On one hand I do take some enjoyment of suckers being fleeced. But on other hand I know who this all will benefit so I really can't do that.

As whole I find that valuation just insane, but seemingly if you only offer tiny enough slice with enough hype it might bump prices to something that really make no sense at all...

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throwaway85825 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The suckers being fleeced are every pension fund in the world. They're demanding the S&P includes them faster to force ETF owners to buy in before the price tanks.

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michaelt 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

God forbid we participants in the stock market evaluate a business before investing in it, or do any sort of work to get the return we're promised.

I, for one, much prefer to earn a 9% return without expending any effort or thought at all.

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throwaway85825 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For most people their talent and expertise does not involve investing. That's why pensions and 401ks exist and why S&P/nasdaq have rules to protect the public.

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bryananderson 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.

	▲	socialcommenter 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do understand, though, that market return will struggle to achieve 9% for the coming decades. A 9% annualised return would put the US stock market at 50% of world GDP in 10 years (edit: 20) and something like 90% of world GDP in 30 years (edit: 50 years). Cost of goods, and your customer's money, both have to come out of global GDP too. (The current value of around 25% of global GDP doesn't even include the 1.75 trillion SpaceX which alone would be another almost 1%...) ETF expense ratios are small but still mean retail will underperform anyway. It's an unfortunate situation all around.

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indoordin0saur 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why are they being fleeced? If people didn't want to buy SpaceX they could buy some other ETF that doesn't include it. If there's enough of a demand I'm sure ETFs will be offered which include all the big indexed stocks except SpaceX.

	▲	throwaway85825 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Restructuring every ETF to be S&P but prior rules and no SpaceX would be enormously difficult.
	▲	throwaway290 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes Americans will definitely move their 401k over this /s Its fleecing because it basically takes everybody's money and gives it to support musk's money loser xai. SpaceX net profit 8 billion per year (previous years much less) and Xai was net losing 1.5 billion per quarter.

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skeeter2020 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless you literally have nothing, YOU are one of the millions being fleeced. Pensions & retirement funds, any index fund that comes remotely close to technology, any equity you own in a venture in tech, any industry that via very short linkages is connected. Good luck avoiding this.

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indoordin0saur 11 hours ago | parent [-]

You only get "fleeced" if the stock crashes. If it's that terrible of a stock then the price will be low. As far as SpaceX goes, I think there are far riskier companies with little prospect of doing well.

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lokar 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are only selling a small % of the shares in the IPO and subsequent weeks.

With a tiny float the price will almost certainly go up as a limited number of enthusiastic investors buy in. The plan is to then line up the lockup expirations so they sell into the index re-balance, a ton of new non-discretionary demand to match the new supply.

It's manipulation.

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FireBeyond 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How about xAI? Losing $6B a year and with that whole "Grok, generate me an image of this child with no clothes on" horrorshow?

Sorry, "xAI, a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX".

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indoordin0saur 10 hours ago | parent [-]

1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it

2.) SpaceX made $16B in profit last year, despite its enormous R&D costs and is on track for $20B this year, despite the losses from AI. People still wise to invest in Google despite their AI business still being a huge loss

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FireBeyond 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> 1.) All the image generation models will do that, xAI is just the one that caught flak for it

Perhaps. But that's a huge undersell. "just the one that caught flak"? No. The one with nearly zero guardrails. Where users could trivially create underage porn, bestiality, etc., using prompts that you could put into any other AI and just say "does this image generation prompt seem likely to create legally problematic content?"

No, Captain Free Speech said fuck it, let's roll.

	▲	torginus 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not that I approve of that, but when image generation was hot and new, the insane amount of refusals I got from the major ones for apparently no reason, exacerabated by the general slowness, quotas and inherent trial and error workflow has completely soured me on them.