From Claude via stockanalysis.com: META — institutions 67.51%, insiders 13.49%, float 2.19B of 2.54B shares outstanding. That leaves roughly 19% as retail/other.
SPCX — institutions 5.95%, insiders 46.47%, float only 638.65M of 13.17B shares. Residual is ~47.6%, but that is not retail.
This is laughable. Many shareholders don’t even know they own stock in these companies.
And once you've left the company and roll those 401ks over into IRAs, you can put them at whatever financial institution you want, many of which have more or less unlimited flexibility (within legality) with regard to what you can invest in.
Now, I know many employees just sort of adopt an "autopilot" attitude and don't pay much attention to their retirement account investments, but that's on them for ignoring this stuff. (The lack of general financial literacy, in the US at least, continues to disappoint me.)
So: yes, there are some people who don't have much of a say in how their retirement fund is invested, but my feeling is that those people are a small minority. I do think a large number (perhaps even a majority) of people do have the ability to direct their retirement investments, but either don't know they can do it, or can't be bothered. Again, though, that's on them for not educating themselves and playing a more active role in their financial future.
Many people wouldn't support SpaceX and Tesla if they knew more about Musk. Conversely, some other people who don't know much about him might want to support his companies.
Your standard SPY or VTI investor doesn't know jack diddly squat about shareholder rights, nor do they ever plan to invoke them.
You can always decide to pick an ETF that doesn't invest in the companies you don't like, or invest in individual stocks if you have the time and stomach for it.
I'm saying it's how the world works. The majority of pension funds (public or private) and 401k plans are simply passive index funds with nearly no direct voting rights (and at best very limited, indirect voting rights).
Oh, don't worry. I already know the answer. I'm asking if YOU can tell me the answer.
I certainly can't buy individual shares in my 401k program. And very, very few programs I'm aware of ever offered that as an option.
There were disputes around SpaceX secondary market/special purpose vehicle shares before the listing, but they were all settled out of court, AFAIK.
One exception is GOOG / GOOGL which both trade actively, and there's not much difference in price.
The mechanism for a price divergence could be accumulation of the 10x shares to seize control, but even if you could buy the entire float, it wouldn't be enough to take control, so that mechanism never happens.
By voting rights, they have 10x (founder stock), 1x (trading as GOOGL), and 0x (trading as GOOG). The class with 10x voting rights does not trade publicly. The class with 1x voting rights does not have enough voting power to control the direction of the company so there is no real difference in perceived value between GOOG and GOOGL.
Employee stock awards are IIRC all in restricted shares of GOOG (0x voting rights) so they don't dilute the power of the founders.
Interestingly, the 10x shares held by Brin and Page constitute only 11% of the economic value of Alphabet, but 51% of the voting control.
And the 10x shares automatically convert to 1x shares upon transfer or inheritance, so if the founders cash out or die, the 10x supervoting power disappears.
it should be, but the market might be a bit irrational.
he might have a large miss with the metaverse, & maybe current a.i effort. but in terms of being ruthless with competition & acquiring competition he did his job well as CEO.
musky on the other hand - overpromising and underdelivering.
But Texas is making a push very specifically around giving less shareholder protections.
B) we literally don’t know if it’s illegal or not yet. The reason investors like Delaware is that there is tons of decided case law and courts that are expert and fast at deciding these issues so you’d get quick predictable answers.
But those answers have lots of rights to minority shareholders which the modern dictator founders hated. So Texas made a play for them with the specific pitch that they will give much less support of minority shareholders.
If you're investing in an Elon company you better believe in the man because he's always ran them however he wants. Seems fine for the voting shares to reflect that since he's been running companies for decades; you had the opportunity to know what you're getting into.
If for some reason you're invested into some total market index or the like and you don't like the companies that it invests into then maybe you shouldn't invest according to those rules.
Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.
By traditional business metrics it looks toxic but compared to a typical tech unicorn it's not really outstanding.
Considering it's a tech unicorn with strategic and financial leverage like no other (their own global Internet infrastructure, access to arbitrary billions in capital, ability to build the biggest chip fab in the world), it's certainly fair to call it a gamble, but to call it failing is a stretch imo.
(man, I wish I could get people to throw money at me for all of my outstanding projects that I buy some parts for and would be nice to do "some time")
Companies generally don't just jump into a totally new market unless they've already got some experience.
The SpaceX acquisitions of xAI and X have absolutely nothing to do with space. While I'm sure SpaceX software engineers benefit greatly from cheap access to Grok, it and X have no relevance to the core business of SpaceX. It's the same level as "huh?" if Boeing decided to buy up an AI company and social media platform. The only reason xAI and X are even part of SpaceX is because Musk fucked himself with being forced to buy Twitter and he decided to bundle them with an actually profitable company.
