So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something.
They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana...
Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive.
They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.
To be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.
To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This is also addressed in the article:
> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!
> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.
> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
It's hard to know if SpaceX will flop in a week or in a decade but what I'm pretty confident on is a lot of retail capital allocated in Tesla will be redistributed to SpaceX.
So my trade on IPO day will be long $X SpaceX, short $X Tesla. Wait 1 month. Wish me luck.
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
The point-to-point travel with starship is the one that urks me the most. It is completely unrealistic and will never happen. They have Zürich, Switzerland as a destination. There is no place in all of Zürich to facility such a thing, you will blow out every window in the city at each launch. Absolutely ridiculous that anyone would take this serious.
Also don't get me started on data centers in space idea...
When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?
> When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?
I liked Matt Levine's take in his latest podcast. You buy an index because you want to own the market. If you want to own the market in 2026 you want to own SpaceX and Anthropic, and probably OpenAI too.
That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
> That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
The price at IPO will obviously be influenced by expectations of a future purchase by index funds... as an analogy, if it became public knowledge that next week, 1,000,000 people would all be required to buy gold, the price of gold would go up today, not next week
By making inclusion near-certain and fast, the rule changes may actually reduce the post-IPO inclusion pop (it gets priced in at IPO) while increasing the IPO price itself and the volatility on rebalance day due to the float constraint.
This IPO marks and inflection point where a fund that tracks whole market value shifts in definition, because of the forced rush value nature of the rule changes.
If the fast entry rule changes hadn’t happened I would agree with you entirely.
The rule change where nasdaq adds a weighting factor to spacex's float is what causes distortions - it artificially increases the size of spacex's cap weight without actually having more shares.
Fortunately, this only affects indices that follow nasdaq, and from what i know, no other index is following this. That means it's "safe" to purchase a globally diversified, cap weighted index fund (safe as in the float isn't manipulated).
People talk of the demise of passive investing due to this, but most of the commentary fail to mention it's a specific, nasdaq thing and not a general change.
Why do index funds follow the exact companies in the index itself? Is it simply a branding thing? I’m buying into S&P500 because S&P500 is a highly recognized term used to mean “The US Economy”?
I feel that what this article is telling me is that passive funds are becoming active funds by way of manipulating the index itself. Kind of like if you’re passively invested in Brazil winning the World Cup but you can’t adjust the team or tactics, so instead you move the goal posts to where they’re about to kick the ball?
Pension funds seem more selective on the other hand. It’s always been the case that you can adjust your palette based on personal preference eg green energy, no weapons, tech stocks, etc.
This is just the dude that's famous for getting Tesla wrong constantly? If he's convinced it's going south it's probably an easy 100% gain from the IPO.
Well, the entire stock market is a world of thievery. Are you saying do not invest in any stocks and let your money rot in a savings account due to inflation?
This is stupid bait intended for financially illiterate readers, designed to resonate with the very common and reasonable anti-Musk sentiments.
Observe that almost all the complaints about what the indices are doing originate from outside of finance. It's very telling that the people who are complaining are not the ones putting their money where their mouths are.
If market participants didn't like what the indices are doing, they would simply reject it. Market participants absolutely do want this.
> Index funds are for people who don't want to know about the details and put the work in. They go by general recommendations.
Oh yes, all those poor giant institutional money managers who don't care about the details would be so shocked if only someone told them about this "rug pull".
>Now the underlying rules got changed, undeniably in favor and through pressure of few individuals.
This is ridiculous. The entire purpose of index funds is to reflect the market, the rules are being changed to enable the funds to better reflect the market.
Basically everyone who wants broad index funds wants this. If you don't want this, you simply need to look for a different product.
It is reasonable to predict TSLA stock will, someday, drop to something roughly reflective of the value of the company. It has a long way to fall to reach that point, but, there's no reason to think it won't happen eventually. The market can remain irrational for a long time, but the facts are what they are.
Well, if Tesla gets merged into SpaceX at a record valuation (as was rumored is the intention recently), people with short positions would end up shorting SpaceX.
There are a lot of high stakes bets wrapped up in that company at this point already. AI, orbital launch business, communications networks, a little bit of Twitter/X, etc. And soon robots, grid battery, solar panels, electrical vehicles, autonomous driving, etc. They don't all have to work out to justify the combined valuation. Of course the facts are that quite a few of these lines of businesses are generating many billions in revenue already. It's at least a more diversified bet if a merge happens. Which might be why some share holders might prefer this. I don't have shares but I think that's a pretty rational attitude.
Still a risky bet of course. But betting that it will all fail might be the riskier one. Maybe it will just end up somewhere in between and not quite live up to expectations but still be a business generating lots of revenue with some healthy growth.
Apple and Microsoft seem to be doing okay after many decades. Edison is 200 years old and is on the stock market. It is about finding the right product that will last. Tesla could be one of them if it can survive the next decade.
