Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashdksnndck | Hacker News Reader

The twitter debt is a negligible portion of the money at stake here. It’s a footnote compared to the trillions of dollars in wealth that are moving around. We are only talking about it because the internet commentariat has special interest in twitter. Not worth wasting time thinking about it if you are deciding how to allocate your portfolio.

Nevertheless it is part of a pattern of weird deals in Elon’s companies. He’ll do anything to move the goalposts and turn his failures into successes. There is no norm he won’t violate, no boundary he won’t cross.

View on HN

Sure, I don't like him either but it shouldn't be about him. It should be about the institutions we trusted to keep our index funds safe. Or was this always based on "vibes"? Was VOO never safe? Was it always possible for the people in charge of the stock market to simply include some money pit into our retirement funds? I feel like the people responsible for these decisions must fear life in prison or this will keep happening.

These are indices created by private entities. They are free to change their rules are they not? Maybe this is the wake up call to the risks of concentrated passive investment vehicles the public needed.

If you think it's a wakeup call about passive investment I think you're asking the wrong question. The vast majority of people do not want to become experts in the financials of 800 different companies in order to maximize their account return on investment over the next 20 years. It's a part time job to do that. Some people do that successfully but most people recognize that they won't. Passive investment was supposed to be a tool for those people. If you ignore all of that, then sure they can just change the rules whenever they like. But that totally ignores the reason a lot of these rules exist in the first place. In my book we're about to get a taste of why we don't want private enterprise responsible for this stuff in the first place.

Exactly all this. The whole idea of passing investing is "hardly any of us know better than the market as a whole." If you don't agree with that, then you don't agree with passive investing. Which, whatever. Live your life.

But the story is not about all indices being wrong, the story is about index management being corrupted. Like bond ratings on mortgages in the run-up to 2008.

> Passive investment was supposed to be a tool for those people.

And it was, for a while. Then financial vultures realized there's huge pots of money tied up for 40+ years in funds that the person doesn't directly manage or have a say in. And if the investments are in indices then the index gets to vote on company matters across the economy on your behalf. What could go wrong?

If you dont like it, you need to choose something else. I dont know how people can keep throwing money at the thing they dont like and then complain it isnt doing what they want.

"Im too busy to spend 30 minutes to move my retirement somewhere I trust" just doesnt cut it.

I'm happy for you that you're always the perfectly informed player in every transaction you ever make having the most up to date information, ensuring that you're getting the best deal possible at any given second, groceries and all.

Sadly, some poor slobs are too lazy to be as informed as you.

I do none of those things, but I understand that there is a chance of losing money gambling in the stock market. Its not a free lunch with 100% upside.

I'm not arguing for myself, I'm arguing for the tens of millions of people who do not understand this system, are not aware of how it works, and are constantly pressured through employer plans, tax deferment, and other aspects of the system to choose the path of least resistance and put their money into a 401k. For a system to work properly it has to account for all of the users and not the top 5% or 1% of the users.

> For a system to work properly it has to account for all of the users and not the top 5% or 1% of the users.

The system doesn't work properly. Retirement is fundamentally broken in the US. The sooner people realize and wake up to that the sooner things might change.

It was never safe, he's exposed the system's design was never intended to be safe for anyone but those in charge.

This. People are locked in their 401k and penalized when taking it out says a lot about what it is.

People should honestly read Killing the Sacred Cows it’s an eye-opener for anyone invested in 401k.

A "401(k)" is not a monolithic entity. In practice, most employers offer a choice of funds, with the most popular being a year-targeted fund that rebalances between equities and bonds as you get closer to retirement. Having said that, you can probably dump your entire portfolio into government bonds, small cap stocks, or euro futures.

I have had jobs with good 401ks and terrible ones. The terrible ones usually have some bond/ saving option. When you leave the job you stick the money in a full service brokerage IRA. The problem is when you are at the same job for too long.

> …says a lot about what it is

Doesn’t it say that it’s a retirement fund, intended to be saved until retirement age? The 10% penalty is little more than a wrist slap level deterrent, too. It’s usually like ~1 year of returns. Not a huge deal if you need to dip into it.

(There’s plenty to criticize about the whole 401k system of retirement accounts. But these criticisms seem misguided)

I mean put it in context of the OP.

People putting retirement funds in a pile of companies that often have little impact on local communities they live in.

They’re changing laws to fast-track sketchy IPOs, putting hard earned money at risk why? So we can send people on a death-mission to Mars?

Point being, they are doing what they will with other people’s money and won’t suffer the consequences. Removing the checks and balances is exactly how financial disasters happen.

You can move your 401k money between several funds at any time.

Exactly right, there's even ones so conservative they market themselves as cash equivalent. Basically zero gain/loss in those funds. If you're so worried then go login to your 401k and change it.

“Basically zero gain/loss in those funds”

Right so what’s the point then? Doesn’t that prove the point: zero gain/loss with a 10% withdrawal penalty to boot.

And your proposed alternative? Please provide at least 50 years of historic returns

If I could pick from any possible retirement plan, I'd want in on the UK pension system that's guaranteed to beat inflation and earnings growth. Until the money runs out, at least!

