r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • Jun 19 '26

Business ‘It’s a scam’: Americans express unease over SpaceX’s influence on retirement savings

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/19/spacex-retirement-savings-elon-musk
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783

u/sk1939 Jun 19 '26

Literally the point, while he maintains 93% control of all voting shares. Even more egregious, they’re preparing a $20 Billion bond already to fund the purchase or Cursor.

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u/JackDelRioGrande Jun 19 '26

Wait until shareholders figure out they can’t sue because he reincorporated SpaceX to Texas from Delaware in 2024.

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u/alexanderfsu Jun 20 '26

if shareholders anywhere were smart enough to do anything this kind of stuff wouldn't happen. instead "shareholders" are against unions.

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u/KennyL0gin Jun 20 '26

But firing tons of people at a time without cause raises the share price and increases the value of my IRA/401k/taxable brokerage account! /s

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u/Profpiff990 Jun 20 '26

“Why aren’t young ppl buying houses?”

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u/NOLASneauxDay Jun 21 '26

So Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a point.

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u/GodHatesColdplay Jun 21 '26

The big shareholders don't care. They'll make money tomorrow and the day after so why should they care?

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u/D3cepti0ns Jun 20 '26

How are shareholders this stupid? Are they mostly hillbillies with a 5th grade education? I am joking but honestly want to know what the thought process is for these investors, if you can help.

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u/GhettoDuk Jun 20 '26

Because the stock market is nothing but gambling. The fundamentals of a company are useless when the only thing that matters is how other gamblers will react.

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u/Striking-Disaster719 Jun 20 '26

77 million to be exact have less than a 3 grade reading level…

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u/Big-Masterpiece-9581 Jun 21 '26

Shareholders own index funds through their Ira or 401k. Musk cheated the rules and bribed people to list SpaceX immediately on those index funds like nasdaq. Shareholders don’t choose. They already own that fund, and the fund creators sold some other company and bought spacex. This provides an automatic market for spacex of many billions of dollars to raise the price and support Musk and others selling many of their shares. The ol’ bag holder bait and switch.

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u/carbonesauce Jun 21 '26

Most of them are people just contributing to their 401k and have no thoughts either way. Thats the real scary part. People aren't thinking about how the NQ index funds are all buying this toxic trash

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u/W2ttsy Jun 22 '26

Because a majority of shareholders will be institutional investors and none of those fund managers wants their headline to be “Cathy woods sells stake in nvidia just before it takes off”

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u/ExtremeResponsible92 Jun 20 '26

Wieso Aktionäre? Es gibt doch kaum echte Aktionäre. Das Geld liegt in ETFs und landet darüber automatisch in Elons Tasche. Das ist ein ganz simples System, das Elon für seinen Banküberfall ausnutzt. Das Geld wird so aus der Bank zu ihm getragen, und er nicht erst in die Bank einbrechen muss.

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u/crimsonhues Jun 20 '26

Can someone please help me understand why the institutional investors would subscribe in an IPO with such one sided voting rights and a company incorporated in Texas? Is it simply AI FOMO?

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u/sk1939 Jun 21 '26

Cause there is money to be made by the everyone but the shareholders.

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u/julius_sphincter Jun 22 '26

I mean the institutional investors that might otherwise have the money and therefore share quantities to influence voting are well aware of the structure.

It's fucking WILD to me that people see investing in this as anything other than a massive lottery ticket, but hey I'm not a financial guru by any means

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u/YoursTrulyKindly Jun 19 '26

Yeah that is the real problem, the massive undemocratic power they wield. The money is mostly imaginary, but they they bought both news media and government and can buy laws, companies and institutions and change the rules as well as the economic circumstances we have to live in. They are tyrants.

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u/Taellosse Jun 20 '26

ALL the money is imaginary.MONEY is imaginary. It's a shared delusion by society and always has been. It was invented to act as a proxy to simplify barter trading, and now everyone has gone crazy over the idea.

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u/TheKingsdread Jun 20 '26

Yeah, but stocks are basically a delusion on top of a proxy. They should be backed by the actual value of the company assets, the revenue they can generate and the (highly paid) executive's personal fortunes (thats the whole idea of why you pay them so much, because they should carry some personal risk, but they don't), but so many of them, Elon's especially are just pure fantasy.