AAPL and MSFT have a P/E an order of magnitude lower than TSLA whilst both having revenue growth % yoy in the teens. They both make over a $100b in PROFIT a year. TSLA's? $4b and shrinking btw. Their highest P/E's since 2005 was under 50. AAPL reached 100 in June 2003 (around the time of the iTunes Store release.. mid iPod era but pre iPhone).
Comparing with MSFT and AAPL makes TSLA look even more insane.
Most have their pension automatically track index. Nasdaq changes rules so that the pension funds are forced to buy stock while very volatile and likely overpriced.
- many funds owned by the public will buy this, so people will be indirectly invested and could lose money
- if this affects the economy, it will affect everyone
All investments in equities carry risk of losing money. You also have a choice how much, if any, you are in the stock market and which stocks. As the market conditions change or the economy changes, it is your responsibility to manage your own investments.
How is that supposed to answer the question? It seems like you completely ignored it and decided to share unrelated complaints, the things you describe are not even vaguely theft-adjacent.
So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something. They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana...
Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive.
They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.
To be fair, they were overvalued in those days as well. Just because the on-paper value went up doesn’t make their statements false, it just means we’ve continued the charade.
Grudge? I would say he was spot on. And he still is.
To be fair, few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.
This is also addressed in the article:
> E. DON’T TRY TO SHORT SPACEX!!
> Elon Musk is a cult figure. Moreover, he has again and again proven himself immune to any meaningful market, legal, or regulatory scrutiny.
> Musk’s detractors have been correct about Tesla’s terrible fundamentals, its Full Self-Driving lies, its robotaxi fantasies, its shaky accounting. But when they have imagined these things might affect the stock price, they have been wrong.
It's hard to know if SpaceX will flop in a week or in a decade but what I'm pretty confident on is a lot of retail capital allocated in Tesla will be redistributed to SpaceX.
So my trade on IPO day will be long $X SpaceX, short $X Tesla. Wait 1 month. Wish me luck.
How do you know that this isn't already priced by quant firms?
More like: why would you think it's not already priced in. Answer: I'm super special!
An S-1 full of fantasies, insiders who will pocket millions, index companies that have changed the rules: it's all a recipe for regular people to have their pockets picked.
The point-to-point travel with starship is the one that urks me the most. It is completely unrealistic and will never happen. They have Zürich, Switzerland as a destination. There is no place in all of Zürich to facility such a thing, you will blow out every window in the city at each launch. Absolutely ridiculous that anyone would take this serious.
Also don't get me started on data centers in space idea...
When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?
And even that pales in comparison to their estimate of a $22.7T (T!) market for their AI "enterprise applications".
As a point of reference, the GDP of the United States is roughly $30T.
> When the Chinese land on the moon sometime in 2030 and the US still doesn't have a way to get there, will Elon finally reap the consequences for his lies or just the interim NASA admin that gave Space X the contract?
In all likelihood, neither.
The other stuff is bad, but surely "insiders who will pocket millions" is normal for an IPO?
it'll be a small from our pockets individually. but it'll add up to what elon needs.
this is the new playbook.
> this is the new playbook.
Same as the old playbook, just scaled up. Tesla got billions from state subsidies and selling carbon credits.
I liked Matt Levine's take in his latest podcast. You buy an index because you want to own the market. If you want to own the market in 2026 you want to own SpaceX and Anthropic, and probably OpenAI too.
That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
> That said, if you think this is as bad as the article claims you'll obviously buy SpaceX at IPO, then sell it when Index funds are obligated to buy.
The price at IPO will obviously be influenced by expectations of a future purchase by index funds... as an analogy, if it became public knowledge that next week, 1,000,000 people would all be required to buy gold, the price of gold would go up today, not next week
By making inclusion near-certain and fast, the rule changes may actually reduce the post-IPO inclusion pop (it gets priced in at IPO) while increasing the IPO price itself and the volatility on rebalance day due to the float constraint.
yes! Michael Munger expressed it beautifully: "anything that is going to happen has already happened"
This IPO marks and inflection point where a fund that tracks whole market value shifts in definition, because of the forced rush value nature of the rule changes.
If the fast entry rule changes hadn’t happened I would agree with you entirely.
The rule change where nasdaq adds a weighting factor to spacex's float is what causes distortions - it artificially increases the size of spacex's cap weight without actually having more shares.
Fortunately, this only affects indices that follow nasdaq, and from what i know, no other index is following this. That means it's "safe" to purchase a globally diversified, cap weighted index fund (safe as in the float isn't manipulated).
People talk of the demise of passive investing due to this, but most of the commentary fail to mention it's a specific, nasdaq thing and not a general change.
Why do index funds follow the exact companies in the index itself? Is it simply a branding thing? I’m buying into S&P500 because S&P500 is a highly recognized term used to mean “The US Economy”?
I feel that what this article is telling me is that passive funds are becoming active funds by way of manipulating the index itself. Kind of like if you’re passively invested in Brazil winning the World Cup but you can’t adjust the team or tactics, so instead you move the goal posts to where they’re about to kick the ball?
Pension funds seem more selective on the other hand. It’s always been the case that you can adjust your palette based on personal preference eg green energy, no weapons, tech stocks, etc.