Because it's not an actual investment and can't run out. Like US Social Security and many other national schemes, the UK is pay-as-you-go. Money coming in is immediately paid out.

Any funds lying around are supposed to be for temporary imbalances, but became significant due to a major demographic imbalance: the Baby Boom.

But they're not significant. The National Insurance Fund is supposed to keep a minimum overfund of £24B (at current spending).

It's now at £79B. It's significantly overfunded.

You can buy i-bonds in the US. You are limited in how much though. They are pegged above CPI. You never hear about them because no one makes money on it. And maybe it isn't that great of an investment.

Historic returns do not predict future returns.

I believe the (apparently AGI-pilled?) folks running the indices are more afraid of the public’s pitchforks in the scenario where the AI stocks go public at $3T value, then increase to $30T before the index rules dictate they buy in. Hence the rule change to prevent that from happening.

Changing the rules for a speculative investment is the type of things to get pitchforks, not sticking by them.

For a moment step into the theory of mind of the AI believer. That’s the common mindset in finance today. You believe that AI is displacing white collar work, and soon with robots it will displace physical work. Your personal job is to help set the rules for stocks to be included in the index. You believe that the point of indices is for passive investors to automatically be invested in the diversified set of top public companies (weighted by market cap). During previous economic shifts, where companies went public early and were already in the index during their growth phase, passive investors broadly benefited from that growth. These new AI companies have stayed private much longer, meaning that the index has missed the opportunity to “buy low” and build up a stake so far.

You believe that the owners of the leading AI companies stand to become owners of most wealth. Furthermore, that we are at an inflection point where the value of these companies rises so rapidly that delays in index investment will set in stone a permanent inequality, where early tech VC and other private funds own a huge portion of the economy. The few-$T downside risk of AI bubble popping this year feels to you like a minor concern compared to index funds being shut out of this wealth due to some arbitrary rules, which have been changed before and can be changed again. Delaying investment in these huge public companies feels like a more dangerous decision than buying in when they become public.

In short, there are two possible stories here:

1) Wall Street is AGI-pilled and thinks AI companies will be worth many trillions of dollars

2) Wall Street expects the AI bubble to pop and is trying to make the public into bag holders by selling a few hundreds of billions of dollars in the IPO

I think the second story actually doesn’t hold together, because Wall Street is making a bunch of correlated bets. The IPO cash is just one more source of capital, and much of it going to be used to make investments which are also correlated bets.

It doesn't matter what individuals believe. The rules exist to prevent people from doing dumb things that destabilize the market and when those rules are bypasses for belief reasons then the market will take that into account and discount the rules and the market loses its integrity. At that point you have signaled that the rules exist in order to facilitate corruption not oppose it, and you end up who knows where, but it certainly isn't better.

My predictions:

1) If the AI companies do end up running half the economy, we will have discussion for the rest of the human history about how the public got scammed by not being able buy in earlier at a lower price and how the late IPOs set in stone the oligarchy.

2) If the AI companies crash and burn, we will have discussion for several years about how everyone involved in running and financing them is a scoundrel who needs to go to jail for scamming us by selling us stock.

Picking winners in the stock market is a fools errand on a long enough time scale.

This has been proven time and time again. That’s the whole reason we diversify risk.

So, we will not have conversation 1, because that is not what index funds are meant to do.

Index inclusion rules have changed repeatedly over the years. The current rules are not some fundamental law of nature.

"It's a big club... and you ain't in it."

No, they absolutely don't fear prison (but they should).

It's just the aggregate behaviour of a group of people optimizing for short term profit and self-enrichment over everything and without any need for long-term careful planning because for various reasons they are pursuing the short term at all costs.

The people in charge of stock markets are mostly not the same as the people who create stock indexes. Those are run by different companies.

This was always the endgame of moving away from managed pensions to 401k's. First you get everyone's retirement income into the stock market, and then you use the stock market to take it all away from them.

It's inherently about him because he is the one behind these changes.

Twitter was 40 billion ish overpriced purchase and SpaceX is seeking to raise 75billion

Let’s not make billions into a footnote?

Space is raising $75B at an expected valuation of $750B so the Twitter value is just 5% of SpaceX’s IPO valuation and if it goes up then the fraction gets smaller.

Is 5% a footnote, maybe.

It’s a footnote because SpaceX is going to be worth trillions. If Twitter were fully written down right after IPO SpaceX’s shares might not even have a bad day.

It may or may not be worth trillions. But the valuation right now based on the IPO sale price is .75 trillion. Which makes it vastly bigger than Twitter regardless.

It could nonetheless be worth trillions by the end of the day.

Map out the road to trillions for us here, please.

"Worth" here means market cap. Which is almost completely divorced from its potential earnings.

Yeah I wouldn’t argue that it’s a good valuation but it may achieve it.

