No longer will there be a year of price discovery for index funds, 15 days. Meaning index funds have to buy it at the peak of the hype cycle. Will be a huge wealth transfer from mom and pop retirement accounts to the ultra wealthy.
They’re taking everything thats not nailed down. A wealth tax is the only way, it cannot continue like this.
> for a trillionaire[!]
This writes itself. It shouldn't, but "should" as a concept needs a lot of work.
And even that isn't accurate. They are not bending the rules for a trillionaire, they are maintaining the consistency more systemic rules. This is how it has always been. We can all point to real or perceived ethical islands. They certainly exist, and are worth creating and preserving. But for now, the sea still sets the rules, and the sea is deep. For the deeper system, island visibility is a useful distraction. Sometimes something heavy moves near the surface and we misinterpret visibility as exception.
There are also perfectly ordinary situations in which this pattern is used to imply the influence of an unknown party. "They built a bridge over the river." Clearly the speaker does not believe that bridges over rivers construct themselves. She doesn't need to know who built the bridge.
There's no rule you have to own QQQ and indeed most people don't. There are thousands of low cost ETFs that provide passive exposure to the market. If this new rule bothers you, be like most people and buy one of those instead of QQQ. Problem solved.
Like sure, let's improve our tax systems (as an aside, I would say there are many more efficient and progressive options than a wealth tax, but whatever), but I don't see how there is even a tangential link between that topic and the NDX rule change.
If you own an ETF that buys SpaceX but without overweighting vs. float, then you're not contributing to the inflated price in that sense. You're still buying at the inflated price though, so the NASDAQ rule change still affects you indirectly.
I guess the point of the "wealth tax" comment is that any higher taxation of the wealthiest individuals would reduce their power to shape the rules to their favor, and a wealth tax is potentially harder to avoid than income taxes. I think most prior attempts just made them emigrate, though.
mv some_rich_ppl_money some_poor_ppl
You're making it more inefficient; any other hop in such a system is inefficiency.
Such a tiny minority of real people are not that important to the species. Maybe that important to some mind palace of some contemporary meat suits but they're going to die anyway; kicking the can down the road for future people. If we can fuck the future, fuck us then. Our existence is just as forfeitable
My neighbors and family have been expressing such. If we're just going to screw the next generation via environmental collapse and serfdom to rich overlords they opt to give up on the living enabling it
After 20+ years in the market, today I learned: "The S&P 500 is a float-adjusted, market-capitalization-weighted index."
So presumably an S&P 500 index fund is not disadvantaged, since it is tracking a float-adjusted index, i.e. the weight of SpaceX will be tiny if its float is tiny.
Or, is there a nuance that I'm missing?
Nasdaq already caved. FTSE and S&P are supposedly considering it.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/03/31/index-providers...
I don’t tend to let my emotions out this much here, but utterly fuck everything about this administration, and fuck anyone who voted in favor of it.
In this specific case I am retired and I have done this based on financial projections assuming the game continues to be played the same. So it hits closer to home for me. But it’s a far bigger problem than just me—this is looting the retirement savings of millions of Americans—and it is far from the only thing about this administration and those who have supported it to make me absolutely livid.
If you’re referring to Biden, who all but guaranteed that Trump would win a second term by having zero sense of urgency or concern, zero drive to push through popular but sweeping changes, zero real vision, falling back to politics-as-usual, and topping it all off with disastrously running for a second term until pulling out at almost the last possible second, then yes, him too, and I will personally never forgive him for stepping in when Bernie had momentum.
For anyone else, it’s hard for me to get as worked up over them. Uninspiring, ineffective, bargain basement levels of corruption is upsetting but not a reason to put fire to everything that has put this country and its residents in a position of economic power, peace and security, and as the diplomatic head of the world. If I could wave a magic wand and strip the right to vote from anyone who thought so and acted upon that belief, I wouldn’t give it a second of hesitation.
No? Contractually, maybe. But legally you can do whatever you want with index constructions.
I’m genuinely confused how a passive investor winds up tracking the NASDAQ 100 versus a broader index.
Also, if you’re picking and choosing your exposures, you aren’t passive.
Or would you say that e.g. an ETF tracking MSCI ex-US is not a passive fund?
