1. Twitter is purchased with debt
2. Debt is transferred to xAI via acquisition of X/Twitter
3. Debt is further transferred to SpaceX via acquisition of xAI
4. SpaceX IPO offered at extreme valuation
5. Index fund inclusion rules waived for SpaceX IPO: profitability requirement, inclusion period cut from 90 to 5 days
6. Index funds are largely held by passive investors such as pension funds.
7. Index fund managers are not incentivized to exclude a SpaceX from their indexes. (?)
8. Holders of original X/Twitter debt (banks) incentivized to support the rule waiver since post IPO, SpaceX will have liquidity to service/pay the debt.
9. Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)
10. SpaceX is in Texas jurisdiction, where shareholder lawsuits are not possible and must instead go for arbitration. (?)
Correction: index funds don't have a choice. They must follow the index, and so must buy the stock.
side effect: they'll have to sell other stocks, pushing their prices and weighting in market cap weighted indexes down.
> Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)
For some active investors, yes. For passive investors (say you through your employer's pension fund), the tax isn't the problem. It's that the market has such a short time to adjust the price of these companies before indexes are forced to include them--and so might buy them at wildly inflated prices. Then, not too long after, the early investors can sell at still-high prices as soon as their lockup periods end. It's a massive transfer of wealth from pension funds and index investors to the early investors in those companies.
Maybe, most indexes do not have to follow the index. they just need to match the returns. An index fund manager has choice of what stocks to buy. However an index fund doesn't have enough managers to make many choices and so they normally buy just what is in the index. However all index fund managers know they are large enough that if they change their holdings "instantly" when the index it self changes the market will collapse and so the fund will under perform. Thus index fund managers are always trying to figure out what the index will do so they can start buying/selling stocks in smaller amounts before the change happens.
How each fund handles this is up to the managers. (and "total market" funds have less ability and need to do this)
Just look up the performance of Mutual Funds vs S&P500.
Again, the vast majority of the time they are matching the index stocks. However they have the right.
Typically managers pay is such that they don't get awards for guessing correctly, so they won't get any upside from a correct second guess, and they will see downsides from incorrect guesses.
Also unlike traditional funds, there are not enough managers to follow every company, so they can't pick stocks that will win just because they don't have enough to time research the stock. When they pick a stock they are just looking at the high level will this company perform like the other peers in the industry long term.
On the other hand, do you want to be the one who says, "As a rule we follow the index, but this time we decided to break our own rule, and as a result we lost X% of returns"?
Better wrong with everybody else than wrong on my own.
Changing one of those features undermines the reasons for including the index. Doing it specifically for the purpose of including a firm where large pension funds have also been extraordinarily critical of the governance structure as a particular source of risk [0] even moreso.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/new-york-california...
Right, if they've advertised as an S&P 500 index fund, they have to robotically follow the S&P 500, stupid inclusions and all. Changing that strategy would require ... a lengthy process involving input from shareholders.
However, someone can still start e.g. a "classic S&P 500" fund that follows the old rules for inclusion, and I suspect we'll see that in response to these recent decision.
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.
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.
"Im too busy to spend 30 minutes to move my retirement somewhere I trust" just doesnt cut it.
People should honestly read Killing the Sacred Cows it’s an eye-opener for anyone invested in 401k.
Any funds lying around are supposed to be for temporary imbalances, but became significant due to a major demographic imbalance: the Baby Boom.
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)
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.
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.
Let’s not make billions into a footnote?
Is 5% a footnote, maybe.
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.
It could nonetheless be worth trillions by the end of the day.
Simple as.
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.
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.
There is video explaining the process
7. ETF managers that track an index aren't allowed to put discretion into what they buy. They offer much lower fees because they don't have to do any thinking, just executing on an algorithm.
8. SpaceX servicing the X/Twitter debt isn't really a question. The total amount of debt is equal to about one year of revenue at the moment, and it's under 3% of the expected market cap of SpaceX. It's less than a third of what SpaceX's IPO is expected to generate selling new shares to the public. It's a non-issue. On the other hand, the fees the banks will get for the IPO could easily convince them to support the rules waivers.
9. This is true of some passive investors. It is not true of pension funds (which are usually not passive) or 401ks or other tax-advantaged retirement accounts. It is likely to be partly true for any individual depending on how much of their assets is in a tax-advantaged account vs a regular account.
10. Yes to Texas. It seems like the arbitration part is likely to be true (SpaceX is certainly claiming it in the prospectus), but there is not the certainty of having a long history of litigation.
