Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation
reuters.com200 points by vrganj 4 hours ago
200 points by vrganj 4 hours ago
I have AkademikerPension as my pension fund through work and this move suits me quite well. They've already excluded Tesla as well as a variety of companies that profit of weapon production, fossil fuel production or are suspected for human rights violations.
https://akademikerpension.dk/ansvarlighed/ekskluderede-selsk...
In Norway the oil fund are actively arguing against boycotting these kinds of companies saying, and I paraphrase: "but our job is to earn money and we can't do that if you hippies keep standing in the way with your morals"
Good to see it isn't necessarily the case.
For some context, this Norwegian cartoon by a group that used to make satire for the government run news agency is a pretty decent summary of how things were discussed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mkuP6kQwNs.
The old man is a caricature of Jens Stoltenberg (who seems to be running the Norwegian economic machine rather well nowadays, controversial or not)
Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes. Also, like it or not, weapons production is going to happen and it's needed. Norway is the 5th largest weapons and defense manufacturer and while the so called Oil Fund doesn't directly invest in them, Kongsberg is 50% state owned.
> Glad Norway's oil fund has some sense and is above the virtue signaling of the Danes.
How would you know if they are doing those moves because it's what they believe in, vs it's just a position they'd like to broadcast publicly?
In my mind, a symbolic gesture would be to speak against Tesla and SpaceX without actually doing something, that'd be "virtue signaling" in my mind, but since they're actually doing something, a practical action to not just speak but also not invest into those companies, doesn't it stop being "virtue signaling" at that point?
That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit.
In turn you also want democratically elected politicians above that saying “yes, but the people want their money made ethically, so you can’t do that”.
> That’s exactly what you would want your money manager to say. It’s their job to turn a profit.
The job of the police is arresting people who break the law, but similarly to your money manager, you really don't want them to do this regardless of anything else, there is more things to consider than just "do everything you can to arrest people", and hopefully the same for your money manager. But also, I might be too European to understand the true value of "money grow regardless of society cost at large".
Of course, some back-and-forwards is healthy.
In a good system both sides fight for their interests, and the outcome is some middle road compromise that optimizes for everyone's benefit.
sorry, but i wouldn't want my money manager to attempt to engage in unethical or illegal practices in order to turn a profit...
Defensive weapons are very much needed in Europe…
Indeed, hence most European defense companies experiencing somewhat incredible growth recently, with no signs of stopping.
Do we need Americans weapons? Unlikely and probably counter-productive long-term. Do we need European weapons? Hell yeah!
How does Tesla fit with the rest of those?
I'm not a huge fan of Elon Musk but Tesla is a company that produces electric cars (mostly in western countries with half-decent labour laws), it's not associated with any of those things.
I guess one could argue with some merit that the governance is bad enough to exclude it on that basis alone?
Tesla has a P/E wildly out of line with the rest of their sector and is facing strong competition with a largely absentee CEO who has a history of making very bad decisions over the objections of more skilled staff (politics, of course, but also things like how the Cybertruck is so expensive to make and own). At some point that bubble is going to pop so I can understand a pension fund being more focused on long term returns passing on them.
Tesla is known for hazardous factory conditions, worker mistreatment etc.[1]
Then there's the autopilot misleading marketing, Cybertruck being glued together with spit glue and duct tape etc.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesla,_Inc.#Worki...
"Danish pension company Akademikir Pension has announced it will divest from Tesla due to ongoing concerns about labour rights, corporate governance, and Tesla CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk's behaviour."
https://www.europeanpensions.net/ep/Denmarks-Akademiker-Pens...
Agreed - Tesla has been an insanely good investment. I'm not sure about the next 10 years, but people have continuously underestimated them (and Elon Musk). The Norwegian so called Oil Fund owns more than 1% of Tesla.
I wanted to see how well Akademikerpension has done wrt. returns. This graph shows average yearly return from the financial crisis 2009 until 2021 and they are actually the best performing among other Danish pension funds [1].
[1] https://www.finanshus.dk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pensions...
