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Posted by leopoldj 2 hours ago

Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'(www.bloomberg.com)
163 points | 90 comments
fluidcruft 1 hour ago|
It's really concerning given how the indexes are changing rules to fast-track SpaceX being forced into index funds. S&P is also working on updates to S&P 500 to force it down everyone's throats quickly and algorithmically.
epistasis 4 minutes ago||
I'm usually a Boglehead, with some exceptions, and one exception I'd love is some sort of trade that would eliminate my exposure to SpaceX for the next few years. I'm sure there's some combo of options that would do it.

Probably finding an ESG-focused ETF would do it. ESG basically meant "good governance, we follow laws" which translated into better governed public companies that therefore had better returns, as one would expect. Really weird how it was politicized into something entirely different...

xenospn 2 minutes ago||
Stock markets are ruled by hype and fomo. Good corporate governance has little to do with returns, unfortunately.
epistasis 1 minute ago||
Short term gains are hype and fomo, but if you're holding index funds long like I am, then returns have a lot more to do with performance. And given the lack of hype around ESG, it seems like an exceptional time to buy in to it.
aNoob7000 1 hour ago|||
Add Anthropic and OpenAI to the list. Companies that are bleeding money.

Personally, a company should be making money before adding it to the index.

parliament32 49 minutes ago|||
Interestingly, these are the exact rules they're working to overturn: currently, no matter how many stupid accounting tricks you pull off, you need to actually be profitable to be included in the S&P 500.
hparadiz 1 hour ago|||
[flagged]
LarsDu88 32 minutes ago|||
This is a fallacy. OpenAI and Anthropic would not continue to make money indefinitely by simply sitting still for the simple fact that their models can easily be distilled by competitors. Their value is contingent on sitting at the top of the leaderboards and staying there such that the marginal value of their AI is better than the mostly Chinese competitors.

And b/c these chinese competitors are open weight, the layer below frontier class AI is totally commoditized.

If there were a recession, the first thing enterprise customers would do is setup Kimi or Deepseek rigs. It would be a race to the bottom and no one would be profitable.

A similar phenomenon happened with rail lines in the 1850s where irrational exuberance led to a massive overbuild of rail lines, followed by a race to the bottom and the bankruptcy of almost all players. In the end, banks ended up absorbing the few companies that survived.

parliament32 47 minutes ago||||
Because they're doing the fancy equivalent of selling $20 bills for $15 and chirping about how high their revenue is. You, me, and everyone else could generate $inf revenue with that strategy, but that doesn't make it a viable business model.
MBCook 37 minutes ago||
Right.

At this point burying money in jars in the back yard and forgetting where some are has a much higher rate of return.

hparadiz 31 minutes ago||
Using Google’s own IPO S-1 / SEC filings:

Year Revenue Net income / loss

1998 Not reported

1999 $220k -$6.076M

2000 $19.108M -$14.690M

Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

parliament32 27 minutes ago|||
I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines.

I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.

MadxX79 10 minutes ago||||
But Google didn't go public until 2004, when they were highly profitable.

Every startup goes through a phase where they aren't profitable... For most of of them that ends when they go bankrupt.

logifail 12 minutes ago||||
> Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time.

Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years.

Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)

marcosdumay 27 minutes ago|||
You seem to be ignoring that a loss lead is supposed to lead people into doing something profitable.
matthewdgreen 52 minutes ago||||
Really depends on the valuation and P/E they plan to list at, and some estimate of their future revenue story. I love Codex and Claude Code but OpenCode/Kimi is wildly cheaper and 90% as good.
tclancy 48 minutes ago||||
Didn't we have a story just yesterday that Anthropic's run-rate now looks like $49 billion/ year and they might have their first quarterly profit? I would suggest if you have billions of dollars coming in the door and aren't breaking even, maybe you do have a small leak somewhere?
mrweasel 9 minutes ago||
Part of that potential profitability is reportedly coming the fact that they get a discount on compute from SpaceX in May and June. Anthropic and SpaceX signing a contract where Anthropic leases datacenter capacity for the low low price of $1.25 billion per month, except for the first two month when they get some sort of discount.

Anthropics expected profitable quarter just happens to be the quarter were their cost is artificially low?

alpha_squared 54 minutes ago||||
> Because from where I'm sitting it seems like you're just operating on hopes and feels.

