Comment by petesergeant

Yeah, this has taken me several readings to understand, I guess because I hadn't really dug into it or thought about it, and also a lot the articles talk about "stock exchanges competing for SpaceX's business".

This whole story is about Nasdaq (company) specifically dangling inclusion into the Nasdaq-100 (index) as a means to get SpaceX to list on the Nasdaq (market). They're uniquely able to do this by owning a market and also an index that people care about.

NYSE couldn’t really do this because its own indices don’t matter much. FTSE Russell could theoretically make FTSE 100 inclusion easier to help attract a company to list on the London Stock Exchange, but SpaceX choosing London as its primary market would be odd. S&P Dow Jones Indices has no equivalent incentive, because it doesn’t own a listing venue; its main asset is the credibility of the S&P 500.

In all, this entire story has been about Nasdaq specifically being willing to weaken their index rules in order to attract SpaceX to their market.