From the S&P's own literature:
> To be eligible for S&P 500 index inclusion, a company should be a U.S. company, have a market capitalization of at least USD 8.2 billion, be highly liquid, have a public float of at least 50% of its shares outstanding, and its most recent quarter’s earnings and the sum of its trailing four consecutive quarters’ earnings must be positive.
Tesla meets all of these qualifications as near as I can tell. It blows the market cap requirement out of the water and has been profitable for the trailing 4 consecutive quarters.
In the mean time, I would love the option of an index that is literally just "the largest companies", without all these exclusion criteria. I wonder how it would fare against indexes with lots of exclusion criteria.
"Going forward, eligible companies need to have at least 5% of voting rights held by the public. Companies with multiple share classes already in one of the indices will have until September 2022 to change their structures or face removal." ( https://www.dividend.com/news/2017/11/03/companies-multiple-... ). Same link as before.