Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

20 hours ago (bloomberg.com)

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.

  • 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...

    • There's an ETF for everything out there. (There are more ETF's than stocks). There'll be a large market for "S&P500 without SpaceX" et al, so it's seems likely somebody will fill it. It probably will have to use a worse name because of the S&P trademark.

      P.S. Here's an example of S&P500 without the magnificent 7 https://www.defianceetfs.com/xmag/

    • > I'd love is some sort of trade that would eliminate my exposure to SpaceX

      You can just short SpaceX of an amount equivalent to its share of your SP500 holdings. You will have to pay borrowing costs though, but on something that liquid it will be very small.

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    • > some sort of trade that would eliminate my exposure to SpaceX

      I think it's less complicated than you'd think.. just buy LEAPS puts proportional to your exposure.

      2 replies →

    • I've sold all my stocks. My reasoning is that if AI stocks go bust, they will take the global stock market with them.

  • 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.

  • There is a market for an S&P 500 ETF without those companies. I'll immediately switch over

  • In addition to covering the IPO in general last week, Matt Levine also wrote about this specific question Tuesday[1]:

    > Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds were not forced to buy stocks they didn’t like.

    > These rules create some tension between the idea that an index is a list of all the stocks and the idea that an index is a list of all the good stocks. Historically, it didn’t matter all that much: The point of the stock market is to tell you which stocks are good, so a company with a high stock valuation should be a very good company, so it should get a high weighting in both the Index of Good Companies and the Index of All the Companies.

    > But SpaceX — and also maybe OpenAI and Anthropic in their coming IPOs — will probably break that link. SpaceX will probably (1) do all sorts of stuff that index funds hate and that index providers have specifically tried to exclude and also (2) be gigantic, because the market loves it.

    [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-26/ind...

  • Apparently, the index funds are based on free float and since the number of free floating shares is limited, the total exposure to the index will be very small.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • We're going to witness bigger blast than the great depression, dot com bust and 2008 crisis combined.

    These greedy capitalists are after the pension funds + retail investor (ETFs in particular) through IPOs but there's no profitability in sight.

  • Waiving profitability requirements to join the S&P 500 and trigger auto-buys from index funds is DEI for corporations.

  • They will only be added to those indexes if they are actually trading at a value that places them in the top 100 or 500 companies in the US. If they fall below that price then they will be kicked out of the index just like any other company.

    What exactly is the risk to normal investors if that’s the case? If it’s all a big scam then they will trade lower and they’ll naturally be kicked out of the index.

    This is a rule that will apply to all new companies. When Anthropic and OpenAI go public they will also benefit from the rule. Do you think the media/public will be just as outraged when they do it?

    The goal of the S&P 500 is to keep the index representative of the US market. They have in fact changed rules in the past when market conditions have changed. These mega IPOs are an entirely new market condition, as private companies have never been this big before listing in history. So large that they immediately fall into the top 100 or 500 largest companies in the country.

    There’s also the fact that Nasdaq is a private company and it now has competition from the new Texas exchange. SpaceX is actually dual-listing on TXSE and Nasdaq. Nasdaq needs to keep these giant IPO companies happy because if they don’t they will list on the competitor exchange which would be disastrous for Nasdaq (supercharging their competitor).

    These things affect each other as well. Nasdaq wants to make sure they get the IPO on their exchange, so they include them in the Nasdaq 100. S&P 500 doesn’t want to be outdated by missing a trillion dollar company from their index, while other exchanges like the Nasdaq 100 include them.

    There’s a real case to be made that this is just self interest on the part of the exchange and the other index providers.

is anyone surprised? the IPO documents are a disaster, and the finance-tube talking heads are all tearing it to shreds

How can I transfer my shares of VTI for an interest in this pension fund, before it’s too late?

  • 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.

    • 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.

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    • NVDA is like 8% of SPY and 6.7% of VTI. So these mega tech stocks are less dominant in VTI, but it's not a night and day "won't really be affected" kind of difference.

      And most index funds including Vanguard track an external index. So when the index changes the rules, Vanguard changes what it buys. Vanguard is also famous for always siding with the management, they take the activist side of any debate approximately 0% of the time, so don't expect them to be fighting this for you.

  • BY getting a job in Denmark in the sector that this pension fund covers. It's a "member-owned pension fund for academics."

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.

  • 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

    • 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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That's a great start, now they need to add pretty much anything swept up in the AI Ponzi scheme that NVidia and others are running. The circular money flows are astounding once on see them. LLMs and "AI" is great, until you actually have to pay for it an an un-subsidized price. I'm working to do that locally, on a machine I control, for my own personal uses. (I'm old, and retired)

The whole market is running on fumes, most of the actual value of the physical economy has been extracted by the Epstein class. It will not be pretty when it implodes, and people have to actually make things for a living again. (I've worked in a job shop, making gears, I know what its like).

