Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 638 posts

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

#581

Post by hnburnsy »

wpasc wrote: post #257
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, who is forced to buy these ETFs? These are all products that people and funds can choose to buy or not buy.

leaving the word 'forced' aside (purposefully), pension funds, 401k holders, and many passive investors end up buying these things. you're right that no one is "forcing" them, but people who try to invest responsibly with little control over the day-to-day which is most people place trust in the institutions who do that investing for them. I don't think that the claim of "the Nasdaq is misusing their institutional tr…

Very few retirement plans offer the Nasdaq 100 as a direct investment choice and certainly no plans offer it as the sole choice.

>However, based on figures from the over 700,000 401(k) plans, allocation to Nasdaq-100 Index mutual funds makes up less than 1% of all 401(k) assets, which the firm suggests is a significant underrepresentation compared to the S&P 500 and other Large Cap Growth Indexes.

https://www.psca.org/news/psca-news/2025/4/should-nasdaq-100...

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

#582

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #573
s1artibartfast wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of your money did they take? Are you one of those people that went all in on WallStreetbets? Who should be at the gambling commissioner that allows such things? Should people be made Wards of the state and finances placed in Trump's noble stewardship?

I didn’t consider that angle—thanks. I don’t day trade and don’t think anyone should. Lots of folks do anyway, however, and then they predictably lose money. It should be similarly predictable that they’ll then get upset and lash out, sometimes in the correct direction, often not. (And the influencers pitching day trading and whatnot, lo and behold, are probably also selling the corruption of indices and why you shou…

[deleted]

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

#583

Post by s1artibartfast »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #573
s1artibartfast wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of your money did they take? Are you one of those people that went all in on WallStreetbets? Who should be at the gambling commissioner that allows such things? Should people be made Wards of the state and finances placed in Trump's noble stewardship?

I didn’t consider that angle—thanks. I don’t day trade and don’t think anyone should. Lots of folks do anyway, however, and then they predictably lose money. It should be similarly predictable that they’ll then get upset and lash out, sometimes in the correct direction, often not. (And the influencers pitching day trading and whatnot, lo and behold, are probably also selling the corruption of indices and why you shou…

Mostly like I think they simply long for communal property ownership with a benevolent overseer that invests and distributes resources according to values that match their own.

Therefore they are offended that private individuals can allocate as they choose, and make losing gambles on other private institutions.

Some of these people were taught indexes are safe havens, and recoil at the idea they might not be safe as milk.

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

#584

Post by frankzinger »

christophilus wrote: post #287
bix6 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that how capitalism works in general? Edit: thanks for the downvotes. Defenders of capitalism unite!!! lol. Free market right?

It’s how the world works in general. Bribes and corruption are not unique to capitalism.

But not in the Shining City on the Hill

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

#585

Post by kazinator »

scoofy wrote: post #518
bko wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the rules are there are hard limits unless a multi-trillion dollar company IPOs with a significant absolute float, in which case tracking the "market" obviously includes said company.

A stock index is a business model. The concept of "passive" investing is alluring because you don't have to do any work. However, choosing a proprietor of a index that actually looks out for your well-being is, arguable, always relevant. We are now at the point where companies can game the system of indexing. Investors need to wake up to this fact and realize this is likely a paradigm shift.

If the underwriters of a fund based on an index are involved in manipulating the content of the index, they are effectively the managers of a managed fund pretending to be an index fund.

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

#586

Post by somenameforme »

ceejayoz wrote: post #408
somenameforme wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta hit on a few things there in no particular order: - USAID's final budget was $34 billion. That's already very real money, but it came from the discretionary budget - that giant bill of spending where the government decides what to spend money on: schools, roads, housing, and so on. The entire discretionary budget for 2025 was $1.9 trillion, so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spendin…

> so USAID made up almost 2% of all the US' federal discretionary spending! So, tiny; a fraction of what we spend on much less useful things like the Iran war or huge gifts to ICE. 30 years of that level of USAID funding would only get us to a single one of those trillions in debt. > The vacuum their exit has created is being rapidly filled by a wide mix of other interests. Yeah, we don't really want China vacuuming…

Yes the Iran war is also a waste of money. Money being wasted in one place is hardly an argument to do it in another place. And the whole point of discretionary spending is that it's money that could have been spent on society instead of e.g. setting up fake social media sites to try to cause chaos in another country. And because of regularly bloated spending I think we often lose track of what it really means. $34 billion is $100 from every man, woman, and child in the US. That's a lot of money, wasted every single year. And yeah after all is said and done Iran will cost hundreds more. Add Ukraine and we're up to the thousands. Add Iraq and we're getting into the tens of thousands soon enough. Imagine if all of this money was spent domestically.