Space is the next great frontier and right now every single other company, and even country, remain orders of magnitude behind SpaceX. This could change in the future and viable competitors could emerge, public ownership could ruin SpaceX, or humanity's further entry into the cosmos could be delayed (Americans circa 1969 certainly probably also felt they were on the cusp of something great). But at current trajectories you're looking at something akin to there being one company that made ships better way better than everybody else, right before the Age of Sail kicked off.

Bro, they make 99% of the revenue providing internet connection where markets and governments have failed to provide good options. A trillion dollar valuation competing with the commodity cost of running fiber. Supporting off-grid internet is not a trillion dollar industry even combining it with all the revenue from other uses of satellites. It’s the next step in rockets which is more equivalent to better horse shoes than the age of sail.

Yeah, but have you considered that rocket ships are rad af and may even have laser guns?

I think most people, especially in this topic, know essentially nothing about SpaceX and are just going off political stuff. SpaceX have dropped the price to get stuff to space by about two orders of magnitude already, and there's no apparent reason Starship might not succeed in which case you're looking at even more orders of magnitude cost deduction.

Space is not, and cannot be, a frontier when it costs thousands of dollars to get a bottle of water into orbit. That suddenly changes when costs reach a sufficiently low threshold, and SpaceX is not only leading the race there but really the only significant player. Even China, with their vast resources, won't be able to compete unless they can reach near to technical parity with SpaceX. And, for now at least, they don't seem especially close and are, by far, the closest competitor SpaceX has, bro.

A similar path to Microsoft. Being the primary gate holder to a developing market segment aka space. In our modern overvalued stock indexes they are worth 750 billion before considering future growth.

The idea that companies can corner entire markets has been proven false time and time again. Every "tech" unicorn has their valuation propped up by the idea they'll be the "primary gate holder" to some billion or trillion dollar industry. For Uber it was Taxis, for Tesla basically all ground transport, etc. None of them have been borne out and competitors are already well established. Blue Origin is already nipping at their heels with the recovery of Never Tell Me the Odds last year.

UFO soft-disclosure is already underway (the Pentagon releases more and more evidence). The USA will go full disclosure before the end of Trump's second term. SpaceX will be granted monopoly on the reverse-engineered alien spacetime propulsion tech, becoming the most valuable company ever. The SpaceX IPO is the final act of the plan that was set in motion when president Eisenhower signed the pact with the Zeta Reticulans (aka "the greys") at Holloman Air Force Base in 1954.

Simple as.

Oh man, I really hope this is sarcasm :)

To explore this (hopefully parody) alt history, I don't know why the us gov wouldn't waited 70 some years for spacex to reach this point to grant that monopoly versus handing it off to the usual collection of defense contractors, eg raytheon (or whatever they're called now), Rand, etc.

The Holloman Pact made the alien technology transfer contingent on launching an alien-human hybrid program. You see, the Zeta Reticulans mandate their technology to be stewarded by hybrids (similar to how China requires a 50% Chinese joint venture to gain access to their markets). The two species' geneticists started working together, and in 1971 the first viable hybrid was born: Elon Musk. Then we had to wait for the hybrid to mature, before it could be given stewardship of this sensitive technology. Meanwhile a generations-long cultural manipulation program was also underway, to prepare humanity for disclosure.

This is the most rational argument in this entire discussion.

It's just the plot to the X-Files, upgraded to the social media age.

X-Files was always part of the soft-disclosure.

No joke the actor who played Cigarette Smoking Man (William Davis) has said that he got all kinds of mail from people who had "proof" of aliens and for some reason thought he'd be the right one to share it with.

I want to believe.

Well, now the "X" (X.com, SpaceX, Model X...) finally makes sense!

So what you're saying is we need tariffs on alien goods.

Let's see, maybe we'll be the Chinese for them, and they'll be hitting us with tarriffs once King Reticulani XVII gets into power.

Of course it's sarcasm, but if it WAS true, it would be because the government was working in cahoots with all those defense contractors all along, until the Trump administration came along and decided to privatize it, at which point SpaceX seized its opportunity.

Hahahahahha. I love this. Brilliant work.

It’s a category error to compare the equity value of Twitter during its purchase to the amount of cash to be raised by SpaceX during its IPO.

Twitter has about $13B of debt, and about $1.5B of annual interest payments (that’s how much cash it actually needs to come up with this year). SpaceX has a planned IPO market cap of $2T and plans to raise $75B cash during the IPO.

"He’ll do anything to move the goalposts and turn his failures into successes. There is no norm he won’t violate, no boundary he won’t cross."

Unfortunately, if you really start digging in to what is going on in the financial world, you will find he has violated no norms here. This is not a defense of Elon; this is a condemnation of the entire financial industry.

The whole thing scares me, honestly. It has never been a clean happy market where lots of honest people get together and are just honestly trying to make a better world for each other, there is no golden past where people were just nice or anything, but damn if computers don't let people build some structures that the robber barons of old could only have dreamt of. I'm really concerned that "index and chill" doesn't just have a "best by" date but that the best-by date could be in the past; I've heard of an awful lot of ways of exploiting it and other retirements schemes we have, this is just one. I find it implausible that these ideas exist but nobody is doing them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com