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S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic

810 points10 hoursarstechnica.com
mattbrewsbytes54 minutes ago

Letting new stocks marinate in the market and get 4 quarters of SEC filings along with following all the GAAP accounting practices will definitely help evaluate them before inclusion. The last large boom/bust cycle had a couple of companies, at least, that were doing illegal things. I'm not stating that these three are, just that nobody knows and the process should play out.

I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?

zhivota8 hours ago

Big relief for me. As a passive investor, I want the indices to follow the same passive strategy they always have, and specifically not make exceptions for specific companies like SpaceX wanted.

Plenty of ways to get exposure to that stock without it going into the indices it is not qualified for.

anonu58 minutes ago

You'll eventually get exposure to it when it gets added in 12 months. Unless there are better profitability criteria. Ultimately it's all about market returns. If other indexes add it and outperform then eventually money will shift to those funds that do better.

jaylittle49 minutes ago

More than likely none of these AI companies will exist 12 months from now. Their carcasses will be devoured by entities with enough money to buy up the scraps after the bubble pops and the market implodes.

Neither SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic have a future. What's a shame is that had Elon not merged SpaceX with xAI it might've actually had a future - but he had to go and ruin it.

What an idiot.

jgalt21251 minutes ago

I think it will be longer than 12 months, if ever.

> To join the S&P 500, a company must demonstrate positive GAAP net income in both its most recent quarter and the sum of the trailing four consecutive quarters

asdfasgasdgasdg55 minutes ago

Well it’s just the S&P. Other big indices may include it eg the Russell 3000. But it’s not quite as big of a deal as it seems because the market cap on which they scale is the float not the whole value of the company.

root-parent3 hours ago

This thread should be marked as dupe. But ChrisArchitect seems very picky...

Previously: "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718

sahildeepreel52 minutes ago

Russel 1000 will include it in 5 days. Nasdaq in 15 days.

jgalt21253 minutes ago

Same here. I was so upset about the prospect of my index funds / retirement savings being force fed 100X revenues investments in large size that I emailed my Representative and both Senators. And to add to the irony, I used ChatGPT to help me write these letters.

gizajob8 hours ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> This news tanked 5% off the Nasdaq yesterday

No, it did not. The market moved in reaction to earnings misses from e.g. Broadcom [1] and the strong jobs report.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/broadcom-stock-sin...

energy1237 hours ago

and Meta saying they want to issue. Combined with the IPO scramble there's a lot of dilution and raising hitting the same sector in a very short period of time. Can the public markets pony up the cash in the short timeframe? It seems investors said no, or at least the uncertainty was high enough that they trimmed the risk.

+2
JumpCrisscross7 hours ago
vasco8 hours ago

The market moved in reaction to the totality of events that happened in the world all averaged out through the actions of the participants, anyone who says "this" was what happened on any day is wrong. Some days have dominating factors but even if the event is the dominant one, the reason why it has the impact it does might be a 3rd or 4th level effect.

+1
JumpCrisscross8 hours ago
+1
khazhoux7 hours ago
d--b8 hours ago

The strong job numbers too.

On a side note, I find it very sad that strong job numbers make stock plummet.

It really is an indication that the stock market is mostly speculative and not concerned about the actual economy.

+1
JumpCrisscross8 hours ago
+5
bruce3434347 hours ago
energy1237 hours ago

These companies are capex heavy and need to reach into the capital markets to sustain their growth. The cost of capital is correlated with inflation. Why is this the fault of the stock market? Maybe blame the government for diluting the money supply?

gizajob7 hours ago

That’s a lazy take. My spidey senses tell me otherwise.

mawadev7 hours ago

-5%? Oh no panic sell everything now, its so over - Warren Buffet

sscarduzio6 hours ago

I agree, but… Plenty? Really?

flakeoil6 hours ago

Just buy the stock or buy a mutual fund which invests in IT, AI, Tech what have you. Sooner or later they will probably also be included in the general index funds.

duttish6 hours ago

Exactly. Once they have enough float and has had enough time for actual price discovery they'll be included in index funds like any other large cap stock.

reactordev4 hours ago

This. This a risk stance where they want to see the performance in 3-6 months. I have no doubt hundreds of funds will buy in but the major index needs to be sure it’s not going to drag down the entire stack with its inclusion.

BlandDuck5 hours ago

Exactly. That's what the index funds would have had to do as well.

prasadjoglekar6 hours ago

Yes. Plenty is correct. Fidelity let's you buy SpaceX at IPO with only $2K in the bank.

And there are other reasons to be cautious. Many passive funds don't license the SP500 and instead mirror it with their own synthetic index. They are not bound to respect this decision.

intrasight4 hours ago

I think caution is most warranted, but I also think it's likely that SpaceX will become a real-life Weyland-Yutani Corporation (i.e. "The Company") of Alien and own space. But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

+1
throw72 hours ago
dbalatero4 hours ago

> But I'll be long dead before that plays out.

Given how that's played out in the movies, I'd be happy about that.

zerobees2 hours ago

I get what you're saying, but I think there's a contradiction between wanting to be a passive index-fund investor and having opinions like that. The core tenet of index investing is that the market knows better than you.

matwood5 hours ago

> the same passive strategy they always have

You'll be shocked to know they have changed the inclusion rules a number of times.

I suspect if in 12 months these megacaps are still megacaps, they will revisit the profitability rules. It's hard to have an index with 500 of the largest, most significant companies leaving out companies with trillion dollar market caps.

steveBK1231 hour ago

Seasoning and profitability rules are why S&P does not have as steep of a drawdown or as long as a recovery as Nasdaq over the last 30 years of market performance.

The S&P recovered from Dotcom bottom in ~7 years while the Nasdaq-100 took 15 years. Likewise Nasdaq took 3.5 years and the AI hype to recover back to its COVID highs in 2024 while S&P had the same recovery in about 2 years.