I’d consider someone that puts $50 into Coca Cola stock every paycheck a passive investor
Assets aren’t passive or not; investing styles are. The degree to which one’s returns earn from, or are expected to earn from, selection effects determines if you’re investing passively or actively. If I say trade SPYs, I’m an active investor. If I buy and hold a custom broad-market benchmark, I’m passive. Buying MSCI ex-US without a hedge is an active investment decision. If it’s bought and held it’s more like a passive strategy over time, provided the U.S. doesn’t dramatically over or underperform the global markets.
You buy VTI, you're impacted.
VTI “seeks to track the performance of the CRSP US Total Market Index” [1]. Not the NASDAQ 100. It will include the latter’s components. But it shouldn’t reference its weights.
[1] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
Seems like MSCI can add new large constituents very quickly as well [1], so to remain neutral to the frenzy until a price has been discovered, one might need to actively short.
[1] e.g. https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_GIMIMeth...
It's absolutely bonkers and wrong but it's unlikely to raise to the level of actual misrepresentation.
But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.
I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/
I'm not sure that's the case. Every value in this forecast is absurd, I actually think the author is sincere in there feeling that they are being extremely skeptical.
I mean that Starlinks consumer broadband is valued at ~38x revenue, when other telcos are valued around 1.5x revenue. That revenue is 2533% more expensive, why pay such a big premium for something that's essentially the same?
Also, AT&T and Verizon customers don't love their provider. They despise them. I walked into a Verizon store last year and was outright scammed by the staff member into their insurance plan after explicitly declining it (they just added it to the bill anyway).
These legacy companies will be irrelevant.
10 years is a long time, considering the global reactions to America under Trump, and also Musk's tight coupling to Trump, and even in the US given how many bridges Musk burned.
If Starlink was properly spun off and independent of Musk this would be much less of an issue, but now? Now the rest of the world is likely to treat it like the US treats Huawei.
net income probably: $1.5B – $3B
P/E:500-1000
Of course people will trip overthemselves to buy it up.
That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink.
Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the analysis consensus today with those eye-popping numbers.
... Why not? Aside from memes, I mean.
This calculation is why "growth" companies dominated the stock market during the 2010's: with the Zero Interest Rate Policy that most of the developed world had, the discount rate that the markets used ended up being basically zero. In which case a market player is indifferent between a dollar in 2020 and a dollar in 2040. So if a company had a 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040, that was worth (0.1 * 1 trillion=10 billion dollars). But with a more traditional 4% discount rate then a dollar in 2040 is worth less than half of a dollar in 2020, and that means your 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040 has less than half of the value. Even if nothing else changed about your business, just the discount rate changing halved the value of your company.
The earnings period is 1 year.
It would mean making 100% return on investment each year. Being that low is only possible if there's reason to think the business is extremely precarious and unlikely to survive.
P/E 30 means returns of 3.33%, P/E of 20 means 5%. These are sensible numbers given people have other investment opportunities.
P/E of Tesla being 400 or so means it would take 400 years of its own profits to be able to afford to privatise itself, i.e. returns of 0.25%; being that high is a gamble that future revenue/unit time will go up by a factor of about 20 to bring it into the sensible range.
The upper bound from the grandparent comment for P/E 500-1000, says the annual return is 0.1%, which is what I saw on various current accounts, not savings accounts, not special deals, current accounts.
It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you?
I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too.
I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.
Developing a new rocket like the Falcon 9, even a reusable one, would cost a private investor less than $10bn. It would take time, that is the hardest part. But in terms of cash, it is a fraction of this valuation.
Then a constellation like Starlink - again, we are talking $10-$15bn. Once you have the rocket, the satellite design is not going to cost much. The challenge is getting the regulatory approvals and getting the launch rate up.
Then developing something like Starship, again a few billions, certainly far less than $50 bn. A crew capsule too, that would be a few billion, but probable <$5 bn.
For a trillion dollars you could probably throw in a space station (the ISS was about $100bn), a few advanced orbiting telescopes, a human mission to Mars, and maybe an intensive exploration of Europa. Heck, why not land something on Pluto just for kicks.
Apple has a float of >99%. SpaceX is going to come out with 3-4% float. Since all big serious total market / whatever index funds are float adjusted, this means that SpaceX will be treated more like a company with $45B market cap, not $1.5T or whatever.
