> SpaceX is obviously majorly owned by Elon, but it’s also owned by regular employees, a bunch of private investors and other funds that regular people invest in.
Is it really owned by them if Elon retains most of the voting rights anyway?
Effectively it is solely owned by Elon and other people have an equity stake. This is another huge risk. You have to trust Elon not to get distracted and decide to hard pivot to something else.
Look at Tesla and their hard pivot to humanoid robots. He is all in on robots which about a dozen other companies already make and are largely unprofitable in making. He is betting AI rapidly improves in a way that allows robots to become rapidly more useful and there is zero evidence that is feasible in the next 5 - 10 years.
I am not sure if Texas law on the subject is well defined. The SpaceX materials make it clear their position on minority rights is "you have the right to trust Elon or not buy the stock"
I'm wanting to build pieces of software that I've been wanting and often working on for years. These new models are making it possible for me to scale my work to build it.
Most of your cash back money actually comes from fees that merchants pay. In the US and especially for credit cards with cash back those fees can be quite high, and unfortunately it's illegal for merchants to discriminate against credit cards with high fees.
This used to be true. But the 2025 Interchange Fee Settlement abolished the “Honor All Cards” regime. Perhaps, I know it’s crazy, but… perhaps segmenting the market into extremely high-spending customers, normal pay-every-month-relatively-low-fees, and no-frills, was a smart move by the big issuers? My sense is that alienating big spenders (whose interchange fees tend to be in the 4% range) is just not worth it?
All I can say for sure is no store I’ve ever encountered has operationalized the newfound ability to differentially reject some cards yet. I am starting to see grittier establishments offer 5% cash discounts more frequently than they used to, and I’m always happy to pay cash when they do.
But when there’s no discount, why would I forgo better accounting and 3-5% back in points?
Those rules are about discriminating against various cards from the same brand. They have also been significantly limited in many jurisdictions by now.
Is this comparison made with the cost of transactions in the US or elsewhere? For example in Europe interchange fees are generally much lower, especially for debit cards which are also more common than credit cards.
Yeah it’s the US credit card fees that are the real problem. No reasonable person would argue that Visa should get to be a 3% tax on all consumer financial activity.
It's not as simple: Visa and Mastercard don't get the 3%; the issuing banks do.
But Visa and Mastercard effectively set the rates, and the higher they are, the more issuer business they get; meanwhile merchants are essentially never in a position to reject either Visa or Mastercard (notable exception Costco confirming the general rule), so market forces are pretty one-sided.
I think if Visa and Mastercard were three-party networks like Amex or Discover (now Capital One), their interchange would have long been regulated down by >90%.
French companies pay social contributions (~45% of the full salary) via Visa and MasterCard, and the French authorities are making it nearly impossible to pay these by wire transfer.
> GHC’s default algorithm works greedily: it grabs the longest run of independent statements from the front, emits it, and repeats.
I'm not sure I follow. If I had to write a greedy algoritm for this I would do a topological sort in O(n²) and then set the level of each expression to one bigger than the maximum level of its dependencies (again O(n²) worst case)
> which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it
If I'm not reading it wrong though NASDAQ introduced a 3x multiplier for low-float stocks like SpaceX is most likely going to be (and maybe OpenAI and Anthropic too if they see that it works). A 15% exposure is then going to be pretty big.
Don't think so - the 3x is a separate cap. It actually reduces it down from market cap.
Eg say spaceX has $50bn of float at $1.5T valuation. If there wasn't _any_ cap at all, the full $1.5T would be used as the market cap. With the (new) 3x cap, it means only $150bn of the $1.5T valuation is taken into account in the index weighting.
Before this change, SpaceX wouldn't clear the 10% requirement to be listed in QQQ at all. So the 3x basically allows them to be included but _does not_ increase their market cap from $1.5T to $4.5T.
Btw, for clarity, I'm not saying there isn't questionable behaviour going on here. My main point is that even if SpaceX, openai and anthropic all went to 0 (unlikely IMO), it's not going to have a material impact on people's retirements which is what OP was proposing.
You still pay for university depending on your income (technically what's called ISEE), although this is usually capped at around ~3k€/year
There are still tests for enrolling in STEM degrees, most notably the TOLC-I test, especially for those degrees with limited numbers.
I have also never seen beer or wine taps in my university.
It is true however that some exams are generally hard and a lot of people fail them. Some are for good reasons, others because the professor is a dickhead. As always there is a lot of variability.
You need to pay taxes and have kids for the numbers to work out.
If your pension benefits are calculated based on a 4 workers/retiree ratio, but then your whole generation has like 1 kid per family then the system will obviously break down...
No, it would only imply that the worker/retiree income ratio (and tax/pension burden) are somewhat constant which is arguably the case; german pensions specifically rise with wages and get adjusted for inflation.
Productivity gains on the other hand get easily eaten up by increased consumption/expectations, or are overstated to begin with: producing 5 times more TVs/ipads does not make the plumber cheaper (nor a house), and unaffected professions actually suffer (=> baumol effect).
People automatically get a higher pension because they make more money? Without actually paying more into the system? That's an obviously flawed and unfair system, bound to fall over no matter what.
Is it really owned by them if Elon retains most of the voting rights anyway?
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