I hate these flippant comments. Similarly, from where I'm sitting it seems you're struggling to disentangle revenue from profit.

hparadiz 46 minutes ago||
I buy 50 billion of hardware. Make 45 billion back in year 1. My losses are 5 billion. I Pay of all my creditors by year two. Then spend another 55 billion on hardware in the second half of year two. My profit is at this point zero.

<you are here>

By year three I am printing money.

It's not a flippant comment. It's basic math.

zdragnar 19 minutes ago|||
In year three your competitors invest in making a better model and crush your business because you have no moat at all.

The entire business requires massive ongoing investment because getting massive investments is the only thing resembling a competitive advantage that you can get.

The equivalent to anything you can do will be available as an open weight set in six months to a year. Sink or swim.

rchaud 21 minutes ago||||
It's not basic math when the numbers are this big. There's not going to be $50 billion coming in Year 3 if there's a market correction and lenders scale back financing. Borrowed money is how companies are paying for AI, and that's the first thing that disappears in a recession.
zzleeper 34 minutes ago|||
Sorry that's confusing cash flow with profits, where things get amortized
43fg 49 minutes ago|||
" But they could just not do anything and continue raking in the money."

Hahaha what a fucking bozo.

Log out and dont talk about valuation again.

mohsen1 1 hour ago|||
There is a market for an S&P 500 ETF without those companies. I'll immediately switch over
rlkf 23 minutes ago|||
You probably want an ETF that follows something like the MSCI USA Ex Mega Cap index then: <https://www.msci.com/indexes/index/758086>
zzleeper 51 minutes ago|||
Let me know if you find one! I'm at a loss. (And even then, if I switch I have to pay $$$ taxes on capital gains)
stouset 42 minutes ago|||
You can sidestep this entirely with a total-market fund like VTSAX/VTI, which hold the entire market and should be more resistant to being gamed.

They’re free-float adjusted so entities like SpaceX are valued only by what’s available on public markets. And Vanguard (and its funds) are owned by its investors, which makes it seem implausible that the rules would be rewritten in a way that would damage investors.

SilverElfin 41 minutes ago||
VTI lists fast even before these recent changes as I recall. So it’s more vulnerable, not less.
LPisGood 37 minutes ago|||
It may list fast, but it covers many more securities from what I understand so it’s insulated. I think the fact is that any broad market ETF is gonna own at least some piece of a $1 trillion company.
felixgallo 9 minutes ago||
well that's the problem, right? There is no justification for a trillion dollar Elon Musk valuation. And he and his investors know this. That's why they're trying to change the rules to dump the stock while it's irrational on every investor in the world. If they really believed in the value of the company, would they be bribing people to scam the index funds?
_delirium 49 minutes ago|||
Any of the direct indexing providers will let you blacklist individual stocks from the index. The intended use is to exclude stocks you hold elsewhere (or receive as stock grants) to avoid causing wash sales, but it can also be easily used to make a custom "S&P 499".
zzleeper 42 minutes ago||
I'm looking at Schwab (and saw a few others) and couldn't find anything: https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/primer-on-wash-sales

I would assume this is not an ETF but sth else?

zparky 32 minutes ago||
https://www.schwab.com/direct-indexing
root_axis 27 minutes ago|||
And accelerating the schedules for insiders to dump shares.
philwelch 14 minutes ago|||
Almost all of the YoY growth in the S&P500 is in a very small number of tech companies. If one of those fast-growing tech companies isn't in the S&P500, the index as a whole becomes obsolete.
rchaud 31 minutes ago|||
Waiving profitability requirements to join the S&P 500 and trigger auto-buys from index funds is DEI for corporations.
SilverElfin 42 minutes ago||
The same rules are now affecting other big IPOs. I think Cerebras was confirmed as getting fast listing too even though they’re much smaller. It’s one big act of dumping on retail markets
red-iron-pine 1 hour ago||
is anyone surprised? the IPO documents are a disaster, and the finance-tube talking heads are all tearing it to shreds
LightBug1 1 minute ago||
Good for Denmark.

Yeah, for all the technical excellence by Shotwell and the team ... I don't want my ETF's and pensions buying into that piece of shit CEO and his corrupt 'at a whim' entity manipulation.

lokar 1 hour ago||
How can I transfer my shares of VTI for an interest in this pension fund, before it’s too late?
stouset 38 minutes ago||
VTI won’t really be affected by this.