I really want a QQQ/VOO replacement that excludes these new rushed IPOs that are just exit liquidity. There are ETFs that exclude harmful industries like gambling, weapons and tobacco. How about an ETF that doesn't include IPOs for six months or until insider lock ups periods are over.
Dimensional runs a bunch of ETFs which are effectively US & world equity index trackers that don’t slavishly follow the indices & can therefore avoid being forced to buy into IPOs or index updates. E.g. DFUS is effectively VTI (IIRC) without the requirement to immediately buy into IPOs that are added to the index:
https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/funds/dfus/us-equity-market-etf
(I have no relationship with Dimensional, nor do I invest in these funds - I just saw them mentioned in a YT video on this topic a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIHa6URUPk )
I think VGT is a good QQQ replacement. It is based [1] on the MSCI US Investable Market Information Technology 25/50 Index which is free-float adjusted [2] [3], meaning that SpaceX will have a lower weight due to its lower free float. Also, VGT has a substantially lower expense ratio (9 bps / year [4]) than QQQ (18 bps / year [5]). You can compare VGT and QQQ's holdings on these pages [6] [7].
[1] https://fund-docs.vanguard.com/F0958.pdf
[2] https://www.msci.com/indexes/documents/methodology/2_MSCI_25...
[3] https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/6bafd9e3-0474-f03b-16bd...
[4] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
[5] https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/about.html
That's fantastic. Thanks! I actually use QQQM which has lower fees. Seems like Invesco pulled a trick from marketing and segmented the market to have it both ways. I also need to find leveraged ETFs that have float adjusted weights which is a bit trickier. I might just pull out of TQQQ until the dust settles.
A long and a short cancel out. So you could construe this yourselves. (Recognise that this has a long tradition on HN ;)
Besides laziness being a tradition among programmers (in a good way), that kind of complex activity is going to generate tax in a lot of jurisdictions.
Except you still have to pay short interest, and I suspect the spacex short interest will be substantial.
VTI avoids these issues. It's float adjusted market cap weighted. More float allows better price discovery. So a company like spacex has negligible weight.
So are other major index funds. That's not the problem.
The problem is that the NASDAQ 100 and most likely also S&P 500, change their rules to permit SpaceX to be added early without traditional time for price discovery. It happens jsut five trading days before the major index rebalance.
After float adjustment SpaceX could be 1% of NASDAQ and 0.7% of SP500, but after full tranche escalation that takes over 130 days, SpaceX weight can be over 3% of NASDAQ and almost 2% of SP500 if the market cap stays near $1.5T.
(I think the price will decrease, so the weight will be smaller)
This is just a ploy to get exit liqudity as brikym, said. SpaceX collects enough capital to pay Twitter acquisition loans and then some, but the IPO not major boost for SpaceX finances. The coming merger with Tesla is clearly in the plans (C stocks).
> five trading days before the major index rebalance.
I didn't realize this. That's really scammy.
The point of these broad ETFs is that they include everything. Let the market decide. Of course they should own one of the largest public companies in the world. They're changing the rules on inclusion because the ipo is unprecedented and not owning it because [reasons] would be a dereliction of their duties.
You want an ESG fund
Also I dont see how weapons companies are harmful. Unless you're so naive to think defense is not a thing any person or country has to worry about in 2026
I think their point is not the ESG component, but firms with traditionally irrational valuations (à la GameStop) for which index inclusion exceptions have been made to facilitate short term liquidity for IPO participants. Seems as though one should be able to hold the broad market less that component.
Let the market decide what, though? What the market cares about may be different from what you care about, if the average investor has a higher tolerance for risk that you do. For pension funds, long term stability is key. A wide spread of large companies has traditionally been a good way to achieve that, but that isn’t guaranteed.
Apologies for the naivety, but, why is SpaceX valued so high? Starlink? Are rockets really a lucrative business? Don’t get me wrong, being able to send objects up into orbit is cool, but is it $1.8T cool?
Because of the Musk reality distortion field. The claim is that all data centers will move into space, and that SpaceX will completely own that market.
