And to be clear, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I just don’t think it matters so much.
It’s a 24 year old company with a current high flying stock price based on very questionable numbers.
“In 2025, SpaceX generated $18.7 billion in revenue, with its Starlink satellite internet service accounting for $11.39 billion, or 61% of total sales.”
Tesla had higher revenue number in at the start of 2019, when it had a market cap of ~0.06 trillion. Further Tesla was highly volatile in 2021 despite huge earnings growth with some people bank when it fell from 1.2T to 0.34T before recovering.
Remember mars by 2024? I think that was around the time they started accepting deposits on tesla semi.
There are ETFs that were issued tied to the Nasdaq 100 which are therefore legally bound to buy SpaceX. But the biggest immorality is the SEC allowing Musk's attempt to manipulate the market by: 1. Setting an IPO price for SpaceX (which absorbed xAi and its money guzzling losses) at unsustainable, incredibly inflated prices; and then 2. Putting incredible pressure on SP500 and other index makers to change their rules to force the purchase of SpaceX at those sky high prices (in an IPO, company gets to set the IPO price).
It's legal. At least in the eyes of the SEC which, of course, is an institution that is controlled by the wealthiest who control the markets, so of course it's legal.
But it is outrageous market manipulation that is fraudulent in its intent to enrich the wealthiest man on earth at the expense of ever wage earner putting her money into Index Funds.
Thank goodness the S&P and CRSP refused to change their rules. Otherwise the shifting of risk from Musk onto the shoulders of every working American would have been complete.
Those deals are doable because xAI failed and SpaceX has a bunch of spare compute lying around they can rent out. However, SpaceX doesn't make the hardware or software so moat is nonexistent.
If compute capacity increases or AI demand decreases, Google/Anthropic will likely skip SpaceX and just buy their own hardware in their own datacenters or go back to their own datacenters.
The one saving grace is s&p isnt changing anything, and they were by far the biggest index.
There were not enough shares actually trading for the index funds to fulfill their requirements that's why the price keeps going up
And then the fall down is hard.
A stock's value can disappear in a matter of days to a degree it leads to a complete collapse. It has happened before, see Enron or Wirecard.
> It’s not like it wasn’t going to end up in every index in a year.
Sure, but it's still not wise to let unripe stocks into most American and RoW retirement funds. There's a reason why many complex software projects keep some sort of "staging" tree, and the stock markets should do so as well.