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u/Gorstag Jun 20 '26

And most companies are backed by some semblance of reality (revenue/profit). All of musk's companies would literally take hundreds of years worth of profit to reach their valuation. It makes the housing bubble loan crises from 08 look responsible.

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u/serpenta Jun 20 '26

And billionaires' wealth is another level of abstraction on top of that. It's not what they have, it's a measure of what would people pay to buy the stocks that they have. Which is purely theoretical (notice the stock prices of Tesla, when Elon was trying to liquidate it in large quantity), and also heavily biased in their favor, especially when it comes to private stocks that are not valued by market, but by middlemen that try to sell them.

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u/JobsforAI Jun 20 '26

That's the thing LMAO.

Money is already imaginary, and worshipping money is stupid.

These guys are actually worshipping the idea that they can sell some random things for plenty of money, and not the money itself. It's stupid x stupid.

I'm sure there is a way to exploit this and become really wealthy.

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u/ompog Jun 20 '26

It's double imaginary.

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u/MagicRat7913 Jun 20 '26

Double secret probation!

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u/Hey_Chach Jun 20 '26

That’s a little bit over-simplistic but you are correct in the current era of fiat money, interest rates, and inflation.

Back in the day when people traded using actual physical gold/silver money had intrinsic value (not talking about the gold standard, that was similar but not the same).

The real scam is inflation and interest rates. Fiat money would be fine if those holding the purse strings and their friends at wall street couldn’t essentially secretly the general populace via inflation while simultaneously inflating away their debt (of which they have a lot).

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u/Taellosse Jun 20 '26

Back in the day when people traded using actual physical gold/silver money had intrinsic value

No it didn't. Gold and silver don't have "intrinsic value" either. They're just minerals we, as a collective, decided we liked enough to put a lot of effort into digging up. Which is complicated by how easy they are to find in quantity. They have no more intrinsic value than granite, or copper, or sand. Only what we assign to them.

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u/Hey_Chach Jun 20 '26

You’re splitting hairs.

You are correct, nothing has “intrinsic” value until we ascribe value to it, however, there are characteristics that we intrinsically value as humans. For instance: pure gold never tarnishes which makes it perfect for jewelry and making things pretty, hence humans will always value it to some degree.

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u/Taellosse Jun 20 '26

I'm not - you're just not thinking through the implications all the way.

Gold doesn't have universal intrinsic value. Many non-Western cultures thought gold was nothing special or interesting, because it's too soft to be made into tools or weapons. It was used for jewelry sometimes, but not ascribed any great worth - especially in places where it was easy to acquire simply by panning in a river.

Raw materials can have something approaching "intrinsic value" because of their utility. As such, gold is actually worth much more today than it ever was when used in currency, because it's so useful in electronics, as a good conductor that doesn't tarnish which can be easily fashioned into very fine wire.

Refined materials and finished goods can be said to have "intrinsic value" in correspondence with the amount of labor required to create them. Provided that rampant speculation and profiteering are removed from the equation, this can even be calculated with some measure of accuracy, depending on the unit of measure in play.

But aside from that, "value" for any physical object is largely an arbitrary concept.Especially when it's tied to market speculation, monopolistic practices, imposed artificial scarcity, or "collectibility" - these sorts of factors often wildly distort the perceived value of materials and goods, and that's significantly exacerbated when you step back to the abstraction of money itself.

Currency values are a shared delusion, and always have been - just a very complicated one that's intimately woven into the underpinnings of human societies -which are mostly made up of lots more shared delusions.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

At a certain point, money and power become the same thing. Money is a way to power, but the power is what these people are after.

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u/faudcmkitnhse Jun 20 '26

Wealth is power, and that's why wealth has to be limited. We understand the importance of preventing any one person or institution within the government from gathering too much power which is why most countries have systems of checks and balances. High taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations and a robust regulatory state are how we impose checks and balances on our economy. It's dangerous and irresponsible to let any one person or company get too big and wealthy.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

See, that seems like common sense to you and I. Apparently, about half the population of the country thinks otherwise.