Returning to 2+3: The rolling up of all other private Musk companies into SpaceX certainly impacted the investors in those companies, and how much Musk owns vs other people. But the equity adjustments there would be interesting, not the debt.
> ETF managers that track an index aren't allowed to put discretion into what they buy.
I detect a contradiction here.
Pension operators are not typically passive. It's a different story to say that maybe they should be given that their returns don't always match up with index funds.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citigroup
They all know how idiotic Tesla investors are, and they all want those idiots to pick up their bags.
Also: SpaceX debt is $20 billion.
Personally, I do think SpaceX is overvalued at these proposed IPO numbers and I will trade accordingly. So should anyone else who is confident and competent at taking appropriate market positions.
1. https://www.investmentnews.com/practice-management/spacexs-i...
which is exactly why public markets have always been a superior price discovery mechanism in comparison to private markets
Like if both these stocks become penny stocks what happens to the indices?
Isn’t the whole point that they are hedged across the whole market?
how could an index fund possibly have anyone's back? It's in index of the top 500 publicly traded companies. that's all. If SpaceX or Tesla or Anthropic or anyone else fall out of the top 500 then they fall off the index by definition.
I think a lot of these comments are coming from extreme emotions associated with AI and Elon Musk and not so much the way things work and will play out.
* S&P500: 0.08% – 0.12%
* NASDAQ-100: 0.47% – 0.70%
* Russell 1000: 0.1%
What Spacex/Elon are doing is sketchy as hell. But the numbers involved here are not terribly meaningful for your portfolio.
At IPO, $75B of Spacex shares will be bought/sold. The S&P 500 uses float-adjusted weightings, and the current float-adjusted total is $54T. If you are 100% invested in SPY, then about 0.14% of your holdings will be spacex on IPO day (75B/54T~=0.14%).
Obviously Musk and friends will start dumping some of the locked up float (~1.65T) when they can. But they definitely will not be doing so in a way that crashes the price or the market. That's in nobody's interest.
If you assume that half of the shares end up as float eventually (post-lockup), you'd end up owning around 1.6% of spacex in your S&P 500 etf (875B/~55T~=1.6%). That's not nothing but it's not significant enough that you should consider liquidating your 401k.
I'm picking on Spacex specifically because they are the biggest and imo, have the sketchiest/worst finances of the 3.
IF SpaceX is actually worth 400-500bn and it's a few hundred billion dollars of fleece, sure, that's a "small" amount (still.. lord almighty it is never enough for these people). But the hazard is that it is a fleece. That would shake confidence in the system, the bear case is basically unlimited at that point.
I dunno, the logical explanation makes sense, but markets don't work on logic especially on the short term. People fearing what other people will do and act in anticipation is known to happen.
Spacex/Anthropic/OpenAI almost certainly won't crash the market. The most probable thing to happen is that all 3 of these rally a surprising amount on their opening day, because there will be so much forced buying of the shares.
In my opinion, the most likely bagholders will be any retail traders that buy these stocks before the lockups expire.
I think it's very likely that we see the following:
IPO day -> all 3 close higher than opening price.
1 month -> price settles into a range 20-30% higher than IPO price.
6-12 months -> price is back near IPO price +-5%. Anyone who bought and held in the first 3 months has unrealized losses.
IPO's fairly reliably pop on day one. The performance in the first 6 months is mixed but skews slightly negative.
But the size of these 3, combined with the rule changes that are allowing them to be included in the indices much quicker than normal, means this time is very different than what we've seen before.
What you should do is have an Investor Policy Statement[0].
This should contain at least two things:
- your desired Asset Allocation (e.g. 30% U.S. stocks, 30% International stocks, 20% U.S. bonds, 20% International bonds) which should be decided upon based on specific, personal goals and risk tolerance
- your strict policy rules for if and when to do anything, if ever, e.g. (don't sell anything ever, or... rebalance your portfolio if one of your allocations is more than 2% from the desired goal)
Now... if say U.S. stocks took a big dump in the next 6 months (while other asset classes either grew, held steady, or simply didn't drop as much), when it would drop below 28% of your allocation, and you'd open a spreadsheet and figure out which other asset classes to sell a few percentage of, to buy the reduced price U.S. stock funds. (This is a policy-driven buy low, sell high strategy.)
