Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance' • Hacker News Board

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#421

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

__Joker wrote: post #392

petterroea wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, there is lot talking out of both sides of their mouth here. If nothing else, at least these should be choice of users to let them choose based on their values and requirements.

The pension fund is the user of the stock here.

Pensioners should get the same amount regardless of investments, as long as there is enough funding, which it seems there is for the moment.

Of course, if someone wants to risk their own money, they can invest in whatever they want. They can even sell their pension for a cash lump sum and invest that.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#422

Post by sega_sai » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

zdc1 wrote: post #256

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.

In my understanding some index funds i.e. FTSE Russel ones will include spacex with the weight based on the floated stocks, so in practice the weight in the index will be small enough in All Cap etc indices. So I decided for myself it is not a cause for concern. But I think now it is the time to look for index providers who do not decide to bend the rules for short term gain (i.e. S&P and Nasdaq).

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#423

Post by wewtyflakes » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #414

Zigurd wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Space is not lucrative or profitable. The SpaceX profit story rests entirely on Starlink. Starlink has a plausible moat servicing ships at sea and extreme remote areas. The big problem for Starlink is that they are trying to grow into a shrinking TAM, as terrestrial wireless expands with ever cheaper equipment ever farther into the countryside that Starlink is counting on for their TAM. Elon's visions border on s…

> No. Space is not lucrative or profitable Yet. To be clear, I don't support SpaceX specifically, but the amount of resources available to us from beyond our planet are quite literally infinite, only bounded by our ability to move fast enough to get it. Comets that routinely pass by our planet have rare-earth metals in quantities that we don't even have on the planet at all. Hell, that's where our rare earth metals c…

How does 100M tons of platinum safely deorbit? Is the idea to let it crash into the sea?

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#424

Post by Eridrus » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

whodidntante wrote: post #413

If you do not like Elon, you can simply move your assets to a direct indexing fund, there are plenty of them at reasonable cost, including from the large brokerages. If you believe SpaceX is overvalued or do not like the way it is being handled by the big index funds, again, use direct indexing. akademikerpension is pretty decent fund, it is about 50/50 asset allocation, losing out by only .9% per year compare to a U…

"Just" is doing a lot of work here.

Many people have appreciated gains locked into their indexing products such that changing is very expensive.

The biggest issue is not SpaceX/Elon per se, but indexes bending over backwards for him and changing their indexing rules to fleece index investors.

Most IPOs perform badly, to the point where the SP500 excludes all of them for a year, and I think that is actually appropriate for an indexing product. Though they're looking to change that and their float weighting for Elon.

Though after doing some digging I am not personally meaningfully impacted since Vanguard uses CRSP, which is float weighted, so only 0.1% of that is going to be SpaceX and I can live with that.

I short the stock on the actual financials if I was exposed to it (and it was actually possible), but it's a small float and there are apparently tonnes of Elon fanboys propping up Tesla beyond belief already so I expect this to be one of the hardest to predict stocks/IPOs.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#425

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

NoahZuniga wrote: post #397

runeks wrote: post #203

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...

Judging a pension fund by how it performs in a bull market seems wrong. Like their main job is to limit your downside from market crashes (if they're not doing that then they offer nothing compared to an index fund), so its strange to not include 2008 crisis (or .com bubble popping). Checking this shows that the top 2 performers in this graph lost more money (~8%) in 2008 than the bottom 2 (~2%)

Judging a pension by how it performs in 2008 seems wrong. Like their main job is to perform well over long periods of time compared to other funds.

Checking this shows that 12 years is longer than 1 year, and thus is a better metric.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#426

Post by pipes » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

devlovstad wrote: post #258

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...

Given the Russian threat to Europe and the fact that we are actively sending arms to Ukraine, investing in manufacturing arms doesn't seem like an imoral thing to do. Quite the opposite.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#427

Post by ornornor » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

I wish they didn’t manage to change the nasdaq rules, forcing a lot of index ETFs to buy spacex at IPO, whatever the price.

Edit: glad to see vanguard VT tracks FTSE which isn’t impacted. The amount of overvalued spacex stock in VT will be minimal down the line as they use the amount of publicly available shares to calculate the weight in the index, which is the more sensible way to do it, Musk’s scam not withstanding.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#428

Post by dijit » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

wewtyflakes wrote: post #423

dijit wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. Space is not lucrative or profitable Yet. To be clear, I don't support SpaceX specifically, but the amount of resources available to us from beyond our planet are quite literally infinite, only bounded by our ability to move fast enough to get it. Comets that routinely pass by our planet have rare-earth metals in quantities that we don't even have on the planet at all. Hell, that's where our rare earth metals c…

How does 100M tons of platinum safely deorbit? Is the idea to let it crash into the sea?

bit by bit, and one of the major useful properties of platinum itself is that it's so heat resistant and inert.

It's also useful to have some heavy metals off world for further expansion.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#429

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #251

brikym wrote: post #196

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.

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 defen…

> Let the market decide. Of course they should own one of the largest public companies in the world.

The pension fund is the customer here. The market is already deciding. You're free to invest your own money as you see fit. The pension fund's money is not yours to decide what to do with.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#430

Post by dijit » Sat, May 30, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

Gomotono wrote: post #417

dijit wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have about 30 years of catching up to do, better defense spending: 1) Saves our lives in Europe, by having access to better training and force multipliers. 2) Seeps into the economies of every country in the union through research spending. Defence is unambiguously a good thing, it becomes a problem if you put an expansionist cunthead at the helm of it.

We can discuss if a society should have a certain amount of GDP invested into defense and i'm not necessarily against it. I would think educating people properly is good, I also think the swizz model is good in sense of everyone learns to handle a gun and can have it at home (as long as high security standards are set and its taken very serious). It could be used as a tool to strengthen societies responsibility, comm…

I think that's less true than the media would have you believe.

We're undergoing a lot of propaganda about how effective Ukraine is against Russia, but that's despite most European countries practically immolating their own stockpiles of defence capability, and they're doing so somewhat unoformily (while Russia does everything they can to weaken the European homogeneity; see their funding into brexit and anti-EU seniment spreading bot farms on social media).

It's definitely not a given that we can stand up to Russia with our current capability, and it's also the case that we'd be throwing human capital at the problem because we failed to adequately invest.

I spoke to one person from Ukraine who was enlisted, he mentioned he was waiting for something from the UK, I asked how long does it normally take.. he told me that he doesn't measure time in weeks, but how many of his friends he he will lose.

.. that hit me hard, and it made me consider who incredibly naive and coddled I was to believe that investing in military or weapons things is a "right wing" or "bad" thing.

War always seems so far away until it's on your door.