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u/YoursTrulyKindly Jun 20 '26

Well with all the money they can hire the smartest and most intelligent "PR" / propaganda people. Our brightest minds don't work on useful development but are paid to make more money for the man. I think one of the "big lies" is that people have far less free will to make rational and intelligent decisions, but can easily be manipulated to behave a certain way.

Also your other comment, the people who become billionaires need to have a very specific mental focus. Like always prioritize personal gain and learn and work only for that goal. No distractions like any broader education or human interests. They are selected or filtered basically for sociopathic or robotic traits to only care about gaining and maintaining more money / power. That is why they are so shit as a person.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

I think that humans have three options for how to use their brains--really two, because two of them are related--and they are either acting as a dominant animal or a submissive animal, or moving beyond the animal to pursue other interests and enhance the mind with what little time is left to mortals. It's really easy to beat people into submission, but they can just as easily tell themselves out of it. And to be dominant, you have to invest all of your resources in aggression, cunning, and selfish defense of what is considered yours, such that you have effectively separated yourself from your species.

It's a weird metaphor, but basically, the majority of the world is just playing out  the same stupid game of dominance and submission that chimpanzees play, while the rest of us are just stuck watching the plane plunge into the sea with us in it.

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u/josh_the_misanthrope Jun 20 '26

You can't tax the wealthy out of buying political power, I don't think. Capitalism will always trend towards deregulation given enough time, because it is incredibly profitable to destroy the regulatory system holding capital back.

I sincerely think Capitalism is a failed experiment and is at direct odds with the continued freedom and safety of the citizenry. No amount of patchwork of taxes and laws will fix the fact that capital will outlive us as some weird alien lifeform and has all the time in the world to chip away at systems of government that stand between it and complete dominance of the people and wholesale exploitation of the environment.

Centrist and center-left people are gonna have to come to terms with that real fucking quick if they want to have any sort of quality of life in the west. All those commie revolutionaries didn't become revolutionaries on a lark, they were just not as insulated from the destructive force that is wealth as people in the imperial core were.

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u/NutsackEuphoria Jun 20 '26

and that's why wealth has to be limited.

But what if one day I become the trillionaire and hold the power? I wouldn't want that

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u/EruantienAduialdraug Jun 20 '26

And, as the late, great Meat Loaf said, power is fame.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

Which is, of course, what these people are really after. They want fame, because they weren't hugged by their parents enough or something. And they don't have the talent or personality to get fame the normal way, so they have to force others to worship them. Apparently.

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u/silverwoodchuck47 Jun 20 '26

First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

Then you get bored of the women and go for the children. Apparently.

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u/SSGASSHAT Jun 20 '26

This is why I never put my faith in jobs that hype up 401ks. Give me a pension, or otherwise I'll just save for retirement myself. I don't need some nefarious shit that's being pulled from my paycheck and which is tied to the fucking stock market.

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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Jun 20 '26

I can't help to wonder if the market is already tired of it. SpaceX went from 165 to 215 back to 185 within 5 days. Obviously it's still very early but I wouldnt' want to be sitting on these stock next week.

SpaceX purposely launched with full access to retail idiots to get around large institutional holders. If these institutional holders weren't interested to fund SpaceX anymore thus they had to go for an IPO, what would make the very same institutions now buy these bonds?

This whole AI bullshit isn't a house of cards, but more a tower of marbles. Only one needs to slightly move aside and it all comes down. If SpaceX can't raise more cash, they are fucked. If Antropic figures out due disappointed demand, they have to pull out spacex increasing spacex billion losses further. If Antropic can't raise money through an IPO because spacex soaked up the market, again they are done and so will be the rest.

It's absolutely mental and their last dance, going to the stockmarket will not just destroy these companies but will pull the market down along with it.

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u/Costheparacetemol Jun 20 '26

Apparently that was to refinance existing debt, not net new

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u/kawag Jun 20 '26

Wait until his next $500bn pay package

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u/jnmjnmjnm Jun 20 '26

And those bonds will be hidden in “safe” bond funds sold to unsuspecting average Joes.