71–80 of 139 posts
I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
This is why he (and other billionaires) are pining to get Social Security replaced with an indexed based retirement fund?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super voting shares were a mistake to allow in general.
For whatever reason, there are a few very successful businesses with super voting shares. If the alternative was to keep those businesses private, I do not know if that would have been better for the public. Presumably, the market will price in the risks of super voting shares.
The reason is not "whatever".
Only very successful CEOs can negotiate super voting shares. In this context "successful" means "runs very profitable company".
If you're crap CEO (your company is not very profitable) then investors won't say "sure, you're crap CEO but we'll give you a complete control so that you can continue to be crap CEO".
Only when you're very successful you can negotiate complete control (which investors don't want to give unless they think they'll make lots of money).
And the best predictor of future success is past success.
Therefore companies run by CEOs with super voting shares were successful in the past and are more likely to be successful in the future.
I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
This is why he (and other billionaires) are pining to get Social Security replaced with an indexed based retirement fund?
Yes please!
I learned just how bad of a deal Social Security is when an employer (a bootstrapped startup) offered a predatory 401k plan. It was free for my employer to setup but the employees were stuck with extremely high fees. It was so bad that John Oliver made an episode[0] about it!
Yet, even for the worst 401K plan in America, the projected retirement returns were 1600% of the Social Security returns. Even America's worst 401K would be better for the average consumer than the federal debacle
Uncle Sam should sunset SSI and allow citizens to select from and move freely between a number of accredited funds.
I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
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I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
This is why he (and other billionaires) are pining to get Social Security replaced with an indexed based retirement fund?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Musk just tied his compensation to having 1 million people on Mars. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... Do explain to me his evil plan of becoming rich by lying about going to Mars and yet agreeing to only get paid when he does go to Mars.
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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SpaceX had to literally sue the military to even be allowed to bid for projects. And won. And then won the contracts. The guy who landed on the Moon testified in congress opposing giving SpaceX any money. The government wanted nothing to do with SpaceX. SpaceX won the contracts despite the government, not because. They won the contracts because they offered the best product at the lowest price.
This is literally how government contracts work on massive multibillion dollar systems.
Palantir famously did this with the Army: https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/03/29/palantir-who-suc...
Every gov-tech company on the planet has a team of people hired and dedicated to suing the government via a well understood process that is intended to filter out organizations that do not have the financial capacity to deal with the government.
As an AF SES I owned $300 million worth of contracts for the Air Force starting in 2020 and by 2022 my acquisition portfolio for AFLMC was $6B yearly. Guess how many of those contracts had actual competition despite months of solicitation? Almost none because the FAR is written/updated by corporations such that the barriers to entry are impossible to meet.
Go tell me how quickly you can get a piece of software running on a govt network and come back to me and tell me that there’s equal competition.
You have no idea how much corruption is baked into the structure of government contracts.
The corruption is not that someone violated the acquisition system; the corruption is that the acquisition system legally converts concentrated contractor influence into unequal access, unequal rule-shaping power, and unequal probability of award.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why he (and other billionaires) are pining to get Social Security replaced with an indexed based retirement fund?
Pretty much everyone already has an index based retirement fund.
I'm more worried about the early inclusion into the Nasdaq 100 index and if other indexes will follow. I don't want my retirement to be passively buying Elon's latest shell game.
This is why he (and other billionaires) are pining to get Social Security replaced with an indexed based retirement fund?
If it was a flat tax where everyone paid the same percentage of instead of a regressive tax where only working people pay the rate, then social security would be well funded.
Obviously they don’t want to pay the same tax rate as working people, so theyd rather get rid of social security instead.