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New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

reuters.com

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Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#41

Post by malshe »

jbecke wrote: post #37
fny wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is already publically traded. It's valuation depends on investors buying into Musks vision. As a rule, investors optimize for long term growth since that's what maximizes valuations. All the megacap companies are judged by future growth. The effect is companies tend to exaggerate and lie about what they can achieve in the long term to juice their own stock. Elon's def got the juice.

Investors should optimize for long term growth, yes. The problem is Management (CEO, etc.) will get fired if things look bad. So the incentive for management, if they can get fired, is to ensure monotonic increase. Sometimes — especially for a rocket company! — you should be allowed to fail for a few years. You should be allowed to take big swings, without risk of getting fired. If Elon knows he is in control, he can…

In that case they should stay private

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#42

Post by jaccola »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #17
jt2190 wrote: post #6

Same article syndicated on msn.com, without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/new-york-californi... The issues: > The New York and California pension systems would become holders of SpaceX shares through their passive allocations if the company is admitted to major U.S. stock indexes. > The officials… objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including: - voting contr…

I’d love to hear one of you staunch capitalists tell me why the description of this persons control over 13,000+ employees is any different than a feudal “Lord” Over the entire lifetime of SpaceX Nearly 100% of the revenue comes from the government They pay gifts and tributes to the government They spend an absurd amount of money on lobbying and writing laws to take monopoly control of the subsection of the market Wh…

The vast majority of those 13k workers are highly skilled and in very high demand. They could work elsewhere or start their own company. In addition, they are far better educated and have more welfare options than anyone living under a feudal system.

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#44

Post by pjc50 »

jnovek wrote: post #29
pjc50 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Option 3: Elon takes over the Federal government, causes some major security incidents, and cuts off USAID stranding a number of Federal employees and cutting off short term food support for hundreds of thousands of people depending on it. Option 4: Elon takes over a social network and tries to Orbanize the West with it.

It’s not just cutting food support. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because we cut USAID. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

I deliberately undersold the claim because this is one of those things that's so big and yet so invisible in the news and discourse. If we had 100k people die in a city anywhere on the globe due to, say, an earthquake, it would be headlines. These people just .. cease to exist, unremarked.

(It does raise questions about how Elon might manage the food supply to Mars, if that ever happened)

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#45

Post by travelalberta »

jbecke wrote: post #12

Option 1: Elon has control and optimizes for cool shit and going to Mars, and maybe abuses the corporate entity a bit, as a piggy bank, or whatever. Option 2: the market has control, and optimizes for short term starlink revenue and the launch business. I prefer Option 1.

People raised on a diet of social democracy propaganda will kick and scream when you tell them people aren't equal and that decisions should be limited to exceptional individuals and not the mob. If you don't like the SpaceX structure don't invest. It's that easy. I'd rather give Elon the reins and see what happens. He managed to make electric cars viable and starlink is an incredible technical achievement. There's so much cool engineering to be done and only Elon seems to be capable of half of it. One person with a vision is more valuable than a million shareholders with a slight level of financial investment.

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#46

Post by AdrianB1 »

jrmg wrote: post #35
iamronaldo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why lie about something that's easily proven false with a Google search? Over last 5 years government revenue is under 25% and if you go off of last 2 years its closer to like 10-15% (and declining!) Starlink is the vast majority of spacex revenue

You don’t need to accuse someone of lying when correcting them.

You need if they are doing it on purpose.

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#47

Post by trunkiedozer »

watwut wrote: post #22
jbecke wrote: post #12

Option 1: Elon has control and optimizes for cool shit and going to Mars, and maybe abuses the corporate entity a bit, as a piggy bank, or whatever. Option 2: the market has control, and optimizes for short term starlink revenue and the launch business. I prefer Option 1.

Elon has control and optimizes for ability to abuse the corporate entity as much as possible. Expects other people to pay for issues he caused, causes as much harm as possible to feel as a manly man with no empathy and his friends in government and Epstein circles back all that up.

Wrote without evidence

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#48

Post by kjksf »

khriss wrote: post #21

> Elon has control and optimizes for cool shit and going to Mars This trope needs to die. SpaceX has no plans to go to Mars. Elon meanwhile regularly says forward looking stuff to attempt to justify the lofty valuations of his companies. Let's just say there is a ... mixed track record on these proclamations (Full self driving, Hyperloop anyone?)

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.

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#49

Post by randallsquared »

> would constitute the most management-favorable governance structure ever brought to the U.S. public markets at this scale

The "at this scale" is doing a lot of work here. The SpaceX IPO will be $1.5T to $2T, and the next highest IPO ever on the US public markets was Alibaba at $231B. This is so far outside the previous scale that their statement would be true even if EVERY other public company was structured in the same way.

Worldwide, the five highest have been Saudi Aramco, NTT, Alibaba, Facebook, and Uber, at 1.7T, 300B, 231B, 104B, and 75B. Note the outlier, here, which was not on the US public market, AND has a very similar tiny float.

If you go by capital raised, it's not quite as stark, but it's still quite different in the US market: 25B raised by Alibaba, the previous high, compared to 75B expected for SpaceX according to the article. The point that SpaceX isn't at the same scale regardless of governance is still pretty good, I think.

Re: New York, California pension leaders oppose 'extreme' SpaceX control structure

#50

Post by funimpoded »

altcognito wrote: post #24
jmuguy wrote: post #18

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?

Absolutely, that's the main reason there's been a push for that for decades. It's a giant pile of poor people's money that rich people can't easily skim from, and they'd really, really like to. Once it's "in the market" they gain all kinds of options for turning some of that money into their money, some immediately, some with tweaks to laws or policy.
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