The datacenter thing is mostly just a meme that billionaires say because it makes them feel smart and gets them media attention, it doesn't seem to move stock significantly.
The actual distortion field is around Starlink. Which is the main product and the only one that's (nominally) profitable. It's the one all the hype centers around. xAI is barely even notable in the AI space.
This also makes it possible to judge the size of the distortion field, as Starlink is just an ISP, for which we have accurate valuations. And for what it concerns shareholders, a strictly worse one than a conventional ISP. Space infra is much more expenive than putting some glass in the ground, once.
Comcast is a behemoth of a company doing far more than just ISP. Worth a "mere" $90 billion. Charter Communications is a similarly sized "pure" telecom. Worth $20 billion.
Both of the above ISP companies have roughly 30 million subscribers. Starlink has 10 million. Yet they want $2 trillion at IPO.
A 20x to 100x overvaluation. And what do you get beyond an ISP?
* A private aerospace company that's not doing notably better than the space divisions of old aerospace. (Remember: Starlink is already accounted for so doesn't count here)
* An AI company that has so little demand it's currently handing a bunch of compute to Anthropic for such a deep discount the latter has claimed to become profitable.
* Twitter. Which is worth either $33b if you count Elon's internal buyout valuation, or $10b if you count realistic valuations.
While there is some hype around "The future of space!", the reality is that the long term growth for that is fairly dead in the current geopolitical climate. Nobody's saying it out loud yet but US Aerospace is being replaced. Fewer and fewer US launches will be bought. The EU is even building their own Starlink equivalent.
This sounds amazing until something needs replacement. Until data centers on earth has a 99.99% (or higher) level of autonomous operation with very minimal requirements to maintenance and part replacements, they're not sending anything into orbit...
It sounds amazing for 14yo boys who are not specifically into hard sci-fi.
I guess we'll see, because most 14 year olds don't have a lot of money to put into SpaceX.
I also sounds amazing until you remember how hard it is to cool something when your only option is radiative cooling.
You could also transfer the heat to tungsten rods and drop them on rivaling earth-bound data centers.
Why tungsten? In terms of thermal conductivity, It’s way worse than silver and copper and on par with good aluminium alloys. Those are cheaper and much lighter (so again much cheaper to put into orbit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
The idea is to use tungsten because of the high melting point and hardness.
Where did they say that all data centers will move into space? I thought the claim was that it's going to be more and more feasible and profitable to have DC's in space.
I truly do not understand why anyone believes anything Musk says anymore.
could it be that those people don't actually believe him and just appreciate the genuine shit-show he puts up enabling them to laugh at people who get sad about what he says, and their eagerness to believe
One must also consider the proximity between musk and the trump administration, the market pricing this proximity is the market pricing power, access and aligning its interest with the blatant collusion between political power and business in the US.
That or the good ol’ « dump it on retail » scheme
We know that xAI (with X) is struggling.
SpaceX is growing quite slowly. You could argue that Starship is likely to somewhat accelerate growth.
Starlink is doing well but also growing somewhat slow.
A more rational valuation would be 900b-1000b.
The rest is Musk and FOMO.
As long as you can offload your bag to the next sucker the value will be high.
Most shareholders don't really care about the company they have shares in.
Big picture: Nice-sounding economic theories claim that stock market valuations are rational, but those theories are mostly bullshit. As soon as the actual humans in the real-world stock market get excited, or scared, or otherwise emotional, they mostly stop caring about all that stupid boring gotta-do-math "rational" stuff.
Yes, eventually, the humans have to sober up, and stock market valuations return to approximately what the economic theories say they should be. But the dangers of betting on that "eventually" are very well known: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/
The earth is finite, and space, for all intents and purposes, is not, and expansion into it would thus be required to sustain any super linear growth of the economy. Well, and rockets are cool. Perhaps people would much rather invest in something with the veneer of furthering space exploration (and the promise of infinite riches) than buy into some crypto blockchain startup. And, its not as if other current valuations are sane.
SpaceX isn't opening space to everyone. They're are preparing for the select few to be able to escape once the earth is no longer sustainable due to their own efforts.