Falcon 9 proved SpaceX can deliver on hard engineering promises. Why isn't that track record factored into the business case here?
Is the argument that SpaceX the business fails, or just that the IPO price is disconnected from reality?
How much of the index fund manipulation concern applies to any mega-cap IPO, vs. something unique to SpaceX?
This is just the dude that's famous for getting Tesla wrong constantly? If he's convinced it's going south it's probably an easy 100% gain from the IPO.
That's not an argument for. Maybe we don't want to live in a world of thievery, or be thieves ourselves.
Well, the entire stock market is a world of thievery. Are you saying do not invest in any stocks and let your money rot in a savings account due to inflation?
What thievery happens in the stock market?
This is stupid bait intended for financially illiterate readers, designed to resonate with the very common and reasonable anti-Musk sentiments.
Observe that almost all the complaints about what the indices are doing originate from outside of finance. It's very telling that the people who are complaining are not the ones putting their money where their mouths are.
If market participants didn't like what the indices are doing, they would simply reject it. Market participants absolutely do want this.
I doubt your sentiment. Index funds are for people who don't want to know about the details and put the work in. They go by general recommendations.
Now the underlying rules got changed, undeniably in favor and through pressure of few individuals.
Where I come from, we call that a rug pull
> Index funds are for people who don't want to know about the details and put the work in. They go by general recommendations.
Oh yes, all those poor giant institutional money managers who don't care about the details would be so shocked if only someone told them about this "rug pull".
>Now the underlying rules got changed, undeniably in favor and through pressure of few individuals.
This is ridiculous. The entire purpose of index funds is to reflect the market, the rules are being changed to enable the funds to better reflect the market.
Basically everyone who wants broad index funds wants this. If you don't want this, you simply need to look for a different product.
How does one simply reject it? You make it sound oh so easy. As if the taxman is a made up idea.
What are you even trying to say? Where does the taxman enter into this?
SpaceX a failure at 83% of mass to orbit. Yoikes.
The launch business is impressive relative to the launch industry, but in terms of company capital value, it is a very small part of the company.
I'm rooting for SpaceX, but even I can see that there's some extremely dicey work being done to mask the enormous sinkhole of XAi (and Twitter).
This is just eds. Same guy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSLAQ
He's got some kind of beef with Elon and has predicted TSLA stock will crash many times.
It is reasonable to predict TSLA stock will, someday, drop to something roughly reflective of the value of the company. It has a long way to fall to reach that point, but, there's no reason to think it won't happen eventually. The market can remain irrational for a long time, but the facts are what they are.
Well, if Tesla gets merged into SpaceX at a record valuation (as was rumored is the intention recently), people with short positions would end up shorting SpaceX.
There are a lot of high stakes bets wrapped up in that company at this point already. AI, orbital launch business, communications networks, a little bit of Twitter/X, etc. And soon robots, grid battery, solar panels, electrical vehicles, autonomous driving, etc. They don't all have to work out to justify the combined valuation. Of course the facts are that quite a few of these lines of businesses are generating many billions in revenue already. It's at least a more diversified bet if a merge happens. Which might be why some share holders might prefer this. I don't have shares but I think that's a pretty rational attitude.
Still a risky bet of course. But betting that it will all fail might be the riskier one. Maybe it will just end up somewhere in between and not quite live up to expectations but still be a business generating lots of revenue with some healthy growth.
This is like ANY company. What company will last forever. Not many.
Not every company trades at 387 PE on 2%-3% growth. I can't name any that do.
F sells an order of magnitude more cars (~$190 billion in revenue), and has a market cap of $62.8 billion vs TSLA market cap of $1.59 trillion.
TSLA is ridiculous. Any sane investor would look at those numbers and run as far and as fast as they can.
Somehow people will read this fact and say it's not overvalued because it hasn't crashed yet.
Apple and Microsoft seem to be doing okay after many decades. Edison is 200 years old and is on the stock market. It is about finding the right product that will last. Tesla could be one of them if it can survive the next decade.
AAPL and MSFT have a P/E an order of magnitude lower than TSLA whilst both having revenue growth % yoy in the teens. They both make over a $100b in PROFIT a year. TSLA's? $4b and shrinking btw. Their highest P/E's since 2005 was under 50. AAPL reached 100 in June 2003 (around the time of the iTunes Store release.. mid iPod era but pre iPhone).
Comparing with MSFT and AAPL makes TSLA look even more insane.
How can a public sale ever be a theft?
Most have their pension automatically track index. Nasdaq changes rules so that the pension funds are forced to buy stock while very volatile and likely overpriced.
Those poor pension funds, unable to make their own decisions. Forced to keep all of their money in $NDX forever.
It must be terrible to be so utterly powerless.
Maybe you didn't know this but:
All investments in equities carry risk of losing money. You also have a choice how much, if any, you are in the stock market and which stocks. As the market conditions change or the economy changes, it is your responsibility to manage your own investments.
How is that supposed to answer the question? It seems like you completely ignored it and decided to share unrelated complaints, the things you describe are not even vaguely theft-adjacent.