The reason China is succeeding in Africa largely gets back to my critiques of USAID. China's pharma companies are establishing production factories within Africa for the local production of trade-level quantities of pharmaceuticals meaning they'll be able to provide not only for their own needs, but have enough production to turn drugs into exports. In the future Africa could even viably start to become a destination for medical tourism. The US could have done this and much more with the vast sums of money we blew on USAID, but we didn't. We preferred exploitable dependency creation paired alongside some corporate welfare for US big pharma. It's yet another example of the focus on short-term benefits while ignoring long-term costs. It's not like African nations don't realize what we're doing, while we then go and try to lecture them about the Chinese debt trap. What a shock that they're not listening.

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

#587

Post by JumpCrisscross »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #583
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t consider that angle—thanks. I don’t day trade and don’t think anyone should. Lots of folks do anyway, however, and then they predictably lose money. It should be similarly predictable that they’ll then get upset and lash out, sometimes in the correct direction, often not. (And the influencers pitching day trading and whatnot, lo and behold, are probably also selling the corruption of indices and why you shou…

Mostly like I think they simply long for communal property ownership with a benevolent overseer that invests and distributes resources according to values that match their own. Therefore they are offended that private individuals can allocate as they choose, and make losing gambles on other private institutions. Some of these people were taught indexes are safe havens, and recoil at the idea they might not be safe as…

> they simply long for communal property ownership with a benevolent overseer

I’m not impressed by the other account. But I respect your opinion. Why do you think they have convictions? (Versus waffling on memes.)

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

#588

Post by e40 »

ar_lan wrote: post #184
throw1234567891 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president may throw a tantrum that “some crazy democrat throws stones under the feet of that beautiful Elon, the most beautiful Elon we ever had”. Better do what the new Tzar wants. Dude was sent here apparently by the God, don’t mess with the God.

I thought Elon and Trump broke up?

People like that are never friends. It’s a relationship of convenience and power exchange. The public riff was because Elon got upset over something and threw a tantrum.

Some think the index deal was in exchange for Elon helping fund the midterm battle. Scott Galloway, for example.

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

#589

Post by Auracle »

slowin wrote: post #464
Auracle wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not who you replied to but that’s honestly an interesting question. Genghis Khan? Jesus, I suppose? Elon Musk is probably up there, though. You could say people like Henry Ford are on his level, but Elon is certainly more broad in his scope. I think people like them are probably accelerationists, meaning someone else would have done what they’ve done eventually. That could be a long eventually though. It’s hard t…

> You could say people like Henry Ford are on his level Since Tesla was started, they've sold ~9.6 million cars. In that same time period, Ford has sold 100 million. Musk is no Henry Ford, it's much more accurate to compare him to P.T. Barnum and Bernie Madoff.

Sure, but I wasn’t talking about car sales. I brought Ford up because of the first mass-affordable car and the production line stuff, not to compare sales measures.

Musk doesn’t just have Tesla. SpaceX is probably a bigger deal for humanity and how we live. Starlink was probably only possible because of SpaceX. We’ll see how some of his other ideas pan out. Ford was, as far as I know, just cars (and manufacturing said cars).

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

#590

Post by wubbawibba »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #579
pitrpatrgetatr wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably that "twaddle" influenced the bits you found to read better.

On what planet do our engineering backgrounds make us more effective communicators about wealth inequality and index inclusion?

If you're so sure you're ignorant of those topics why so sure those measures are meaningful? Why answer what may just be some words you know but irrelevant to the context?

Can you prove the so-called experts know better? Or are you just deferring as you have been socially trained to? Maybe economists have over complicated things and you're too ignorant to know.

Society runs on hearsay. Heard that's how it works as kids, now say that's how it works.

Stats are just euphemism for what happened. For history. They’re not a meaningful basis for next steps. They cannot predict exactly the future; what stats showed covid would occur in 2020 exactly? Not just general appeals to stem a future pandemic.

Why then are economists analysis of history meaningful to future needs?

Like gibberish population forecasts saying 12 billion by 2100! while birth trends now show a halving of population by 2080, a whole lot of priors need to be revisited.

Strong, weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism; the fundamental forces of physics that give rise to all we see and know; do not mandate a whole lot of the crap ideas humans babble on about.

Post reply on HN