X can supply training data to to Xai and Grok is heavily integrated into X so there is some synergy there.
He broke through that professional firewall when he merged xAI with SpaceX and then pushed it to go public as he did. I also posit that Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future.
There was enough technical analysis to show that even Musk's cult feed can't overcome the significant financial hardships he laid on SpaceX. I personally think it was his jump the shark move. He can't really go up again after this. He no longer has any untainted assets for mega-exploits.
Gwynne is fiercely loyal to Elon. I don't expect to see significant strife between them.
Without looking, can you tell me who the COO of ULA is?
Seems similar to me as when Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board many years back because their products started to overlap, especially mobile.
Twitter by itself is lucky to be worth $15B anymore.
The space portion of SpaceX is easily worth 10x that.
xAI is theoretically the hype machine that makes up the remainder of the value.
At SpaceX’s valuation, even a 1-2% increase in share price due to some astroturfing on the platform they themselves own basically pays back the cost of acquiring twitter.
It's insanely profitable they did $7.2bn in EBITDA on $11.4bn in revenue in 2025.
And SpaceX has become their favorite place to put money over the last 5 years.
A huge mistake, I'm sure the relevant parties have been punished appropriately.
Investors are buying Musk, like they were buying Warren Buffett with Berkshire Hathaway. Long-term shareholders are not buying space; they are buying Musk. This has been clear to everyone since the beginning; it has been well communicated (look at SpaceX governance rules in Texas), and there is nothing mystical about it.
It's very likely Musk will roll everything up into a single Musk conglomerate.
Whether this trend continues or not indefinitely will largely determine if incestors start looking for the door.
In defence of Mr Musk, despite his character flaws, Tesla is the only Western electric car company in the top 20, and this includes Korea and Japan. Also, SpaceX is ~90% of the world's commercial rocket launch capacity.
But this does not mean SpaceX would be correctly priced at the moment. It may be expensive, but SpaceX is going to have many years to come to reap the benefits of their hard work building the business.
WV is number 6 in the top 20, and BMW is number 10. And while Tesla has good sales now their lack of innovation is a huge risk.
https://www.blackridgeresearch.com/blog/list-of-global-top-e...
This conflates the quality of the product with the value of the business. There is no contradiction between Tesla cars selling well because they fit a market and Tesla the business not being a good investment.
Which is going not too badly for the shorts, so far. There's a reason almost 50% of the float is loaned out.
We'll see once the earnings call rolls around.
The funniest thing you can write… Can’t believe people still write “Robotaxi” after 12+ years of failed promises… wild wild stuff
Ramping up Cybercab production is definitely high risk play. Which is counter to OP's point that Tesla is now just some boring non-visionary company, especially combined investments in humanoid robots and semiconductors.
If Tesla was just looking to make safe easy money they wouldn't be making huge gambles on new markets.
I think Musk's luck is running out, he's been too political this past year and he seems to also have run out of geek "street cred". Remember youtubers visiting (whatever the Tesla trade show was called) were more perplexed than impressed with what has been shown. Similar sentiment seen across trade shows (like CES) where everything was AI and no one seemed to ask themselves "why are we putting AI in this?". The answer, of course, for startups and stock listed companies, to make themselves more valuable on paper.
Investors would probably be aware of that if they run any kind of sentiment analysis on online social media content. And at the same time there's some pull-out from tech stock. So maybe some are starting to realise that things are too shaky for their risk profile?
Because I find your words surprising since critique is what I was raised with in the late 90s early 2000s. Offline and in the media.
At the same time your definition of criticizing is very lax, when I'm stating banal opinions and a broad observation.
If only some billionaires (trillionaires?) could strike a better balance between successful and human. Especially since most wealth is actually wealth transfer from the poor and from taxpayer coffers to the rich.
But, fundamentally,bro become a billionaire, you exploited some people at some point in the process. Their mere existence is not ideal for society. And their assets would be better served distributed to the masses. Unfortunately, we also lack many good and strong governments and policies - so I wouldn't feel great just transfering their wealth to the governments of the world for said distribution, either.
You are implying that any successful person should strive to achieve something like that? Or what point are you even trying to trying to make?
/s
"It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp."
Somebody was wise a decade ago.
Since then Starlink has succeeded, reusable rockets are a reality, ISS crewed spaceflight restored to US.
I expect all that had an impact on the valuation. Personally I wouldn't invest in Elon because his stock is a wild ride but space x has achieved a lot.