[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investment_policy_statement
- yes 401k fund options are negotiated by people that don't know I exist, or care
- but... how I allocate my contributions to those funds is under my discretion
- and... I've never stayed somewhere long enough to have a $600k 401k balance. As soon as I'm gone, I roll it over to a private account that I have full control over (and much lower expense ratios.)
So I don't really care if I'm in the door or laughed out the door, because it has no material affect on how I manage my finances.
On what grounds? What tort have you suffered?
If you want change (and who wouldn't?) you need to talk to your representatives, not the courts.
Also some EU pension funds are already in the process of divesting from US markets...
And where will they go to?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/124-trillion-global-stock-m...
Amazon is worth $2.81T right now and only represents 4.03% of the S&P500.
So a $1T share would represent less than 2% of the S&P500. This is significant for a single company, and 6% for 3 shit-tier companies (SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) is even more significant, but we're far from "losing retirement if they go bust"-levels.
It is especially telling if we try to list out all the psychological biases at play:
- Availability & salience bias - vivid, memorable things feel more important than they are
- Narrative bias - humans tend to think in stories, and AI tells plenty
- Recency and novelty bias — new things feel more consequential than established ones (this one already drives like 80% of all HN content btw)
- Proportionality neglect - people are bad at intuitively grasping what percentages mean, even if they see the stats
- Social proof and reflexivity - coverage signals importance, and drives more coverage
- Status quo invisibility - things that work reliably become invisible (surprisingly, HN is really good in terms of working against this bias, I feel like at least 5% of all posts are some niche "inner daily workings" topics)
- Speculation premium in attention - uncertainty generates more discussion than certainty
- In-group signaling - cutting-edge things are status markers among influencershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_float
I hear S&P 500 is weighted on float rather than on market cap, while Nasdaq 100 is based on market cap.
> most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading (the “free float”). For SpaceX, this means just the $75bn or so of stock it intends to issue in June—so its initial weight in the S&P 500 will be around 0.1%. The NASDAQ 100 is an exception, and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float, in an apparent effort to woo Mr Musk. Even so, SpaceX’s probable initial weight in this $40trn index will still only be around 0.5%.
NVIDIA Corp NVDA 8.02%
Apple Inc AAPL 6.53%
Microsoft Corp MSFT 4.84%
Amazon.com Inc AMZN 4.01%
Broadcom Inc AVGO 3.36%
Alphabet Inc GOOGL 3.32%
Alphabet Inc GOOG 3.09%
Meta Platforms Inc META 2.23%
Micron Technology Inc MU 1.71%
Advanced Micro Devices Inc AMD 1.19%
Oracle Corp ORCL 0.99%
That's 40% of the S&P 500.
And if anything happens to the AI bubble all of these go down together. While they won't all go to zero and cause a "-40%" overnight, Nvidia's rise is so meteoric that they will trigger a -8% and the rest's valuation has more than doubled since 2023. Even Apple, which isn't much of an "AI company", is still following the AI-tech hype.
If Nvidia eats shit, and the others go -50%, that translates to an overall ~-24% on the stock market.
Before any contagion outside the tech industry is considered. Look at the Dotcom Bubble and a -40% to -50% crash is quite plausible.
This is the key comparison. It's not the "Pets dot com" side of the DotCom bubble, but the Telecom Bubble that followed. (All the AI startups that just repackage someone else's inference will go the way of Pets dot com, but their economic impact is minimal)
Certainly, Big Tech has massive cashflows. But those cashflows were priced into the 2023 valuations.
That is what makes the current valuations so ominous. Just a correction back to 2023 would be enormous. And as you note, a lot of these companies are taking on debt, dumping huge investments into AI. They're worse off than they were in 2023. Oracle may straight up go bankrupt.
> Oracle may straight up go bankrupt.
And nothing of value would be lost.
I do not want things to go kaboom, the CAPE index seems to indicate that what I want isn't relevant.
Google and Amazon fund Anthropic which returns the favor with cloud purchases at these hyperscalers. So, google and amazon show increased earnings (via anthropic share markup) and increased cloud revenues via anthropic purchase. SpaceX didnt want to be left behind, so, it signed a deal with Anthropic.
Meanwhile capex at hyperscalers, VCs, PE etc is funding the party. Capex is not a concern to anybody as it doesnt appear on either revenues or earnings at the hyperscalers.
Downstream is partying from all the spending (server makers, chips, disk etc).
Whats not to like ! this is a perpetual money machine. Lets partay !