This is the downside to Nasdaq having higher returns in tech bull markets.

So the indices have a very different volatility profile by design, we should be happy to have the choice rather than have them all converge to the same product.

londons_explore4 hours ago

My personal photography blogging business has a market cap of a trillion dollars too.

I have 1 trillion shares, and I sold 1 to a mate for a dollar.

Total company revenue is like 50 bucks a month and profits are nil.

Can I be in the S&P 500 too?

matwood4 hours ago

Anthropic has raised $130B. It's a bit more than selling a share to your mate for $1.

Matl4 hours ago

Yes, it's like selling a share to a group of mates who hear from their mates that AI is hot so they want in. Still does nothing for the profit not being there to pay those investors back in any other way than via new investors (ie pension funds).

kmbfjr1 hour ago

Is it when X is clearly engaging in creative financial engineering with a goal of maximizing their value.

MikeNotThePope5 hours ago

It’s a list of the 500 largest profitable companies. Gotta make some bottom line $$$ to be included. At least that’s how it’s worked in the past.

matwood5 hours ago

It also used to require 15 railroads, but the market moved on. They held tight on the profitability requirement with TSLA and missed a huge part of the growth. They may continue to hold the line on that going forward. But, if the AI companies grow their market caps, it's going to be hard to point to the S&P 500 as representing the most significant companies in the US market when trillions in market cap end up no represented.

Of course this all becomes moot if all the companies crash out. I don't think enough people are asking what if these companies don't crash out though.

+1
tialaramex4 hours ago
zippyman559 hours ago

Yep!! Respect to them. I was planning to move to an equal weight index but this gives me a little more time to evaluate options.

LinguaBrowse8 hours ago

I’ve moved my S&P 500 investments to the Equal Weight index to reduce my exposure to AI. Quite aside from SpaceX, I think the large-cap tech companies are making some uncomfortably large bets on AI and any major upset could cause a domino effect.

But as so many ETFs have a significant stake in large-cap US tech stocks (the top 10 holdings of the iShares MSCI World ETF is entirely comprised US Big Tech, making up 20% of the value of the ETF), I found S&P 500 Equal Weight to be pretty attractive.

As for SpaceX itself? I feel the numbers involved all sound a bit unbelievable to me. I fear that there will be a rug-pull sometime post-IPO, and retail investors (and taxpayers, if the US Government ends up taking a stake, as they have recently indicated they might do for OpenAI) will inevitably be left holding the bag.

derf_4 hours ago

> I found S&P 500 Equal Weight to be pretty attractive.

The rebalancing required to maintain equal weights means constantly selling your winners and buying more of your losers. That creates volatility drag. Stock returns are highly skewed: only about 4% of stocks outperform the market, and are responsible for most of its gains. By keeping your allocation to those stocks small through constant rebalancing, you are missing out on a large part of their gains. The vast majority of stocks underperform.

Maintaining the equal weighting also requires constant trading, which generally means higher fees. A market weighted fund, in contrast, naturally maintains its desired balance in response to price movements, without any trading.

Also, the equal weighting ignores the amount of outstanding float for each company. If the fact that NASDAQ has not (historically) been float-adjusted (a common anti-SpaceX talking point) gave you concern, this is even worse, due to the multiple orders of magnitude difference between the largest and smallest companies in the S&P. If enough money enters the equal-weight index, this can spark large amounts of buying in (relatively) small companies that is divorced from their economic performance.

The equal-weight index has outperformed the market-weighted index in some periods (not in recent memory), but with higher volatility (so worse risk-adjusted returns). That outperformance can mostly be explained by factor tilts implicit in the equal weighting (e.g., a higher allocation to mid-cap value stocks).

You would probably be better off with a mix of market-weighted funds explicitly designed to give you the factor tilts and risk exposure you want.

cj2 hours ago

If big tech ends up seeing a 40-50% draw down in the next 2-3 years, what ETF is best equipped to limit the blast radius?

simsla2 hours ago

I think there are no safe harbor investments at this time. Even gold is unpredictable.

Personally I went 80% world excl US and 20% equal weight S&P500 to hedge against what I think is an AI bubble. But if the market decides to adjust Nvidia's valuation 20% downward next week, I expect there to be ripple effects throughout the economy.

(Like the .com bubble, I think the tech is genuinely transformative and here to stay, but the valuations are just ridiculous.)

cool_dude852 hours ago

Selling winners and buying losers sounds an awful lot like "buy low, sell high".

vmg122 hours ago

Company performance doesnt follow a uniform distribution where each company is as likely to overperform as any other. Selling companies that are run well because their stock went up is a great way to miss out on a lot of money.

cfiggers2 hours ago

I think you're missing the feature of equal-weight index that your parent comment is attracted to—which is a sense that the market generally is out of balance toward AI investment at the moment and that there's a correction coming, which the equal-weight index will have less exposure to.

Your concerns sound valid provided things continue on as they have (I'm not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice) but the commenters above you are specifically worried that it's not going to do that. In which case, the disadvantages you point out of the equal-weight index will be handily outweighed. If an AI bubble popping causes the market-weighted funds to suffer, it doesn't matter that we've avoided trading fees along the way.

Ensorceled1 hour ago

> As for SpaceX itself? I feel the numbers involved all sound a bit unbelievable to me.

If the SEC was doing it's job, there would sanctions or jail time for those numbers.

CuriouslyC4 hours ago

I've been doing research on this subject for an article I'm writing, and the only way things end well if the government gets involved is if we pass legislation deprivatizing AI data centers. Like the dark fiber laid during the dotcom, the compute is the valuable thing here that will remain after the speculative bubble has burst. The deal isn't bad for the AI companies, they can depreciate on a short schedule while still getting a payout for the capex, and being able to offer tech companies compute subsidies puts the people in a stronger position than if we're subsidizing them directly.

frozenseven7 hours ago

[flagged]

Wololooo6 hours ago

People are doing so because the math is not mathing.

