New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

> If they have discretion...

True. But doing so would be a fair amount (by index standards) of overhead and hassle. Plus they'd get endless complaints any time the S&P500 was outperforming the "S&P 499" that they were using. Plus they'd put themselves in the crosshairs of a whole range of activists who wanted them to switch to an "S&P 498", or ...497, or ... - by excluding various other companies the activists didn't like.

> If they're forced to passively hold...

Their responsibility is managing their pension funds in the interests of their state, and their current & future retirees. Not pious adherence to passive indexing canon. Their calculus here might be to throw a small bone to the anti-Musk activists who are currently bothering them, while acquiring some "we tried!" butt-coverage for whenever Musk really goes off the rails. (And, obviously, trying to discourage other companies from using such control structures.)

I am a non billionaire and I would prefer Social Security to go away.

Mathematically, there is no alternative to the purchasing power of my Social Security benefits being reduced, simply due to the changes in the population age histogram.

It has to become more and more of a wealth transfer from the working to non working, which means my kids will benefit less and less from their work.

There is the problem. The fund managers have legal requirements on what they invest in. They don't get a choice in some cases. Which means they sometimes are forced to invest in companies they don't like. (often they had input into the law in years past, but they never imaged this situation and so the law doesn't cover it)

> yet agreeing to only get paid when he does go to Mars.

He already owns hundreds of billions of dollars worth of SpaceX. He "gets paid" whether or not these goals are achieved (a million people on mars definitely won't be achieved this century, as the place is fucking awful; one thousand is vanishingly unlikely, one million is flat-out not happening). In fact, hyping the company up ahead of IPO gets him paid, to the tune of thousands of working people's lifetime earnings.

The SpaceX IPO may go down as one of the most manipulated in US history. I'd actually like to see the likes of Vanguard and Blackrock do is ignore the rules that will force passive funds to invest in SpaceX on a small float, creating passive funds with their own rules that won't invest in small floats. I know I'd move my money to more "total market" type funds that required their investments to be sufficiently liquid.

It may not even come to that. I think if large pension funds and the large mutual fund managers coming out and saying "we don't trust this process" will probably be sufficient pressure to change it.

There are two other issues with SpaceX in particular that kind of show just what a house of cards the Elon Empire is:

1. The whole xAI bailout. This isn't a new tactic. Elon did it with SolarCity where one of his companies bought another of his companies who owed a lot of money to yet another of his companies. Elon way overpaid for Twitter. Fidelity had slashed the valuation by as much as 80%. Elon rescued himself from a margin call on his Tesla shares by raising money for xAI and using that to buy Twitter. But now the xAI investors who (IMHO) felt fleeced had to be rescued and so SpaceX "bought" xAI.

So the problem is that I've seen reports that xAI is losing >$1B/month. That's a huge drain on SpaceX's estimated ~$15B of annual revenue where it's already losing money due to the Starship program cost and delays;

2. Allegedly, one of the biggest buyers of Cybertrucks is (drum roll please) SpaceX. So, again, one Elon company is rescuing another.

I have huge respect for what SpaceX achieved with Falcon 9 but honestly, I wouldn't touch any of this, as an investor, wtih a 10 foot barge pole. At least, not until the SpaceX float gets sufficiently large and the lock ups on selling expire so you get a true market picture of its value.

And I think passive investors need to rewrite their rules to do this too.