And that is on top of the IPO companies losing value themselves, this seems likely to trigger a doom-loop until the market reaches a low enough value. This will likely trigger layoffs and companies reducing spending and investments further depressing the economy. Added inflation from oil prices and war.
This doesn't seem like one big balloon ready to burst, but more like a house suspended by hundreds of balloons and they are about to be ran over by an airplane.
You mean our pension funds?
Firstly, pension funds hold some share of stocks, but far from all. Second, pension funds hold a share of a pie that's not all that came out of the bakery. The bakery made a lot more dough, but much pie was spent (horribly mixing metaphors) to buy assets like property and private investments. So in reality pension funds hold a fraction of a fraction. Third, pension funds invested in equity is a replacement for the old pension systems of yore where companies were forced to set aside money and invest smartly to fund guaranteed income pension plans. They don't have to do that anymore. Instead they contribute to a 401(K) or similar in other countries, which lowered their costs and reduced company risk. For listed companies, those savings went to the shareholders, of which pension funds were just a fraction of a fraction.
I hope this illustrates that we, the salaried workers, see only a small fraction of the value created by increased productivity.
"Reasonable" is doing herculean amounts of work as usual, as it is implicitly operating under a thief's logic that the target didn't really deserve it anyway therefore if I steal all of it I will be justified.
We see the same shit when regiemes 'nationalize' segments of the economy and then wonder why instead of miraculously getting better without the 'exploiters' things turn to shit and absolutely nobody wants to trade with them. Empathy such a foreign concept to them that they don’t understand why merchants refuse to trade with those who steal businesses wholesale. Whose only response when confronted about their crimes is lame whataboutisms and victim blaming.
But this doesn't solve the problem in any way; it simply leads to production drop.
I mean, this is literally the logic of every communist government in the 20th century. They had the same logic that "given the mechanization of agriculture, food practically produces itself; you just need to throw a seed in the ground and give it a couple of tractor rides, and the earth will do the rest. Therefore, we need a tax on such activity, because we have enough resources to feed everyone".
In other words, it's literally a pure tax on automation. The results were mass deaths from starvation every single time.
There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.
Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.
Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause.
When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society.
This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant.
But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.
It's absolutely correct that we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone. We can even give everyone comforts. It's mostly greed that prevents it. Greed that capitalism spends $trillions cultivating by brain-washing us all to want more and never be satisfied.
> It's mostly greed that prevents it
Greed is a human axiom. Anything that depends on humans not being greedy isn't worth the paper it's printed on. That's why capitalism won, despite its many faults: it requires human greed to function.
No, I don't think so. From a historical point of view, everything is quite clear: after communists came to power, the most severe famines occurred even before this totalitarian dictatorship is build, as a consequence of these very tax policies, the purpose of which is "easily feed, clothe, house everyone".
Totalitarian dictatorship comes later, as the problem transform to "we can easily feed, clothe, house everyone, but they don't want to, so we should force them"
The fact it became an all-inclusive all-year-round vacation reward is an anomaly which is getting corrected. Too bad for us we're the generations holding the bag.
Caring for grandchildren, running clubs and societies, giving their experience to local politics.
At 60, women who had daughters at 30, whose daughters just had children would be well placed to help with childrearing.
These sorts of things got lost in UK with equality and the pensions crisis.
I suppose when we look at things like the 4-day week, we imagine more time and energy available for social cohesion. Or I do at least.
Current system: Work until you die.
New system collapses: Work until you die.
New system lucks out: Probably get returns (pension).
Current system isnt great but works. Just fear uncertainity doubt here.
"back of the napkin" logic:
~2M FAANG employees (source: Gemini & this includes all types of employees...is your avg Amazon delivery driver regularly reading HN?)
~10M HN users (source: Gemini (via HN post :)) )
Data from 2022, so if we multiply it by 2 I would say 26k real hacker news users.
Wasnt the stat that for 1 creator there are 10 commenters and 1000 viewers?
Unless I'm misunderstanding this, buying at the sale price is the least risky way of purchasing the stock, which is what index funds should do. They should pursue the least risky way of indexing the market
More importantly, it allowed organic price discovery to occur. This eschews that process because the indexes are _forced_ to participate essentially at _any_ price, so rather than the market writ large having the opportunity to reward or punish the underwriter pricing of the IPO and determine any true idea of price, they're forced to buy the banker's narrative, which will intrinsically prop up the stock to some degree, but at what cost, and based on what underlying?