Assuming that all the claims are true, this would lead to a collapse under its own weight, because at that point, supposedly, most people won't be needed in the jobs they currently occupy.

Assuming the claims aren't true, there will be a reckoning where all the glitter thrown will hit the ground and people that invested would like to have their marbles back at whatever the cost.

I'd be betting on the latter rather than the former. BECAUSE all those companies are RUSHING for an IPO because none of them want to be left with the bag.

Just for the sake of comparison and to put things in perspective, just for the spaceX situation, running a datacenter is no easy task and require significant maintenance and supporting infrastructure, now you're going to tell me that you can achieve the same and even more in space where virtually everything is more complicated to achieve? And you're telling me that your entire business, or at least a big majority of it, will be this entirely unproven infrastructure? Seems like a bit of a stretch to me...

Now this being said, somehow some things may lie in the middle, but people seem to be a bit either too fond of the claims or too aggressive towards some part of the tech stack.

+1
everforward2 hours ago
lelanthran5 hours ago

> The greatest tech revolution by far and people on this site are trying to movie their money away from it. I hope y'all will do an honest retrospective in a year or so.

I see this sentiment often, and think it is short-sighted:

1. The tech fails at the goal - profitability is what we see for any tech that augments humans, which isn't anywhere close to satisfying the trillions in debt, busting the market and bleeding trillions from the economy.

OR

2. The tech succeeds at the goal - humans are mostly not needed anymore other than for menial low-paid work. Economy slows, then almost completely stops.

What is the outcome you see that keeps you optimistic? How do you intend to avoid the soup kitchen if this all works out? Because, you see, if this all works out you will have nothing of value to contribute too.

fauigerzigerk2 hours ago

Neither is very likely in my opinion.

I think the tech will work well for some tasks where a formal feedback loop exists (such as coding). In other areas it will take many years to adapt business processes and roles to make the best use of this technology. The total productivity boost could be around 1% p.a similar to the industrial revolution of the 19th century.

Stock prices could be at risk not from lack of demand but because the data center buildout is bound to slow dramatically as we come up against some serious bottlenecks like energy, grid, fab capacity, permissions, etc. Not much will have to be written off, but the delays could cause big problems for debt funded projects and companies.

This slowdown will allow the economy and the workforce to evolve away from execution and towards planning, strategy, research and development, idea generation, experimentation, oversight as well as manually handling a million exceptions and gaps left by current AI models.

I don't think there has ever been a tech boom without a tech bust. But that's not the same thing as the tech not working or causing economic collapse. Maybe this time is different. Who knows.

+2
Marha014 hours ago
CuriouslyC4 hours ago

I think there's a very small needle to thread, where the federal government can buy out the compute/data centers when the economics start to come apart, and the USA becomes for compute like China is for manufacturing. I expect anti-AI sentiment and adoption will trend better when the people feel like they're getting the lion's share of the benefit (which will happen naturally as models commoditize).

In the long term there will be a lot of work that AI _can_ do as well as (or better than) humans, where the human is still nominally doing the work, because of liability and verification requirements (e.g. medicine). Beyond that, I expect influencer/independent media to become the new it job.

asdfaoeu6 hours ago

AI can still have a massive impact while these three companies go nowhere.

Same as the dotcom and same as the railroads.

+2
JumpCrisscross6 hours ago
weird-eye-issue5 hours ago

That doesn't necessarily make it the best investment at this point in time. Especially on a short time horizon such as "a year or so" AI stocks could easily correct 50% or so. And if you think that sounds impossible then you probably don't have much experience with the stock market.

marcosscriven5 hours ago

If you’re here next year for the “honest retrospective”, it’s a deal.

KellyCriterion5 hours ago

I'll taket this bet!

Saline95156 hours ago

Have you heard of the dot com bubble?

+3
frozenseven6 hours ago
throw0101a3 hours ago

> The greatest tech revolution by far and people on this site are trying to movie their money away from it. I hope y'all will do an honest retrospective in a year or so.

It does not necessarily follow that it being a technological revolution also means that it is a good investment—at least, perhaps, at this point in time. Railroads were a tech revolution, but a lot of them—and their investors—went bankrupt once the hype subsided and the overbuilding stopped. Once consolidation happened after their crash then railroads became a stable investment.

There are numerous examples of this in history, starting with (at least) canals; see Perez:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...

thefounder6 hours ago

Yeah like Cisco in 2000

alkonaut6 hours ago

The trouble this time is if this goes bust I see a huge crash. And if it's wildly successful it seems worse.

Hamuko5 hours ago

Call me when the greatest tech revolution stops burning through billions and billions of dollars.

kakacik5 hours ago

Large swaths of population will be left unemployed, lives ruined, with no replacement work in sight if it all pans out. So far, every company is working with massive debt, burning through money in hope that financials will start making sense sometime in the future. Adoption rate will be next to nothing if one has to pay say 3-5k a month for a normal unthrottled access. Very few will get much richer. I know I know, rich couldn't give smaller nano-fraction of a fuck about others, and in US its kind of built in the system, but most of mankind has different values.

If all that works out. Most people including me so far don't see the promised revolution, productivity gains are meager since not all of us work in code sweatshops churning simple crud or similar apps out like there is no tomorrow, llm models are extremely unreliable, confidently hallucinating shit out of blue, their quality highly varies over time as compute is present or not.

If thats your revolution, well fuck that revolution we can do better as mankind. Its probably a change, but bearing hallmarks of the worst in mankind we could muster together and seems to bring the worst traits out of humans, ie greed.

andsoitis7 hours ago

> I was planning to move to an equal weight index but this gives me a little more time to evaluate options.