With schemes like SpaceX, and the general number of large-cap-but-negative-earnings companies trading on the market, I feel like the conventional wisdom of DCA and chill / just passively buy the index will turn into an underperforming strategy vs a slightly more active or opinionated approach.
For those commenting that this decision may have a political element: Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Musk is a prominent Trump/MAGA supporter, and Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force. SpaceX is part of Trump's Golden Dome project, and one of the reasons that Trump wants Greenland is to site ICBM detection and interceptor systems.
> ... part of the reasons that Trump wants Greenland is to site ICBM detection and interceptor systems.
Nothing is stopping the US from deploying those in Greenland right now.
The only reason Trump wants Greenland is he's not all there -- Greenland looks big on the map so he's fixated on it.
All good points, but I think their main point of poor governance is still the pure motivation.
The governance issues seem much worse than the other issues with pricing and inclusion.
Then why not hedge? If they take Greenland at least they have their pensions.
I don’t think this is politically motivated but posting this on HN (and the 2nd time reaching the front page) sure is
Political tribalism wearing a mask of financial news. There are many pension funds and many large companies with valuation problems. Plenty of them in the tech sector. Everyone involved in propagating this story understands the political move they’re making.
Personally if anyone cares my take is that our economic problems are basically structural and geometric at this point. DC is a circus of people tasked with solving them and with the general competence the process selects for, the problems are in a practical sense unsolvable. So instead we get the tribal war spectacle over who holds the pen. Meanwhile the problems sit on the desk with a blank in the answer space.
(Apologies for the bad grammar, my son was born a little over 24 hours ago. I’m choosing not to use a LLM, so you are getting the real me)
Even sovereign funds (example Norway) are invested in American tech, funds, and indexes.
It is interesting to think about (from the perspective of an immigrant to Norway) how I moved my life’s savings from the US to Norway.
I’m now fully invested into Norway (real estate, savings, and retirement).
My understand is that Norwegians (and the nordics) have historically looked up to the US as a world leader.
I think that is no longer true and maybe this decision by Denmark is a data point of how the Nordics are changing?
It kind of feels like we all have been caught holding the bag (US reserve currency) and now we have to carefully unwind our position.
I’ve lost my point. Maybe my goal here is to just contribute to this discussion to distract from the exhaustion.
As a Nordic (Finland), I think this is true. In the history, US has been always admired and we've loved to travel there and cherish the culture. Damn, I was there when Conan O'Brien traveled to Helsinki, and greeting him with this massive crowd of people who really love him. I married an American, I've traveled through the country multiple times with my partner. Love the food, people, the nature, the cities.
But this has definitely changed for me now. The idea of crossing the border and having to flip a coin is the border control guy a nice guy or not is not appealing as a diabetic who needs his phone to be with him untampered and who doesn't want to sit in a cell somewhere for days/weeks because they posted a funny meme of a person you can't joke about. Or who just witnesses this absolute inequality happening, and who witnesses the leaders of this country coming to my country and giving their support for parties who want me to not marry and who doesn't want to see me existing.
I am just tired. And sad. I wish I could get our relationship back with the US but I don't know... Even if we backtrack from here, get back to the "olden times", it will take a moment until I can enjoy US again.
P.S. Conan is still a treasure!
> The idea of crossing the border and having to flip a coin is the border control guy a nice guy or not
That is nothing new. It's how it's been forever. And not only arriving in the USA, but also Canada, Germany and other places.
Well... Strip searching and jailing young German girls in the border is not something I hear happening very often in countries like Canada, Germany, Denmark, Finland... Actually I have not heard that happening even once! My American partner has crossed the German border countless of times from US. Before they got an EU passport, even then the border queue was prompt and the guard sometimes asked a joke in German and a minute later let them pass.
I waited hours in Newark even before the current joke of a government. The risk of being in a jail without my phone which has a life-saving app to manage my diabetes is a risk I am not going to take.
> Actually I have not heard that happening even once!
Have you heard that happening more than once?
