alt Hacker NewsYou don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
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>float a fairly small issuance
SpaceX are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem small a % for the valuation target. However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1]
There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling interests in AI, and middle eastern capital changing priorities, interest rate outlook for the rest of the decade. These are all strong head winds to overcome even when not raising the largest ever amount in an IPO.
That is not say that it is destined to fail, Elon is excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak, There is no better proof than Tesla P/E .
It is by no means clear this would be successful or not. The valuation, funds being raised, future growth potential are all not based on just SpaceX core businesses which would have been an easy sell.
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[1] i.e. it could be still under-subscribed even if everyone buys into the vision, growth projections, is comfortable with valuation gets fully onboard including retail.
Even in this best case scenario SpaceX would have to sell at the lower end of the target range or go even lower and still end up being short matter what, because there could simply be not enough money in the market.
Only NASDAQ so far; S&P 500 is apparently "reviewing its rules" but hasn't changed them yet.
So you've got a full year to wait on that index fund, assuming they don't cave.
Uter and complete corruption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389233
- "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."
Honoré de BalzacInitial public offerings whose market capitalizations rank within the Nasdaq 100’s top members will normally be eligible to be included after 15 days of trading, Nasdaq said in a statement. The timeline is shortened from at least three months currently.
“Industry professionals, including asset managers and institutional passive portfolio managers, were mostly supportive of the Fast Entry proposal and proposed timing,” Nasdaq said in the statement.
15 days vs 90 days isn't some huge shift nor is it inherently some "flaw." These changes have been asked for long before Elon entered the White House.
Most people don’t have their money in the NASDAQ. They have it in the S&P 500. SpaceX hasn’t been fast tracked into it.
Serious question: Is there some ETF that is "Index of S&P500 minus anything that smells like Musk"?
Ever since SNAP the whole IPO show has been a transparent scam to game the index funds.
The market simply doesn’t have enough people actively investing because it rewards mass stupidity over generating meaningful returns.
The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.
For general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
ok so it seems pretty bad that they changed the index rules both to allow spacex in early and the wonky weighting stuff. But if one already has index-based things that are likely to be captive on the wrong side of this, and one wanted to benefit or at least balance out, to confirm my limited understanding the goal would be:
- buy shortly after the IPO, ideally less than 15 days
- and sell less than 6 months later when lockups would end and insiders are set to cash out?
Thank you for posting that. I also read that on some less authoritative source I don't remember. It's truly scandalous. I wish ETFs will revolt and apply the old rule for inclusion, but I have no illusion it will happen.
I can see both sides of it though. The old rule made more sense when companies ipo’d at small valuations. It could be argued it’s wrong to keep one the top five market cap companies off the sp500 for a year.
Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.
"If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch."
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
> If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch
You will be an investor in spacex and xai which it bought.
Fun fact, Xai net loss 6 billion dollars per year and SpaceX net profit 8 billion on a good year (https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-xai-posts-net-quart... https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/spacex-registers-tak...)
If you remember xai, it's that company currently being sued for the undressing kids feature (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/895639/x... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal) in its flagship product. By the way the feature is still enabled apparently
Is there something about why spacex wants to go public ? if not then this is definitely about xai... to hide unprofitability and offload it on general public ASAP.
My 401k has BrokerageLink set up and invests in VT/VTI. It takes less than 15 days so if your company offers BrokerageLink, you can avoid investing in SpaceX.
SpaceX will not be part of the S&P 500 when it lists, so you can avoid owning SpaceX for now by sticking with non-NASDAQ funds. IIRC it would take about a year for SpaceX to qualify for the S&P 500, four consecutive profitable quarters is needed I believe.
If you own a NASDAQ fund or total US stock market fund, you will have exposure to SpaceX.
This is absolutely vile. The xAi merger made no sense and this is forcing working class people into purchasing risky assets from a known scammer.
So that’s what he’s been busy with. I was hoping it was Ketamine.
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I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...