S&P requires 4 consecutive profitable quarters, amongst other requirements, so if one of the new mega caps like SpaceX or Anthropic or OpenAI get included, you’d probably want to get the benefit of their performance.

Put differently, if one previously specifically picked an index fund that is not equal weighted, why would you change from that strategy?

Ensorceled1 hour ago

> you’d probably want to get the benefit of their performance.

What performance? None of these companies have established "performance" and they are all still burning money in a race to be the industry leader.

There is no evidence these companies can be profitable without some kind of significant hardware advance.

enaaem6 hours ago

Many people already have x% of their portfolio allocated to a growth fund, that might include fast growing AI companies. You need to keep the risk profile consistent. If you change the rules you mess up people's strategy.

abustamam2 hours ago

Yeah if people wanted to change their risk profile they would, they wouldn't want their low risk investments to suddenly be high risk. That would suck and mean disaster if that person is heavily allocated to low risk near retirement time.

integricho7 hours ago

But they haven't been good performers, and don't deserve joining s&p, and that is the point, do not make exceptions just because Elon Musk or whatever delusional billionaire says so.

JumpCrisscross9 hours ago

> I was planning to move to an equal weight index

The only substantial effect I've seen of the influencers who were doomsplaining this decision was some minor churn in retirement assets from low-cost S&P 500 followers to higher-cost funds. (The market, broadly, never priced in a rebalancing of the S&P 500. So this was almost entirely whipped up by influencers.)

Broadly speaking, if you were actually considering trading on the back of S&P's decision, or worse, if you actually did, consider trimming who you follow for financial advice.

vostrocity8 hours ago

The market may not have ever priced in a rebalancing of the S&P 500, but the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable.

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable

Yup. Which is why it was always a long shot. I personally thought they'd adopt some of the seasoning rules, but they were more conservative than even that.

matwood5 hours ago

> but the S&P 500 also has never allowed entry of companies that may never become profitable

I suspect this will be revisited if all these companies are still 1T+ market cap 12 months from now. At some point the S&P will have to say the market itself has spoken and likely capitulate.

+1
JumpCrisscross5 hours ago
kgwgk8 hours ago

> The market, broadly, never priced in a rebalancing of the S&P 500

And if you had seen it what would have that pricing looked like?

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> if you had seen it what would have that pricing looked like?

Look up rebalancing trades, or, less graciously, rebalancing front running. If the index is going to rebalance to include a new entrant, you'll see the other components trade down in anticipation. It's a very tight signal, and it wasn't present to any measurable degree for the S&P 500.

+1
kgwgk8 hours ago
zeroonetwothree9 hours ago

They weight by free float so it would been something like 0.3%. Hardly the end of the world

figmert8 hours ago

Why is that relevant? The rules are in place for a reason, why does it matter what the percentage is? They're not profitable. When they prove they're worth the dollars, they can be included, per the rules.

Also, S&P500 has a current market cap of $67 trillion, 0.3% of that is some $200billion. That is essentially a wealth transfer to the rich. They don't need it.

smilekzs7 hours ago

> why does it matter what the percentage is

This percentage directly determines the influence on SP500 index funds holders (SPY, VOO, etc.).

The outcome could have been:

1. not included (0%)

2. included, weight by free float (0.3%) --- 54th in the list between $AXP and $MCD

3. included, weight by free float x 3 (0.9%) --- 19th in the list between $ORCL and $JNJ

4. included, weight by market cap (1.75 trillion / 67 trillion = 2.6%) --- 8th in the list between $AVGO and $META

https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500

#2 is _much_ closer to #1 than #3 (let alone #4), meaning that had an exemption been made to allow SpaceX in, given the rest of the existing rules, at least the impact to ETF holders would not be outblown. The same could not be said for NASDAQ , which was the main source of all the debate.

ralferoo7 hours ago

Yeah, the thing that really concerns me about the other indices is the minimum free float in calculations, so not only will SpaceX appear in the index way too early, they'll be artificially giving it a massive boost, meaning that passive fund investors are forced to buy even more. That is the most egregious part of all.

I can partly see the rationale - existing stockholders will want to ditch their stock ASAP to cash in on the artificially elevated prices, and so there's a good chance the free float will increase quicker than the index can capture it, but this rule change will be driving those sales. It's all a scam.

I'm glad a good chunk of my US holdings are in S&P tracked ETFs because they won't include SpaceX until it's ready, but another 25% of my funds are in funds tracking FTSE global indices (so equivalent to about another 15% in US), and I haven't yet found a good alternative to those. I might end up having to switch to separate UK, S&P 500 and global ex-US, but making that switch would probably cost me as much as just sucking it up and being forced to buy SpaceX.

Dylan168075 hours ago

> #2 is _much_ closer to #1 than #3 (let alone #4)

Even with linear scaling, being one third of the way between two numbers is not what I would call underlined-much closer. But zero punches above its weight here. Those extra orders of magnitude should make some impact on the scale.

matwood5 hours ago

> The rules are in place for a reason, why does it matter what the percentage is? They're not profitable. When they prove they're worth the dollars, they can be included, per the rules.

I'm sure you know this, but the rules have been changed many times over the years. Now that companies IPO much later with huge market caps, I suspect we'll see more rule changes over time. The S&P 500 is fairly conservative, so they held tight this time. If these companies are still 1T+ 12 months from now, there will be a very strong argument that the market has decided these companies are important regardless of current profitability, and the S&P will likely have to revisit.

kortilla8 hours ago

> That is essentially a wealth transfer to the rich. They don't need it.

These are not valid arguments. The companies that get added to the S&P are always owned in some fraction by rich people.

SpaceX is obviously majorly owned by Elon, but it’s also owned by regular employees, a bunch of private investors and other funds that regular people invest in.

