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SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

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Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#481

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lol just be glad it's something civil money, historically it was much worse. Also, what's up with this influx of very sheltered reddit-like comments? It's not even September yet.

complaining about reddit is the most redditor thing you can do on HN, congratulations.

it's just a generic dismissal, a way of putting someone in a box without actually engaging with anything they say. which lumps it in with 90% of all internet arguments really. "Your argument must be invalid because you're the type of person whose arguments are invalid."

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#482

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Ah yes, because capitalism in it's purest form would never have companies form monopolies and lobby governments for favorable legislation.

Where does capitalism mandate corruption? Yes, it is not realistic to assume there is no corruption, but capitalism in and by itself does not mandate corruption. Obviously this all falls apart when capitalism can buy legislation. We are seeing how the USA is currently eroded by a few oligarchs.

"capitalism" was meant to harness the greed in men- they're self-assembling groups on mostly level playing fields, and the people vote during every purchase. The more votes they get, the more opportunities to expand. Only when the people fail to choose wisely is a governmental body supposed to come in and help "regulate". The other option is the government decides from on-high how things should work, and you'd better hope that what got them to power was good. Then these people need to be wizards at allocating labor, research, and benefits.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#483

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We're living under true capitalism right now. Look at the incentives. I don't see how we could have progressed to anything besides this, this is the natural outcome of the system in place. American libertarians often imagine some kind of wonderland capitalism where everyone agrees to play by the rules that aren't enforced by anyone. To my knowledge this has never existed as a long-term equilibrium and it can't exist.…

The United States is far more socialist than capitalist and it’s not close. In the early 1900s the federal tax rate was 0. Now we spend 125% of what we bring in in taxes. That is definitely not capitalism. That’s not a free market, that is the government spending far beyond what’s even feasible

> socialist than capitalist [...] federal tax rate

My dude, you're acting like Federal government is the only government that matters. It's a common mistake, but in this context it's fatal to your argument.

It's fatal because federal spending is the least relevant kind, since so much of it (and so much of its growth) is for the military, and military spending indicates very little about whether a country is socialist or capitalist on the inside.

In contrast, state/local taxes and programs are--even today--still a majority of the spending that actually tells us anything useful for a socialist/capitalist spectrum, the stuff that involves schools, libraries, policing, homelessness, property rights, etc.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#484

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Having the stock traded on their board is good for them. They also maintain an index. Elon made inclusion in the index a prerequisite for trading the stock on the board.

> Elon made inclusion in the index a prerequisite for trading the stock on the board Source? He may have claimed this. But he has no power to. Once a stock is publicly listed, every exchange can trade it. Where Musk had influence was on to whom he paid his listing fee.

"SpaceX stock is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq. To secure such a high-profile listing, While listing requirements remain unchanged, Nasdaq recently amended its index-inclusion rules to accommodate companies like SpaceX when they go public."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2026/04/25/spacex-...

Notice a listing on the board and an inclusion in an index are two different things. Nastaq changed the index to secure the listing of SpaceX on their board.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#485

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Pretty sure Adam Smith captured that in his writings. Full laissez-faire, free market capitalism generally leads to wealth (and power) imbalance. Regulation is necessary to prevent that (assuming you want to maintain a "fair" democracy of sorts and not regress to oligarchy).

I can't see any system where people are treated fairly (equally and able to reap benefits of their labor aka not slaves) that won't lead to inequality. People are just different, and will have different production rates.

Sure, and that's mostly ok. I earn more than many people, some people earn more than me.

The problem is that extreme wealth imbalance leads to a power imbalance that tends to throw society into turmoil. The French Revolution being a canonical example.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#486

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Companies need to raise money for investment. Even Apple doesn’t have cash for all the things they want to do. Suppose they want to lease or buy a piece of real estate.

Apple has a giant pile of cash and the last time they issued bonds was to do a stock buyback so that might not be the best example, although there's a fairly small number of companies in their unique position.

That’s kind of what I’m saying. Their most recent issuance was 2025. Even when you have a lot of cash it’s inconvenient to spend cash on all purchases

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#487
post #415

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I'm old enough to remember they weren't just buying and selling corporate bonds like most of the bond market. They were a hedge fund that used massive leverage to exploit tiny arbitrage opportunities between correlated securities. There may be important factors that the bond market isn't aware of, just like most of them didn't know about the problems with mortgage-backed securities in 2008. But anything you and I are…

> But anything you and I are aware of, they probably are too. This is something that seems like it should be true but the subprime crisis (which didn't at all come out of the blue — anyone with any instinct at all should have understood when they first saw someone get given insane mortgages) argues against.

A lot of mortgages were trash but the securities were a new and complicated financial product with a plausible story. A few people figured out the problems, but Michael Burry for example did it by combing through thousands of pages of prospectuses.

SpaceX bonds are just plain ol' corporate bonds, the same stuff these investors have been analyzing for a very long time.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#488

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True capitalism has never been tried. This right now is crony capitalism.

Crony capitalism is true capitalism. The idea that capitalists will simply choose not to organize to benefit their own positions out of some sense of altruism is insanely naive, and puts you in the same camp as USSR apologists claiming that their issue was the lack of true communism. A system that fails when people subvert it to their own benefit is a system that fails.

The power of who lives, dies, and what's allowed are made by the individual consumers (or groups of consumers), so it's the same problem we have with democracy.

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#489

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Really? Do you want to try one out? I don’t see very many articles interested in new startups. It’s usually about them failing. I often use market explanations in my comments and these are not received favorably.

Consensus means there is general agreement, but those statements are highly disputed.

Maybe “dominant view” is a more accurate term? (On HN)

Re: SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status

#490

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> A bit silly Mm hmm I mean the planets would fly off orbit ...such thoughtless justification is not really disproving comparison to "anything goes" discourse of other platforms with a nonsense appeal to empty normalization 100% designed to offload an empty bag onto retail investors SpaceX is propped up entirely by government subsidy It has no real sustainable business unlike SK Hynix, very much like OAI and Anthropi…

> offload an empty bag onto retail investors This was a popular meme on Twitter and Reddit and YouTube, granted. The math doesn’t make sense with an index like the Nasdaq 100. But I’ll admit it’s a good story. > SpaceX is propped up entirely by government subsidy This is also true of every defence contractor.

Colonies on Mars is a good story

Super intelligence is a good story

These companies are built on little more than "a good story" for politicians to sell to voters ..."i voted in Congress for that!"

You're arguing semantics

Economic math is being leveraged against innumerates as euphemism and obfuscation of same old avarice and political corruption. Biology is self selecting. There's no using rhetoric to wave off the ground truth is just a minority of the total population ensuring their own lived experience is put above everyone else's

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