If you're buying most index funds, you should literally not care about this.
If you buy VTI, then SpaceX is going to be like what, <0.1% of the fund? That is noise.
Check out Matt Levine commentary, which goes into more detail (SpaceX Indexing) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-03-31/are...
Wait for the lock-up terms.
Any mid-sized country would have multiple cellphone and Internet providers with larger customer bases and less upkeep.
I mean if you value a company for its future cashflows, how long will Starlink be the only game in town? Will we not see other rockets/space-internet competitors in 2040 for example, in 15 years from now, from any other company (or even, any other state actor)? I think we will, and I think that timeline is generous. Without a monopoly you're competing the price towards marginal cost to cater to a tiny and shrinking fraction of the world that needs satelite internet. The vast majority of people live in urban environments, particularly among those who can afford internet in the first place, and it's only growing further in that direction.
I think Starlink is a wonderful product but there's a reason it has $10b revenue, while telecom companies around the world do more than $1.7 trillion in revenue.[0]
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.
It’s not really sensible to compare a single spacecraft with what is essentially a fleet of ships with an order of magnitude greater cargo capacity. It’s the possibility of refueling that unlocks the ability to push really large payloads beyond LEO, and many of the more audacious plans (like a Moon base) do require a lot of cargo well beyond LEO.
Well, they are going to live with multi-customer payloads if Starship can do it for a tenth of the price. There's already a large market for ride-sharing and it's only going to get bigger.
Except that at some point this stops being true. Induced demand is not infinite. There's no telling when we'll reach that point, or indeed if we've already reached it.
This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different.
Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc
A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?
How many private earth observation satellites?
The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.
My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).
[1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...
I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.
I missed 2 and 3 it seems.
Starship: zero competitors & potentially makes humans inter-planetary.
Seems crazy if investors put more value on Grok.
What is the realistic, non-science fiction appeal of this?
Humans being interplanetary would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn’t much revenue there.
European settlers being on the north american continent would be an amazing technical tour de force. But relatively speaking, there isn't much revenue there.
The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47612775
SpaceX files to go public
Of course once again, you are "not allowed" to be early into pre-IPO companies which is where the actual money is made.
The moment several companies start IPOing, you are already too late for those multiples and have to wait for a massive crash until these stocks reach all time lows after IPO.
I ended up largely deferring to them, e.g. predicting the public will value xAI at $258 billion ($222b - $310b) at time of IPO, even though I've elsewhere been skeptical that xAI should be valued like a frontier AI lab.
It's a keynesian beauty contest
1. Tesla was priced at $2.5b end of 2010. 2. Tesla started production that year of the model S, with nearly 500km range and 0-100 in 4.4 seconds, still competitive 16 years later. It was an obvious disruption of a proven market. 3. that car market was valued at half a trillion at the time.
So Tesla being valued at 0.5% of the market, with disruptive technology, seems fine. Of course it was a moonshot, but hindsight is 20/20.
But what is the total market here that it's stepping into? Seems like SpaceX is servicing the majority of the market for years, yet it just has 16 billion revenue. How that gets you to 1.75 trillion, I don't know.
For comparison, it is routine to see sale prices of 3x to 5x revenue for many, many kinds of everyday businesses that have much less potential than Tesla.
There are very, very few businesses whose shares one could have purchased in 2010 that performed better over the subsequent 15 years. That is about as objective as one can get about determining whether or not something was under or over valued (in 2010).
Source: https://starlink.com/business/aviation ($250->$10k/mo)
https://starlink.com/business/maritime ($250/mo)
https://starlink.com/business/mobility ($65->$540/mo)
The point I have more issue with is that a 60 or 100 PE ratio only makes sense in a high-growth scenario. Telecoms are valued at 9x by comparison. 60 or 100 only makes sense if you expect it to grow by 10x from here, and face no competition and keep prices this high.
And that seems like a bit of a reach. The richest people on the planet live in urban environments in US/EU/Asia, with fast and widespread 5G.
Yes, rich people on boats in the pacific, hiking remote mountains, and researchers in Antartica exist, but they're not a market of 200 million people. And even if you get there, that's still just 120b, not 380b valuation.
