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Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

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Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#451
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seni…

Its not propaganda when you can see it. We know what Putin showes in his Military parade and we know the stockpile of tanks they have and had due to satelite images. My statement still stands, we do not need to increase defence spending to beat russia. You said something different though: "We need to increase defence spending to have as little as human risk as possible". I wouldn't call it naive, more optimistic. And…

In nominal terms "we outspend them" is true, but it misses the forest for the trees.

Nominal spend is the wrong yardstick when one side builds at home for a fraction of the cost; Russian labour, steel and energy are far cheaper at the point of use, which is why PPP estimates put their real military output roughly level with the whole of Europe combined.

And spend isn't the binding constraint anyway: it's production. A budget line is not a full magazine, and we've spent years throwing our stockpiles into Ukraine while letting our shell and propellant lines wither instead of refilling them.

"We don't need to catch up" assumes the money on the page is already steel in the field. It isn't.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#452

I think European countries need to get serious about investing money locally. The UK is a particularly egregious example but it’s taking begging and pleading with the mansion house accord to even convince pensions to try to invest in the UK economy. Every country should make a portion of local (at least within Europe) investment a prerequisite for whatever favourable tax treatment pensions and similar products get. S…

I partially agree, but if my private pension needed to invest into the underperforming FTSE250 by law, I’d just opt out of that system and put my savings into a US/Emerging-markets index myself. I’m not patriotic enough to spaff my compound interest opportunity on a bunch of dying tobacco, oil, & mineral extraction companies to put any of it to work in the FTSE250.

I don’t think it needs to be the FTSE and I don’t think it even needs to be all that much in UK funds but if you look at the default allocations of many large pensions it’s single digit UK equity exposure which I think isn’t really acceptable.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#453

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.

By who exactly ?

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#454
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let the market decide... They're changing the rules on inclusion ... You have the market deciding and the rules changing in the same paragraph and nothing's bothering you. I genuinely envy your peace of mind, my friend. Some of us are truly blessed.

The rules changed because it's unprecedented. It's not complicated. If your job is to "track the market" and there is this company that is worth $1+ trillion, you're not doing your job if you don't have exposure to this company. Just be honest with yourself. The only reason you and others have an issue is because of politics. You don't like Musk for whatever reason and now you're very opinionated about the internal w…

Hang on, wasn't the market supposed to work it out? How come it's someone's job to fast-track inclusion? Isn't intervening directly in the market a communist policy? Are you a communist by any chance?

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#455

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?

Starship makes space access 1000x cheaper than before, with cost-to-orbit under $10 / kilogram. Also much larger payloads become possible. That's an insane economic unlock, because space contains unlimited amounts of resources and energy. Space-based manufacturing, building space hotels, mining asteroids etc. becomes viable. Larger satellites and probes for commercial or scientific use becomes possible.

All this might not make sense in a standard business sense. Real profits might be decades away, who knows. Anyway, people are willing to throw their money at it, because they think it's important.

If they succeed in the long term, it'll easily be the most valuable company on Earth.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#456
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla is not and never has been a good investment. Its a gamble. The current evaluation of Tesla is still higher than real car companies + robot companies + robot taxi companies.

Fair enough I guess, it has been a gamble. But risky investments are still investments that paid off well. Or they can drop like a rock.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#457
post #339

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.

> our job is to earn money Which is exactly why you wouldn't put it in a company with a ridiculous valuation.

I don't know the AUM of this pension fund but if the managers were doing their jobs they should have had at least a tiny bit of exposure to SpaceX years ago.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#458
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla is not and never has been a good investment. Its a gamble. The current evaluation of Tesla is still higher than real car companies + robot companies + robot taxi companies.

Never is a strong statement. Tesla’s price to sales ratio wasn’t absurd prior to 2020.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#459

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?

According to SpaceX's own documentation more than 80% of their value comes from xAI and their data centers. Starlink is where they are making the money, but they are pouring it into AI.

Re: Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'

#460
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%)

You make a good point, but I think “lowest risk” is also not the metric either. You could buy 100% bonds and be even safer.

You want some risk-adjusted return metric parameterized by average returns and also volatility.

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