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.

Good. Would love to buy SpaceX stock at a 90% discount after the IPO and the next tech / AI correction.

  • Why is it a good thing to buy something that is financially not well run up front, and usually things don’t get better as time goes on however, if you’re in first, you can just sell it down the road and let someone else hold the bag in time.

    Tesla was a great ride if you got in early but long-term from this point on if you had any significant amount of money, why would you buy them now? Unless you like sleepless nights…

    • It’s a good thing because it’s definitely an interesting company worth investing into long term. But not at this valuation. 10% seems reasonable given the profits perspective.

  • Imagine not wanting to own a piece of the first company to make a re-usable orbital class booster.

    • Yeah, I also don't want to eat a tasty morsel if you roll it around in the dirt and serve it up covered in bugs and hair.

      And that's basically what SpaceX is right now after you account for xAI and twitter in the mix.

      So I'd love to own a piece of the SpaceX from a decade ago - but the current offering smells pretty bad.

      Combined with the fact that at this point, Musk clearly isn't opposed to running a business with dramatically inflated valuations based on vaporware, lies, & hype (cough - Tesla - cough) it just makes me far more skeptical than I might otherwise be.

      I think caution is warranted here.

      Essentially - I want to own the SpaceX that could have been if we didn't end up with the shoddy k-hole version of musk in charge of things.

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    • > Imagine not wanting to own a piece of the first company to make a re-usable orbital class booster.

      They didn't say they didn't want to own it, they said they wanted to own it at a : "90% discount after the IPO and the next tech / AI correction."

      It is possible for a company to be both technically impressive and horrifically overvalued.

      5 replies →

    • SpaceX is now an AI company with a rocket side hustle. At least that’s how the S1 looks.

    • With this governance structure, you won't actually own anything. Ownership implies that you have a say as a shareholder.

    • Imagine buying the most overvalued company of all time helmed by a crazy man who does Nazi salutes. Payback period? Who cares! Orbital class booster yayyyy

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    • I'd love to own SpaceX - what I don't want to own is all the unprofitable, toxic dogshit its ketamine-addled CEO folded into it that has nothing to do with putting stuff into orbit or selling Starlink.

The part that gets me is that changing of the rules by exchanges and financial regulators to essentially force mass purchases on a small float. That's disgusting and in a just world, those people would go to jail.

The funny part of all this is that SpaceX has achieved a lot but what might break them, or at least weigh them down heavily, is the impulsive and forced purchase of Twitter. Before anyone claims it was some kind of master plan, Elon went to court to get out of it but was forced into it [1].

What happened? Mass firings, pushing his own tweets because his fragile ego couldn't handle Joe Biden getting more likes [2] and Twitter opened the floodgates for hate speech [3] and worse [4]. Advertisers fled. Fidelity (who foolishly was part of the acquisition) massively wrote down the value [5]. Elon had used Tesla shares as collateral and was possibly facing a margin call.

How did he get out of it? Well, in 2023 Elon founded xAI to challenge OpenAI. People invested in this for some reason. And by 2025, Elon merged Twitter with xAI, overvaluing Twitter at $33 billion (which is still down 25% from the purchase) [6].

Now, I imagine the xAI investors were unhappy with Elon using xAI to bail out himself so what did he do? Easy. Make SpaceX acquire xAI of course [7].

Thing is, xAI and Twitter/Grok are a massive drain on SpaceX's finances, losing more than $10 billion annually allegedly [8].

Twitter did not have to end up as part of SpaceX. SpaceX would've been a better company without it. SpaceX already faces headwinds from the incredibly expensive and behind-schedule Starship program. Part of all of this regulatory fixing is to make sure the insiders (and Elon himself) get bailed out.

It's also not the first time [9].

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/elon-musk-offers-to-end...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/twitter...

[5]: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/29/fidelity-twitter-x-value-el...

[6]: https://www.fintechweekly.com/magazine/articles/xai-acquires...

[7]: https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-spacex-merge-with-xai...

[8]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xa...

[9]: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/21/13698314/tesla-completes...

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.

Sorry, fuck SpaceX

  • Now are we going to bomb Denmark? Or Venezuela style? Greenland of course is part of Miami anyway so that needs to be regaineed ASAP which is another top priority.

[flagged]

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;

  • Isn't that how Facebook is ran too? Basically Zuckerberg's private company, that in theory is public?

    • Though (at least to my knowledge) Zuckerberg doesn't have a history of abusing his authority to make deals that advantage other companies he owns at the expense of Facebook.

      E.g. SpaceX buying up large numbers of Cybertrucks Tesla couldn't sell at MSRP, not even negotiating a good fleet sale deal.

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    • 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.

  • 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.