Having your luggage searched, long interrogations, dog sniffing, and then more interrogations - that has been common on international borders. All for no other reason than the border guard didn't like your face. That's my real life experience as a person who used to travel a lot. And many others I've met told similar stories, including being denied entry. So it's been a coin flip for a long time.
Get off your phone and enjoy the time lol - journal instead if you must write something
Congratulations :)
As a Dane, I would say yes. Especially among boomers there was always a genuine appreciation of the US and its role as guardian of a rules-based international order and western civilization more generally.
I think that sentiment has gone, even as younger generations have increasingly incorporated English words, music, TV and more into their own, but you seldom hear the same genuine trust in the US as a force for good.
>I think that is no longer true and maybe this decision by Denmark is a data point of how the Nordics are changing?
No, this is just standard pension fund governance.
Right, that makes sense. I assume it happens often as part of the governance process. my original statement could have be better phrased as a question.
What are your thoughts on the general consensus of Nordics views and opinions about the US?
Presumably Musk will sue them.
Or tell Trump to start a war with them.
I'm pretty sure Trump threatening to invade Greenland/Denmark played a part in the decision to not invest in the company.
American gov is gonna invade Greenland for sure for not cooperating with american conmen
I've recently been thinking about pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have. I really don't want my investments to be in SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic.
With the new Nasdaq 100 fast track rule, I'd certainly get out of any index that tracks it, or any funds that are invested in it. I don't know if any other indexes have had similar policy changes...but, if it works this time, and insiders are able to steal a few billion dollars from retirement funds without people even realizing it, I'm sure it'll become more commonplace until we have a functional government that regulates this kind of crime.
https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fas...
Apparently my US index fund is based on MSCI, which is even worse: eligible after 10 trading days. Although the float-adjusted market cap calculation should lessen the blow.
I’m going to be selling out of my Nasdaq ETF too. Such a shame.
Buuut if Anthropic does the same and lists on the Nasdaq then I might reconsider.
> been thinking about pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have
What’s holding you back? And what alternative investments are you considering?
I recently did homework to decide whether to double down on VOO (S&P 500 index) or to diversify via VXUS (ex-US index), and concluded VOO is better for my risk-adjusted ROI outlook and time horizon.
Momentum, really. I usually just buy more of a given fund and don't really take any out. My small portfolio is split across different funds, so I'd probably just split around the money I'd withdraw from the US-based ones into the other ones.
> I really don't want my investments to be in SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic.
This just being an incomplete list or is there another reason you name the last two but not Google?
Google being one of the most profitable companies on the planet might contribute? OpenAI and Anthropic don't seem to be profitable while SpaceX is weighed down by heavy losses on grok.
Why not Anthropic? They’re a very rare company capable of charging $200 per month per seat level fee across the corporate workforce.
Yes their compute costs are astronomical, but that can be managed down over time by more efficiency or mild enshittification that doesn’t create too much churn.
You would think you’re investing in a software technology company, but after reading a bit of news stories, you realize you’re quite literally funding war crimes. If I invested in an arms company, I’d have reasonable expectations about what I invest in. Investing in Anthropic at surface level looks like investing in software for hobbies and business.
It’s pretty depressing to be honest. I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.
Replace "war crimes" with "hardware" and it's an equally good reason not to invest.
They're valued like software companies, but they have terrible margins compared to software. Investors haven't figured out how to value these companies.
Normally Danish pension companies and banks will refuse to invest your money in weapons manufactures (unless you have a lot of money, then they apparently don't care). But as long as your money is invested as a pool, they won't do weapons.
I think you're right that e.g. Anthropic wouldn't be on the block list, because: It's an IT company, and I suspect that even Palantir might make the cut. It is fairly annoying, because my pension fund won't invest in Rheinmetall, SAAB or Kongberg, which I think they should, but they will probably invest in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which I don't really like.
It’s probably quite similar here in Finland. I’m interested to see what the current fund(s) contain.
All major indices have always included defense contractors.