> They're not profitable.

Right

> When they prove they're worth the dollars,

Profitable isn’t related to “worth the dollars”. You need to look at income and how much is being reinvested into growth. Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet.

+1
m-i-l6 hours ago
+2
gizajob8 hours ago
+1
muadddib8 hours ago
figmert6 hours ago

> Profitable isn’t related to “worth the dollars”. You need to look at income and how much is being reinvested into growth. Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet.

Sure, but we the only thing we know about the company is the current S1 filing. Need to time to see what all of that looks like. Fast tracking it and essentially forcing other people to buy without scrutinizing is the problem. They may very well be worth the money they claim, but we won't know until after they've proven it. That's what the rules are there for.

+2
SkiFire138 hours ago
Marazan5 hours ago

> Profitable isn’t related to “worth the dollars”. You need to look at income and how much is being reinvested into growth. Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet.

Amazon met profitability requirements and went into the SP500 at around $2.40 in November 2005. Two years before it was $2.70. Six Years before it was $4.40.

Two years _after_ listing it was $4.50. Six years after it was ~$10.

Waiting for profitability seems like it was a good bet.

jjav6 hours ago

> They weight by free float so it would been something like 0.3%. Hardly the end of the world

That's one way to look at it. At a personal level, it's a small sliver and if it were to drop, its influence on your balance isn't much. So that's true.

Another way to look at it is that with ~200 million people owning index funds, all their funds balances together, even a tiny fraction of a percent is a massive amount of money being force-fed into spacex, which is to say, mostly into Elon's pocket (since he owns vast majority of the shares).

So why is it fair to change the rules to give this massive wealth transfer to Musk, who certainly does not need the extra money?

trumpdong5 hours ago

Are you sure he doesn't need it? People are saying SpaceX has six months to bankruptcy.

kmbfjr1 hour ago

Such is life.

kmbfjr1 hour ago

Me losing $500 to Musk’s clever idea is still me losing money. It isn’t like this is a normal market event.

If it is not the end of the world, cover my losses.

ddalex8 hours ago

"they only be stealing a tiny amount so not worth doing anything"

KaiserPro7 hours ago

Its a sensible move. The spaceX IPO is a mess, and if it doesn't go full enron I'm not sure what will happen to the wider market.

matwood5 hours ago

BTW, Enron was in the S&P 500 when it went bankrupt. Other fun fact is that it was replaced with NVDA.

danielovichdk9 hours ago

Stocks and money. It's so boring.

I will go drive my old German car now, and get a bit drunk in a bottle of Nebbiolo while listening to some French lunatic with a piano.

Enjoy your trip to Mars and your self driving toy cars. The world is off its rails. Bit time.

uyzstvqs48 minutes ago

I will go ride my horse, and get a bit drunk off some ale at the local pub. You go enjoy your automobile, electricity, and telephony.

Electricity is overhyped anyway. Nikola Tesla is a scammer with his crazy ideas. Not to mention the scam that is Bell's telephony. Electricity is causing a copper shortage for us common folk. This electricity bubble is built only on hype, and will pop soon enough!

abustamam1 hour ago

Stocks and money should be boring for most people. I'm not a financial adviser and this isn't financial advice but I believe no one with a net worth less than $2m should ever buy an individual stock. Invest in a target date retirement fund for your 401k. Same for Roth Ira. If you have more money to invest after that, invest in an index that aligns with you values (for example I invest in an ESG index for environmental, social, and governance, ie no weapons or drugs). I've kept my money boring for over ten years and my boring investments have over tripled in value. I consider it a point of pride that I don't know what the DOW is at or how much NVIDIA is trading at right now.

It always boggles my mind when someone who is middle to maybe upper middle class tries to time the market or buys/sells stocks in reaction to random news like this. At best you're going to be up maybe 50% on this trade, and you're going to pay commission to your broker, and may even need to pay taxes. At worst you're going to be down a lot and still pay the broker.

xeonmc8 hours ago

just be sure do it in that order and not the other way around

q3k8 hours ago

What's your SKILLS.md? Is your flow multi-agentic?

hugh-avherald7 hours ago

`--dangerously-skip-hype`

kome2 hours ago

i fully fully agree with you.

somewhatgoated8 hours ago

Sir this is a message board run by an US-American venture capitalist organisation; frankly what do you expect

Muromec7 hours ago

I expect the balancers to judge and some car batteries mysteriously catching fire as a counterweight.

euejcidnf1 hour ago

[dead]

MrGando7 hours ago

Dude, are you me? :D

wg07 hours ago

This is very smart of these folks because for just three companies, they can't ruin the trust and impeccable reputation they have built over the years.

This decision alone is worth several trillion dollars.

Allybag7 hours ago

Well, it might be a good decision but I think the possibility of Standard and Poor one day being worth trillions of dollars more than if they had included three companies a year or two earlier than when they inevitably join the index is absolutely zero.

bootsmann4 hours ago

SpaceX needs 4 profitable consecutive quarters to be included. If you have a lot of faith that they will achieve this I recommend you buy day 1 so you can ride the highs when the passive money eventually pours in.

wg04 hours ago

Absolutely. Plain and simple. Go ahead and buy if so sure.

SwellJoe6 hours ago

You've used the word "inevitably". Are you sure it's inevitable? SpaceX is launching at a ridiculous valuation, has two bad businesses bolted on to one modestly successful one, and all together the revenue puts the company well behind companies with a market cap vastly smaller than what they're pricing the IPO at.

This is a ridiculous situation, a ridiculous valuation, and a very risky business (data centers in space? c'mon, be serious).

polotics6 hours ago

More explicitly, it puts them at the same level as Kellog's, with one difference: breakfast cereals is profitable...

