> It's that changing the rules to suit the rich and connected is the literal definition of crony capitalism. Why should SpaceX get exemptions from entry requirements to the S&P when every other company before it didn't?

The S&P grandfathers in loads of shit. Google and Berkshire got to be the only special babies with multiple classes of stock for a few years.

The S&P tries to represent large cap American stocks. There was a genuine debate around whether SpaceX et al represent large cap stocks. Elon et al tried to put their thumbs on the scale, of course, but that wasn't the driving concern, this has been a debate that has been happening for a while.

The weird thing is linking it to Elon is absolutely titillating. So that's what influencers did. It's a maddening story. But it really isn't true, and it was even less true when the S&P rule changes were being misrepresented as faits accomplis.

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khriss 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Google and Berkshire got to be the only special babies with multiple classes of stock for a few years.

Wasn't this after their entry into the index?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Wasn't this after their entry into the index? Yes. Then rules were changed. Then they were unchanged. S&P is explicitly a committee-based index. It's not hard and fast rules driven. (Russell markets itself as being super duper rules based. It's a good niche. It's also so wildly complicated as to be, in practice, at least to me, indistinguishable from the committee-based method.) Elon undoubtedly tried to corrupt this process. But there were loads of non-corrupt reasons to look at a few trillion dollars of market cap hitting the market and ask how that should impact how various indices are calculated. The answer we've come to, that the tech and total-market indices should reflect the change while large caps should not, is a pretty good one.