It’s based on the total market and not artificially limited to a small number of large companies. Plus it’s free-float adjusted so only the publicly-tradable portion of SpaceX is considered when weighting its inclusion so it will constitute only a small portion of the fund. There is also a (small) mandatory delay period which I don’t recall between it going public and it becoming included in the index which should give time for the SpaceX valuation to stabilize on something notionally realistic.

Thankfully, Vanguard and its member funds are investor-owned so are likely more resilient against someone like Elon trying to change the rules.

lokar 31 minutes ago||
The index they use is altering the rules. I complained to my account rep, he agreed it was not great and is asking the fund mgmt what the plan is. I doubt there is a lot they can do.
ambicapter 3 minutes ago||
VTI

> Seeks to track the performance of the CRSP US Total Market Index.

The index that is changing its rules is the NASDAQ100, commonly referred to as the NASDAQ, although NASDAQ is also the name of the exchange.

tgv 56 minutes ago||
BY getting a job in Denmark in the sector that this pension fund covers. It's a "member-owned pension fund for academics."
thesimon 1 hour ago||
Matt Levine described it well (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-21/spa...)

> The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain.

> When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did.

> [...] Surely SpaceX has created all that shareholder value more because Musk does what he wants than in spite of Musk doing what he wants; it is hard to accidentally create $1.75 trillion of value. SpaceX’s shareholders signed up for this deal — letting Musk cook — and have been rewarded;

vondur 1 hour ago||
Isn't that how Facebook is ran too? Basically Zuckerberg's private company, that in theory is public?
grassfedgeek 43 minutes ago|||
Right, if Meta had good governance Zuck wouldn't have been allowed to invest so much in Metaverse.
stefan_ 34 minutes ago||||
Facebook is still a Delaware company, with lots of established case law for what Zuckerberg can and can not do, voting majority or not. SpaceX is now some Texas corporation with a state legislature ready to enable whatever Musk wants.
jdgoesmarching 41 minutes ago||||
Tech bros reinvent autocracy
tonetheman 49 minutes ago|||
[dead]
nicole_express 40 minutes ago||
It seems like a fine offer to have exist, but one that a pension fund with low risk tolerance wouldn't want to take. So everything seems reasonable with the world.

Similarly I don't understand why indicies are rushing to change their rules to allow SpaceX in. People accept a certain risk tolerance and changing the rules to ramp up the risk seems questionable at best.

zerotolerance 1 hour ago||
Should have renamed the company xGoodwill.
amarant 8 minutes ago||
Any chance of bypassing the paywall? Does someone have a archive link perhaps?
iso1631 43 seconds ago|
Pay perhaps?

Or do you work for free?

pu_pe 1 hour ago||
Wouldn't the same argument apply against Tesla?
fuglede_ 38 minutes ago|
https://akademikerpension.dk/nyheder/vi-ekskluderer-tesla/
kome 39 minutes ago||
again, i’ve been posting this a lot recently, but i still think it’s worth sharing: it’s a summary of an academic paper i wrote, “it’s not finance, it’s your pensions” https://theloop.ecpr.eu/its-not-finance-its-your-pensions/

the piece explains how modern finance is de facto built on the shoulders of the privatization of the welfare state. i find it particularly relevant here: the finance class - in this case musk - wants pensioners money via mutual funds, even modifying the rules of indexing...

it’s not a great sight tbh.

SilverElfin 1 hour ago|
It’s obviously a scam. First xai acquires failing Twitter and then SpaceX acquires xai? At a made up valuation number that’s too high? The voting structure of SpaceX prevents Elon from ever being held accountable. Not to mention that the revenue and profits are simply not enough to justify the desired value.
nolok 1 hour ago|
Merging the failling companies into the other ones is the usual Elon thing, Solar City didn't get acqui-merged into Tesla for its great result.

It's not a "scam" in the traditionnal sense, it's riding the bubble while it's there, stock value is "supposed" to be about the company performance and potential but technically it doesn't have to be, it's about what some people are willing to pay for it (the stock, not the product the company sells) and that's all. That's also why tesla has such a valuation.

You can see it in the comments even here and other thread about this IPO, some people read the numbers, and some have just religious sounding comments about it being the biggest revolution ever or making the history book etc ...

And that's also why they need to keep elon as CEO because in the scenario where they remove it and get the best car company CEO and become a great regular car company that works and ships lots of great car ... Their valuation would be reduced a factor of ten

Danox 9 minutes ago||
It’s a scam and the party will be over when Tesla finally bites the dust, and it will. The worldwide trajectory is not in their favor.
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