While I like the dreams Musk sells of self-driving cars so good they don't need steering wheels, of space colonisation and useful robot workers cheap enough that I could personally afford them, at this point I don't trust him in particular to actually deliver any of those things.
(And no, you can't convince me with some variant of "look at ${current version} of FSD" or "look at progress with Starship", etc., that's like responding to someone who doubts you can build a house by pointing to a pile of bricks: they're a necessary step, but aren't sufficient).
If you disagree with him, he might brand you a paedophile.
Then the rules were changed.
They don't, while timing certainly benefits, and potentially was triggered by them and OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, these rules are not specific to only apply to SpaceX.
FTSE Russell (Russell 1000/2000 etc.) Adopted "fast entry" for large IPOs. Eligible companies (investable market cap above Russell Top 500 cutoff) can join after 5 trading days (previously quarterly rebalances). Also eased float rules with carve-outs.
https://www.lseg.com/en/media-centre/press-releases/ftse-rus...
Nasdaq (Nasdaq-100): Effective May 1, 2026, top ~40 market-cap companies can enter after 15 trading days (previously 3+ months). Adjusted low-float handling.
https://spotgamma.com/spacex-ipo-index-changes-spotgamma/
S&P Dow Jones (S&P 500): Reducing seasoning from 12 months to 6 months for megacaps and waiving the 4-quarter GAAP profitability requirement for large issuers.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-indexes-are-contort...
So the question remains, why do they warrant a rule change?
The links above provide specifics as to the what's and the why.
It does not, of course, but when oligarch corruption runs supreme, it is whatever they want.
It's basically a money transfer from the average person to the poor richest person on the planet.
The true Great Filter is mental illness, apparently.
I wonder how much better Anthropic is doing.
I wouldn't bet on either Anthropic or OpenAI being profitable, we'll find out soon enough what this house of cards has inside, as they both want to IPO.
Though with the current US administration, as proven by the SpaceX IPO, laws are mere recommendations.
> While I wouldn’t say this is cooking the books, it’s definitely a shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers. Anthropic has deliberately leaked a quarterly “profit” where it knows it can suppress its costs
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...
It turns out, there are many ways to skin a financial cat.
Are they breaking laws?
Instead blame the bankers and market who are putting buying in at 1.5T valuation.
If people really don't want SpaceX in their S&P 500 tracking ETF, we should see a S&P-ex SpaceX in short order.
It is absurd to blame "market" that did not had enough time to settle. "Bankers" are to blame for making this rules change happen.
It is entirely valit to blame people who changed the rules to allow this to happen.
"People" don't know much about finance to put it mildly. ETFs are created by market demand. Even "factors" ETFs are often based on completely irrational things like dividends, P/E ratios and other meaningless metrics. This happens because people are easily seduced by narratives ("solid dividend paying stocks", "low P/E ratio - good returns") which are plainly wrong but tempting to an average person.
Most people realized they don't know anything about finance and would like to pay someone (their fund manager) to make responsible decisions and expose them to wide market while avoiding blatant manipulations. Unfortunately the incentives are misaligned here. The managers' incentives are somewhere else. They are not paid by long term performance of their fund and they are disproportionally penalized for taking contrarian decisions.
People being force feed those mega IPOs losing money on them is bad for others as well - there will be less wealth for productive investments and more in hands of "players" (or scammers if you want to call it out). There might be a crash. Trust in financial market will plummet and hostile regulation might arise which other market participants will pay for even though they are not to blame.
I will not have exposure to those mega IPOs but I am in privileged position because:
-My understanding of financial markets is much better than that of an average person.
-I have quite a bit of time to follow all of it and react in time
-I pay 0% capital gain tax and use a broker with nearly 0 fees which allows me to rotate for free (almost)
-I know where and how to move my money so I don't lose advantages of wide market exposure
It took me a lot of effort to set it all up like that. An average person falls short on all of the above and is not in position to avoid donating part of their pension fund to Musk and Altman though. It is still bad for me for reasons mentioned above.
How so?
I wonder if Musk chose rocketry solely because of the ability to use it to drain money from government?
I'd argue that it certainly isn't.
Only for people that get their news from reddit.
Initial 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.[0]
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.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
This is why non partisan financial institutes like the FED and consumer protection groups like the CPB are important and we should have them as non corrupt and robust as possible.
Because it just doesn’t seem wise to trust asset managers with these kinds of things without a lot of evidence and transparency. The 2008 crisis should have taught all of us that much.