This is as per Patrick Boyle's https://youtu.be/IHD8BDFYyGI?si=FZ52TSEYnpJwZ1FT

SlinkyOnStairs3 hours ago

Their job, EXPLICITLY, isn't to maximize returns.

People don't buy the S&P 500 because they buy the index because it spreads risk. That they won't get maximum returns is the intended risk tradeoff they want.

That people consider the S&P 500 as a vehicle for "maximum money" is precisely why it should be considered in a bubble. And why actions like the NASDAQ's fast-track exceptions are so concerning.

The moment you start making exceptions to the rules because "gotta push the stock index higher", it's game over for the entire economy.

bell-cot4 hours ago

> ... Standard and Poor one day being worth trillions ...

S&P - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global - is a business intel & analytics firm, not an investment firm. Their S&P 500 list just one of many datasets that they manage and sell. Cleverly trying to pick future winners and losers has little potential upside for them, and could put them into direct competition with many of their customers.

alaudet1 hour ago

It's amazing how many intelligent people don't understand this. People on the internet just like to complain. Not one single person is being denied anything, each and everyone one of us can go fill up on all the high valuation unproven companies we want to, directly or through an ETF that tracks some index that is making exceptions.

Drupon8 hours ago

Crazy to see the Twitter behavior here of really smart, well conveyed top level comments replied to by weird propaganda pushing bottom feeders.

solenoid09378 hours ago

HN discussion quality has deteriorated dramatically, especially for anything AI related.

etempleton3 hours ago

One of my indices of mania. You saw similar comments for crypto, blockchain, NFT, VR.

n_e1 hour ago

Unfortunately it's not limited to the trendy topics. For example there is a huge amount of factually wrong comments on the topic of npm vulnerabilities. I'm sure it's the same on topics I know less about.

infecto2 hours ago

Sadly you are absolutely correct. The quality has nosedived in the past 1-2 years. I am not sure the exact cause but one of the things I noticed is a massive uptick in users who have insane post counts with sub 1-2 year history.

Breaking the rules but it does feel very much like Facebook or Reddit where there are distinct hive minds on topics and it just becomes a pissing match between brain-dead individuals.

xyzal6 hours ago

Mind that the host of this site has an interest in keeping the hype going on ...

infecto2 hours ago

And? Continue down your conspiracy theory please.

lionkor7 hours ago

I suspect this is due to fatigue. I admit I often post low quality replies under AI slop posts, simply because flagging them does nothing when they are somehow upvoted above and beyond anything human made.

This fatigue also causes a lot of readers to skip the AI threads, meaning less self-moderation of the forum through voting.

discreteevent6 hours ago

No, it's bots. When it comes to AI the HN community is now the mark.

kortilla8 hours ago

The top level comments are not smart or well conveyed, they are just the other side of the internet echo chamber. “Good, the rich don’t need money”, etc.

I think Elon owned companies are just a third rail for any kind of intelligent discussion because it turns into Elon fan boys arguing against Elon haters.

infecto2 hours ago

I think you pierced the hearts of Elon haters/fan boys and are getting downvoted.

Absolutely agree with your statement. Most top comments are just upvoted from the hivemind. Elon topics are always the worst because nobody even uses critical thinking and will just upvote/downvote based on the theme of Elon = Good or Bad.

JoshTko51 minutes ago

So what's your intelligent argument as to why SpaceX's deserves an exception? Please lay out a case that's comessurate to the gravity of such an exception

germandiago58 minutes ago

Responsible decision as things stand today.

alecco4 hours ago

Yesterday:

"SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" (bloomberg.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718

Ars used to do deep insightful articles a couple of days after the news but today it's just regurgitated blogspam that is 2 days old news. And way more political. It's sad.

dtgriscom2 hours ago

"Denied Fast Index Entry" is a much more honest title than "Rejects SpaceX", which is just click-bait.

shmoil4 hours ago

If you have any doubts, I highly recommend to review the stock price history of GPRO(GoPro), BYND (Beyond Meat), CGC (Canopy Growth), TLRY (Tilray).

These are just some somewhat recent IPOs that come to mind, I am sure I am forgetting some.

In the case of GPRO, look up their first quarterly reports after the IPO. Pure comedy gold.

beernet4 hours ago

This comparison is nuts and invalid. Each of Anthropic/OpenAI/SpaceX has more revenue than the mentioned companies combined at IPO time.

Doomers gonna doom

shmoil4 hours ago

And scammers gonna scam.

thinkingtoilet1 hour ago

Open AI has never made a cent of profit.

newsicanuse3 hours ago

Don't be one of those cluless techbros

khriss7 hours ago

A lot of comments here are saying that the impact on the S&P would have been 'minimal' since the S&P is float weighted. So SpaceX would have been ~0.3% of the index.

The point isn't that the impact would have been minimal. 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?

Trying to justify it based on an argument that it would have been 'just' $200 billion, is absurd since that $200 billion is coming largely from the public via index funds that would have been forced to buy SpaceX shares.

matwood5 hours ago

> Why should SpaceX get exemptions from entry requirements to the S&P when every other company before it didn't?

The rules have never been set in stone and changed a number of times since the S&P 500 was created. The current set of rules are based around the old way of companies IPOing and growing into something that could be included. Now, companies are staying private longer and IPOing with huge valuations.

Take AI/Elon emotion out of it for a second, and there is a rational debate to be had if multiple 1T+ market cap companies should be accommodated for in an index that's supposed to represent the 500 largest/most influential US companies. If these companies are still in the 1T+ ranges a year from now, I suspect the S&P may change some rules to get them in with the idea that the market has spoken.

JumpCrisscross7 hours ago

> 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.

khriss7 hours ago

> 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?

JumpCrisscross6 hours ago

> 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.

ExoticPearTree7 hours ago

> Why should SpaceX get exemptions from entry requirements to the S&P when every other company before it didn't?