Also, when you buy into an index fund, you are not funding the companies that the index tracks. That’s a misunderstanding of how the markets and index funds work.
you seem to be implying that, secondary markets have no effect on primary market prices, and i just want to make sure that's what you meant.
>I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.
You'd sing a different song quite quickly once the threat stops being abstract as you don't get to free-ride on the security a defense industry provides.
The defence industry that would be required to prevent an invasion of the US mainland is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what currently exists to sustain the US empire.
I wouldn’t, but thanks for the reply. I’ve gone through conscription and we are neighbours with Russia. I’ve not lived a day in my life without existential military threat.
> you’re quite literally funding war crimes
What difference with Microsoft, amazon and google? They all heavily support the military.
(S)he said: "pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have".
Edit: OK, no the same person.
Chinese hardware and energy headwinds aren't going to be great for Anthropic, apparently not even over a 1 year time horizon.
Because I don't really trust any of them, and I don't believe that the business is self-sustainable. At the moment we're in a phase where CTOs are able to withdraw money from the corporate bank accounts to be "on the cutting edge", but I don't think that's going to last. I'd rather have my money in something else.
Index funds adjust based on performance of the underlying stocks, so it doesn’t really matter if one of them does poorly. The index fund will adjust. When you buy an index fund like the S&P 500, you’re taking a position that the mega-caps it comprises as a whole will give you outsized returns over extended periods of time.
And they "only" need about 100 million recurring subscribers at $200 per month to make the profits that will justify their nearly $1 trillion valuation with almost no room for growth whatsoever, so who wouldn't want a chunk of that pie. (numbers calculated on back of imaginary envelope)
Good move.
Elon is rigging the stock market and getting index funds to invest in companies that are over-valued and thus not stable.
I mean it isn't like it was automatically included.
hope my Danish pension fund PFA doesn't do the same
Oh this duplicate post again. SpaceX stock may as well be bonds on space flight. I'd buy them at a loss.
That sounds dumb.
The criticism seems politically motivated. Considering what happened to Blue Origin, SpaceX's success is commendable. Although I agree $1.8T seems crazy.
I don't think it's politically motivated at all. My impression of this IPO is that it's designed to inflate SpaceX's perceived value by offering very limited float and aggressively seeking to capture passive money by bargaining for inclusion in indices it would not otherwise be eligible for. Speaking as a passive investor myself, I want my money nowhere near this company until it meets the old eligibility criteria.
Elon achived this valuation by merging xAI into SpaceX. The future of xAI is questionable, and without it SpaceX is very overvalued.
SpaceX has the potential to be the most valuable company ever if the space economy expands. Starlink will be a tiny puzzle piece by then.
How is this even debatable.
Why do people believe SpaceX is trying to democratize space flight? Thats demonstrably false if you actually listen to the things Elon says. He wants to go to Mars so he can setup the equivalent of the racist gated community he grew up in. That way he and his rich friends can escape there once being on earth is no longer tenable.
If the space economy expands + if spacex continue to hold market share + if it can do so while increasing profitably against increasing competition in the future. And considering the argument is for "the most valuable company", if spacex can do all of the above while other non-space related companies that are hugely profitable slow down their paces of innovation, spacex could be the most valuable company ever.
The SpaceX S-1 contradicts your claim by including an optimistic "TAA" (total addressable market) figure for "the space industry". Which falls heavily short of your claim. While the SpaceX claimed total TTA is mostly (like 80%) AI-powered "enterprise applications" which don't exist and are not related to space data centers or whatever.
How is this even debatable.
Also, starlink is stupid as a long-term play. Do you really think tossing satellites up into to space and replacing them every few years is cheaper or more sustainable than just building out wired infrastructure on the ground that can be used for decades? Plus, the is a finite limit to how much they can scale based in physics.
What space economy? Aside from satellites- which have been a known quantity for a long time- I'm not seeing it.
The "space economy" is not yet a certainty, other than in the mind of science fiction fans. (Unsurprisingly, hard to reach irradiated rocks of undifferentiated boring minerals in a cold vacuum are of negligible value to humans here on Earth.)
