?
saltyoldman•1h ago
This is just eds. Same guy here: 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•49m ago
It 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•37m ago
This is like ANY company. What company will last forever. Not many.
SwellJoe•28m ago
Not 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•2m ago
Somehow people will read this fact and say it's not overvalued because it hasn't crashed yet.
system2•
tick_tock_tick•1h ago
This 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•41m ago
That's not an argument for. Maybe we don't want to live in a world of thievery, or be thieves ourselves.
system2•29m ago
Well, the entire stock market is a world of thievery. Are you saying do not invest in any stocks and let your money rot in a savings account due to inflation?
l23k4•24m ago
What thievery happens in the stock market?
readthenotes1•59m ago
SpaceX a failure at 83% of mass to orbit. Yoikes.
bdamm•18m ago
The 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).

riv991•52m ago
I 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•48m 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•29m ago
By 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•20m ago
yes! Michael Munger expressed it beautifully: "anything that is going to happen has already hapened"
simonjgreen•42m ago
This 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.

khazhoux•48m ago
How can a public sale ever be a theft?
avaer•45m ago
Maybe 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•36m ago
All 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•31m ago
How is that supposed to answer the question? It seems like you completely ignored it and decided to share unrelated complaints, the things you describe are not even vaguely theft-adjacent.
mordae•9m ago
Most 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.
henry2023•37m ago
It'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•19m ago
How do you know that this isn't already priced by quant firms?
TurdF3rguson•11m ago
More like: why would you think it's not already priced in. Answer: I'm super special!
l23k4•28m ago
This is stupid bait intended for financially illiterate readers, designed to resonate with the very common and reasonable anti-Musk sentiments.

Observe that almost all the complaints about what the indices are doing originate from outside of finance. It's very telling that the people who are complaining are not the ones putting their money where their mouths are.

If market participants didn't like what the indices are doing, they would simply reject it. Market participants absolutely do want this.

Nykon•17m ago
I 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

bogdan•7m ago
How does one simply reject it? You make it sound oh so easy. As if the taxman is a made up idea.
l23k4•4m ago
What are you even trying to say? Where does the taxman enter into this?
gorgoiler•21m ago
Why 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.

prolly97•17m ago
So 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...

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•6m ago
To 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.
bmink•1m ago
To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.

This is also addressed in the article:

> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!

> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.

> 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.

general1465•1m ago
Grudge? I would say he was spot on. And he still is.
itskokeh•1m ago
Falcon 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?

26m ago
Apple 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.
chii•35m ago
The 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.

"They're made out of weights"

https://maxleiter.com/blog/weights
447•MaxLeiter•7h ago•129 comments

Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-u...
194•littlexsparkee•6h ago•120 comments

Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2026/06/03/elixir-v1-20-0-released/
703•cloud8421•12h ago•260 comments

I built a vulnerable app and spent $1,500 seeing if LLMs could hack it

https://kasra.blog/blog/i-spent-1500-seeing-if-llms-could-hack-my-app/
161•jc4p•6h ago•64 comments

Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemma-4-12b/
797•rvz•15h ago•316 comments

The ways we contain Claude across products

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/how-we-contain-claude
104•jbredeche•6h ago•46 comments

I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis

https://burntsushi.net/encephalitis/
581•Tomte•16h ago•180 comments

Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
363•lordleft•13h ago•639 comments

Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/uber-caps-usage/
452•pdyc•18h ago•558 comments

DaVinci Resolve 21

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew
440•pentagrama•16h ago•198 comments

Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

https://fagnerbrack.com/learn-sql-once-use-it-for-30-years-9aceb0bdee03
43•karakoram•3d ago•10 comments

Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/meteor-explodes-over-massachusetts-what-we-know-and-where-it...
93•1970-01-01•2d ago•50 comments

CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment

https://github.com/tsupplis/cpm86-crossdev
26•elvis70•3d ago•2 comments

ESP32-S31

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-s31
281•volemo•14h ago•151 comments

A Man Who Reads Books for a Living

https://lithub.com/the-man-who-reads-books-for-a-living-one-every-two-days/
106•gmays•10h ago•80 comments

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/06/03/pq-certs
248•SGran•15h ago•135 comments

Ableton Extensions SDK

https://www.ableton.com/en/live/extensions/
105•bennett_dev•10h ago•41 comments

Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig

https://github.com/duanebester/gooey
161•ksec•13h ago•59 comments

Patching my guitar amp's firmware

https://mforney.org/blog/2026-05-28-patching-my-guitar-amps-firmware.html
71•birdculture•3d ago•9 comments

Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/06/journey-to-jpeg-xl-how-open-source-experiments-shaped-t...
67•ledoge•9h ago•35 comments

The Capacity of HotHands to Facilitate High-Altitude Research (2023) [pdf]

https://www.colorado.edu/center/spacegrant/sites/default/files/attached-files/B3_RRCC_BringingThe...
3•radeeyate•3d ago•0 comments

Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

65•shalinshah•13h ago•58 comments

A Mathematician's Lament (2002) [pdf]

https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician%27s_Lament.pdf
66•xeonmc•9h ago•2 comments

Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground

https://www.science.org/content/article/mathematicians-issue-warning-ai-rapidly-gains-ground
216•pseudolus•20h ago•257 comments

U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/trump-ooi-amoc
414•rguiscard•6h ago•273 comments

Dumbphone 2

https://dumb.co/
27•skogstokig•6h ago•13 comments

Self-hosted dev sandboxes with preview URLs (Docker, Go, no K8s)

https://github.com/tastyeffectco/sandboxes
79•tastyeffectco•11h ago•20 comments

PlayStation Architecture

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/
288•gregsadetsky•20h ago•57 comments

Embryos shape their limbs: a key discovery of "genetic brakes"

https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/en/article/2026/06/02/how-embryos-shape-their-limbs-a-key-discover...
65•gmays•13h ago•5 comments

Every Byte Matters

https://fzakaria.com/2026/06/01/every-byte-matters
238•ingve•20h ago•118 comments