I could give you a lot of non-stocks related examples of why rules should not be set in stone.

jb_briant8 hours ago

I wonder if profitable means that investment must be recouped or just if your operational expenses must be compensated by your earnings.

Anthropic is becoming "profitable" while burning a series H of 69 bns usd. Does it count as profitable?

I'm curious if someone well versed in finance can answer, because from my uneducated perspective, it's not profitable to burn billions in order to make a billion.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-...

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> wonder if profitable means that investment must be recouped or just if your operational expenses must be compensated by your earnings

S&P requires profitability (i.e. net income) according to GAAP. That definition incorporates both ROA and operating income.

awestroke8 hours ago

EBITDA is typically used to evaluate profitability.

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> EBITDA is typically used to evaluate profitability

S&P requires GAAP profits, i.e. net income. EBITDA is above that.

ferrouswheel8 hours ago

Finally some adults in the room.

kburman1 hour ago

I wonder if Elon would now reconsider IPO.

site-packages11 hour ago

This would have been so disastrous. What a great move.

hvb29 hours ago
satvikpendem9 hours ago

Nice to see others are thinking the same, as I just posted the same article as a dupe of this one.

lenerdenator2 hours ago

Is that... no, it can't be.

squints

Is that an institution working for long-term stability instead of short-term gain?

looks through binoculars

Holy hell... it is!

glimshe5 hours ago

They don't make decisions like that out of wisdom and restraint. I imagine they got calls from Vanguard and others after index funds themselves got calls from institutional investors.

everdrive2 hours ago

I'm quite relieved as the S&P should be stable and slow. But with that caveat said, is this why the S&P 500 dropped off a cliff on Friday? If so, why?

cascades421 hour ago

The story being reported is that the unexpectedly strong US jobs report will push the Fed towards a rate hike, which often is correlated with a drop in stock prices.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-sink-rc...

steveBK1231 hour ago

Quite the opposite.

It dropped because tech dropped and it still has a lot of tech.

This is why QQQ was down far more than SPY, as QQQ is more tech heavy and will be adding these companies.

droidjj2 hours ago

The general consensus is stocks nosedived after the strong jobs report, because strong labor market means its more likely Fed will hike interest rates to curb inflation.

oceansky2 hours ago

Impossible to know for sure. But I would speculate a lot of investors are "bullish" on these three companies and would rather invest more on them.

throwawaycan2 hours ago

No. All index dropped on Friday.

enraged_camel1 hour ago

Jobs numbers came way stronger than expected, and previous two months also got revised up.

Strong job numbers + increasing inflation = overheated economy = goodbye interest rate cuts. In fact, there's a significant chance that rates will go up this year. Perhaps even more than once.

That means cost of borrowing will increase, which is bad for business growth.

RobotToaster8 hours ago

It's a risky investment, yes there's a chance it could go to the moon, but it could also plummet to earth.

ncruces6 hours ago

Anyone knows what MSCI World will do?

flexagoon6 hours ago

Same question. It seems like they have had fast track rules for a pretty long time and will include SpaceX

https://www.msci.com/indexes/markets-in-motion/megacap-ipos

ncruces5 hours ago

So the funds will have to buy within 10 days of the IPO.

But I assume at least it's based on the free-float market cap?

flexagoon1 hour ago

Yes, it's based on free-float cap, so while it isn't ideal, it shouldn't be a huge deal for individual investors.

0x10ca1h0st3 hours ago

This is a duplicate thread.

Previously: "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718

satvikpendem9 hours ago
aswegs85 hours ago

Dodged a bullet... seems like they still have integrity.

spacebacon5 hours ago

Smart choice imo. One pass with the SRT wipes their moat out overnight.

https://github.com/space-bacon/SRT

emsign3 hours ago

Thank goodness my portfolio is safe from these junk papers.

mgianluc2 hours ago

Thats good honestly and a big relief

blobbers7 hours ago

Good. Financial grift needs to end. Passive investment has become slightly too passive. S&P saved us. We weren't so lucky when they were rating bonds before the GFC. Glad they seem to have grown some ethics and are not bending the knee to the rocketman.

trumpdong5 hours ago

As a rule, no one in the financial industry has ethics. They're doing this because they think it'll be more profitable.

bluecalm4 hours ago

Fast entry rules are terrible. There is an old adage IPO - It's Probably Overpriced. Warren Buffet explained why: It's the issuer who chooses the price and time to enter the market. They will pick circumstances that suits them best. The chances that an IPO is a better deal than multiple other companies available in the auction market at that time which didn't get to choose the timing is close to 0 and it's not worth thinking about it - just don't buy IPOs ever.

I don't care about profitability, sustainability, ESG scores or anything like that. If the market is pricing unprofitable company at hundred of billions maybe there is a good reason for it. I do care about market having time to evaluate the company so index funds buy at fair prices. For this you need time and enough float and volume. Time being the main factor.

phplovesong4 hours ago

This is REALLY GOOD news for every passive investor. They try to game the system with this one, big time. There should be hearings about this, and new laws need to put in place to prevent something like this.

ChrisArchitect9 hours ago
berlianta7 hours ago
muadddib10 hours ago

Kudos to S&P 500. Vast majority of the world has no clue how trillions of $ from their pension funds is being funneled to the select few. Absolutely pathetic.

JumpCrisscross9 hours ago

> no clue how trillions of $ from their pension funds

Pension funds don't tend to follow the S&P 500, much less automatically. They're sophisticated institutional investors like CalPERS [1] who dabble in everything from public stocks to private equity.

It's other retirement assets, e.g. 401(k)s and IRAs, that tend to follow the S&P 500. But again, with substantial variation.