Even if the Star Trek utopian future materialises, it is very likely to be a long time from now.
1. SpaceX has competitors. Most are making reusable rockets.
2. SpaceX has no moat.
3. The concept of money itself might change dramatical by the time SpaceX becomes a multi-planetary mega corporation. Investing now may not return returns in any meaningful sense.
While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now.
And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable.
If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.
> If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right
A symptom of his fickle nature and erratic behavior, as well as general poor impulse control, all of which rightfully make people skittish with their money and question his judgment.
I dont think he was fickle with this one. He was remarkably consistent.
He had period where he though he can become hero for the democrats due to green cars. It did not worked, neither democrats nor left accepted him as unconditional hero.
The racism, the villingness to cause harm to get more power for himself were there whole time. He was far right the whole time, just became more extreme and open when it stopped being disadvantage.
But it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.
Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.
Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity
Not even remotely politically motivated.
It doesn't matter if it's successful or not. Their space business is worth virtually nothing on paper and the funding structures and profit/loss accounts are scary.
Most of the 1.8T hype is not at all related to the rocketry business. Well, I suppose if you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch they could be somewhat related.
If you buy the "AI DCs in space" pitch, you deserve to be parted from your money.
What's political is a policy change to "fast track" companies into the Nasdaq 100. Spacex is the first to benefit from this loophole that allows them to be added to indexes almost immediately after listing, which likely is a license to steal a bunch of regular folks retirement money. Elon Musk doesn't need more ways to steal people's money.
The unfortunate thing is, a lot of people have no idea this rule change has gone into effect, and that they're about to get fleeced by a bunch of professional investors.
https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/what-the-nasdaqs-new-fas...
It's legalized theft, and the victims are people least able to defend themselves from it. Most people have no idea what's in their retirement accounts, or track very closely what's being tracked by the index funds they've been told for decades was the safest way to invest in the stock market for non-pros.
>Akademikerpension also said the governance structure of SpaceX was "extremely deficient", adding that Elon Musk is expected to control more than 80% of the voting rights while simultaneously serving as chief executive officer, chief technology officer and chair of the board.
Their skepticism seems pretty valid to me
The company is wildly overvalued. It'd be funny if Musk wasn't about to walk away with a bunch of money stolen from retirement accounts.
I think you'll find the whole valuation of the S&P500 is built upon retirement accounts. Yours. Mine.
In other words, look one level deeper and you'll see it's not the S&P500 that's overvalued. It's you and me and 100 million other people desperately attempting to make sure young people pay for them for 20-30 years when they're old.
And then you calculate it out ... and see it's not happening. No matter what the number on the account says.
There's the normal level of... optimism. And, then there's SpaceX, a scam on a scale the world has never seen.
Zuck was in roughly the same position and they didn’t put out a statement skipping that IPO. The valuation criticism is more valid but this line belies political motivation.
More than 10times higher (possible valuation), 10+ years of Musk showing what kind of liability he is and at that time Zuck didn't have all the main CxO positions.
I don't think it is similar therefore.
Google too, and this was in the long term best interests of shareholders.
Imagine in 2010 if investors had real transparency into how much money YouTube or Maps was losing, along with the governance structures to enforce their concerns.
Musk appears far less predictibile, more volatile than Zuck. Musk also got directly involved in US politics aligned with of a man who singlehandedly butchered US relations with almost everyone in the world. A man who threatened Denmark with taking their territory by force.
You’re calling it “political motivation” as some sort of blind hate or vendetta out of principle, cutting off the nose to spite the face. But you can no longer separate Musk from politics and aggression towards Denmark.
The pension fund’s assessment looks entirely valid, objective and justifiable to me. But for anyone who personally favors Musk and his political views any dismissal will look politically motivated. It’s easy to cry foul. In this light your shallow dismissal might be just as politically motivated.
The political motivation is on Musks part. There's no unpolitical view of a man who ransacked the US government and is propping up far-right movements all over Europe.
Has anybody noticed a marked increase in simping here on HN?
They've been simmping for Musk for at least a decade. Doing it for AI is only few years old.