S&P including these companies would have driven a lot of money towards them. But there was a lot of misinformation around the magnitude of that drive, as well as the breadth of whom it would affect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CalPERS

viceconsole8 hours ago

In the US at least, many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors who promise fantastical returns that will help dig them out of their funding ratio hole. Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund for their equity component instead of getting wined and dined into an illiquid, opaque private equity investment.

Telling that among OECD countries, the US is an outlier in having a much lower average funding ratio, and this despite the fantastic performance of the US stock market over the last 15 years.

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> many pension funds are not sophisticated, they're small, underfunded, and getting taken for a ride by expensive advisors

Who tend to come up with bumfuck benchmarks other than the common ones. Sometimes for good reasons. Often to justify their own comp.

> Many would be better off using an S&P 500 index fund

Maybe. They would probably be better off with some total-market funds (instead of biasing towards large caps, especially if they're small). But my point stands: pension funds don't tend to automatically follow any major index, much less the S&P 500 proper.

+1
kgwgk7 hours ago
joxdosba9 hours ago

[flagged]

lumost9 hours ago

It's quite clear that there is an effort to engineer mega financial vehicles that index tracking funds are forced to buy. The incentive to do so is massive, and there is nothing illegal about it.

As a holder of index funds such as the S&P, I'd much prefer that these vehicles are excluded for at least some period of time to ensure that the greater fool isn't simply my index portfolio.

joxdosba2 hours ago

> It's quite clear

In the same way 9/11 was quite clearly an inside job.

Alternatively, a crop of big companies with real, potentially world-changing technology are going public.

This isn’t exactly pets.com we’re talking about.

kortilla8 hours ago

Are you happy to be invested in Tesla? It is not profitable quarter to quarter and is included in your fund.

Why do you tolerate that and not this?

muadddib8 hours ago

I did, in fact, use words. Would you prefer heiroglyphics?

viccis9 hours ago

All of those are real, natural, organic and, might I add, "actual" words.

36838263128199 hours ago

[dead]

propagandist9 hours ago

The comment above is perfectly clear, and if you have been living under a rock since the Reagan years, that's on you.

See Elon talking about Tesla finally joining the S&P 500 so index funds would finally have to buy its shares. See a hundred examples where socialism is reserved for the few, the jungle and legal constraints for the rest of us.

psychoslave5 hours ago

A bit tangent, as I never had a single thought about investing any of the few precious attention moment into financial theaters.

if I get it this is an index to invest in common in distributed wallets chosen and managed by an organization named S&P?

I'ld be interested in something similar, but aiming at growing cooperatives, non profits, externally checked for alignment organisations striving to benefit humanity as a whole. It doesn't have to be something that have strong garanties of direct personal financial profits, just no way it makes me in personal bankrupts, zero personal gain would be ok, staying ahead of inflation nice to have, and having some profits back would be acceptable.

Please be kind or hold from losing time and energy for everybody with aggressive answers.

I'm just considering ways to make sure as few as possible resources end up in the control of techno fascists.

matt_kantor4 hours ago

> something similar, but aiming at growing cooperatives, non profits, externally checked for alignment organisations striving to benefit humanity as a whole

There are a lot of investment funds like this, usually called something like "ESG" (environmental, social, and governance) funds.

psychoslave2 hours ago

Hey thank you very much for your reply, it's deeply appreciated, this helped to start a rich research on the matter.

BLACKCRAB1 hour ago

[dead]

haeseong6 hours ago

[dead]

themuskgpt20253 hours ago

[dead]

sergiotapia9 hours ago

Major W. Regular people were going to get robbed blind.

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> Major W. Regular people were going to get robbed blind

Not really. One, it was unlikely to happen. The market not pricing in any rebalancing communicated that. Two, the magnitude–even for the S&P 500–would have been small. About a third of stocks are in passive strategies, about 15% in any index, and while most of that is the S&P 500, the index market is incredibly competitive.

S&P made the right move. But the tragedy this episode has revealed, at least to me, is in how venal and influential this new breed of financial influencers on YouTube and X are, and the degree to which they're willing to misinform to get clicks.

frikskit8 hours ago

What was unlikely to happen? It already happened in Nasdaq. It’s nice that it didn’t for S&P but for most investors it already did happen, so I’m not sure the ‘whatever’ attitude is warranted.

Also, since when is it appropriate/intellectually OK to respond to allegations of corruption by saying ‘stop freaking out, it’s only a small amount of corruption PER PERSON’.

JumpCrisscross8 hours ago

> What was unlikely to happen?

S&P adopting the rule changes.

> It already happened in Nasdaq

NASDAQ 100 is marketed as a tech-focussed fund. It's also way smaller. And it makes sense for it to include new issues. Total-market funds are also being adapted to include these, and again, that makes sense.

> for most investors it already did happen

What do you mean? For the vast, vast majority of investors, nothing happened. If S&P had adoped these rules, the majority of investors would still be unaffected.

> when is it appropriate/intellectually OK to respond to allegations of corruption by saying ‘stop freaking out, it’s only a small amount of corruption PER PERSON’

I'm saying the allegations of corruption were misplaced. The rule changes have been mooted for years. Did Musk et al try to put their thumbs on the scale? Sure. That should be called out.

But the scaremongering that followed was full of factual misrepresentations. Moreover, it presumed corruption across the board versus certain actors trying to corrupt a process, all for the purpose of getting views.

+1
frikskit5 hours ago
petesergeant8 hours ago

It was unlikely to happen anywhere but the Nasdaq-100, because only Nasdaq has the incentive to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411713

+1
JumpCrisscross6 hours ago
frikskit5 hours ago

But… it’s not just nasdaq it’s Russell indices too.

tigerlily4 hours ago

Meanwhile the NASDAQ fell 4.18% Friday just been. This seems more than just a coincidence, people have been talking about pulling investment ahead of the SpaceX IPO, and the latest market activity makes me think the discontent is tangible now.