You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
I really wish more people were aware of this. It's a major scandal and definitely not being talked enough about.
Nevermind SpaceX, which at least have some importance for US defense industry, but xAI ? We will be investing in Elon's private venture, at the price that he himself set and which is at least 2 orders of magnitude too high...
There are enough Elon haters that you can rest assured there will be an inverse ETF so that you can easily hedge away your index exposure if you really want to.
Well, we elected a bunch of criminals, and Elon fired everyone who regulates this. The SEC was gutted like a fish, and contract terminations resulted in a large percentage of FINRA staff being laid off.
You have to be more specific when talking about "socialist europe". The Netherlands, for example, has the best-managed pension system in the world. Despite what many people believe, "Europe" isn't one country and it doesn't have a single healthcare system, pension system, or anything else related to the welfare state.
US social security on the other hand is exactly as you describe pension systems in "socialist europe". Money taken from current workers and invested in state debt.
In order to be incredulous at xAI, you'd have to be incredulous of the AI business in general, which is fair.
But then you'd also be basically betting against the entire tech sector, and really the entire US economy and against the value add of AI. That kind of bet is much more difficult to swallow.
They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time.
No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.
I was using Alta Vista and preferred it. It had fairly sophisticated search options that Google never got like stem and wildcard searching.
The problem was that yahoo killed it. They shut down its crawler and it started going stale.
Plus they didn't have as good a solution to index spam as Google's pagerank.
It was basically a story of product developing a lead, getting sold for a quick buck, then the acquirer shuts down innovation and tries to milk it, with bad timing because google was chomping at its heels.
I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people.
I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly pushing this narrative about Google being this great technological triumph with their PageRank algorithm. This coincided with AdWords being rolled out, dotcom hype, and people generally taking SEO more seriously while Google was best positioned to take advantage.
Now, I'm not saying I know much but I'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice". That seems like low-hanging fruit for just about any students excited about the topic, but again what do I know. To me, the Google story was always more of a business success than anything else. They got so much praise and so effectively leveraged their nerd cred that people optimized for their results and it all snowballed from there.
This time around with LLMs, they can't claim to have the best. The space is way too volatile. What they can say is everyone uses it because everyone eventually searches on Google, if not by default. Google just has to be good enough and the easiest to use.
As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.
Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.
Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.
And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.
A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.
The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.
Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.
As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.
By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.
And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).
I think that’s a fair point. What I would say in response is that you should bear in mind the times back then.
The internet had just blown up. CompSci programs at major universities were still teaching Fortran and COBOL. Linux had its very first release in 1991 I think (when the initial Google folks were in high school), people knew what BSD stood for back then, web protocols were not horribly dissimilar to the Wild West, and don’t even get me started on web standards.
In addition to all of that, they actually fixed search. There was this golden era where searching worked. The other responses you’ve had so far are much more enlightening than mine, I’m spent. I didn’t meant to come off as an ass, it’s interesting to hear your perspective on this.
(I don't think your comment deserved the downvotes, it wasn't me)
I think Google _did_ succeed as a better search engine, but ,y point was just that even if you think a company won't do well it does not imply the whole sector won't.
You can consider the example of Nikola/electric trucks, if you disagree on google/search engines :)
You can post-IPO - depending on liquidity. I don't think that'll be an issue here.
And if the thesis of "it's going to look good for the first 15 days" holds, you can indeed be very profitable by e.g. buying ATM puts. (The problem being that markets don't like sticking to time tables just to accommodate your investment thesis ;)
So yes, you'll be able to take a bearish position fairly shortly after the IPO.
Sure. It's the market that's irrational, not the people here. The people here are the truly enlightened rational ones and know what the true value of things are.
xAI's value is irrelevant here. This is about Elon throwing his weight around and rigging the game to create an artificial squeeze so him and his early investors can make bank by transferring wealth from everyone's retirement fund.
The company is irrelevant. The focus should be on the money making scheme
Overall it's worse than the other frontier models, but it's decent for queries about breaking news, due to being trained on twitter data.
It's also better for queries about controversial topics, and topics that the other labs have deemed to be "unsafe".
Politically, it differs quite a bit from other models.[0] It's right leaning, although it's closer neutral than other models, defining what neutral is a challenge though.
The study you link to doesn't take into consideration the Overton window of opinions. Perhaps there's some dimension along which you could say that one ideology lies 'opposite' to another political persuasion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the two ideologies are equally acceptable to support in a given society.
I don't think calling defining neutral a 'challenge' does the question justice - neutral will always be context-dependent, and what may be in the center of the Overton window of one society may be unpopular or even highly illegal in a different society.
Grok and Elon's ventures in general should really get the Purpose of a System treatement in public discourse. For all we know the purpose of Grok is to make nude edits of people. You can assign this to left or right leaning as you please.
I tried it when it has the most extensive free offering, and it definitely answers my worldbuilding questions in more detail than I expected and compared to Gemini or Chatgpt. Can't say anything about hallucinations tho.
I use it, overall, it is not too bad. I wouldn't use it for coding etc, but its access to X means it can answer news related stuff much better. Its guardrails are lower so it does fairly innocuous things that will have ChatGPT or Gemini refusing to do.
Right wingers and generating creating nude images of girls and women who post on xitter, without their consent? Those are the only things I even associate with Grok anymore. The venn diagram may line up pretty nicely between them, too.
SpaceX are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem small a % for the valuation target. However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1]
There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling interests in AI, and middle eastern capital changing priorities, interest rate outlook for the rest of the decade. These are all strong head winds to overcome even when not raising the largest ever amount in an IPO.
That is not say that it is destined to fail, Elon is excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak, There is no better proof than Tesla P/E .
It is by no means clear this would be successful or not. The valuation, funds being raised, future growth potential are all not based on just SpaceX core businesses which would have been an easy sell.
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[1] i.e. it could be still under-subscribed even if everyone buys into the vision, growth projections, is comfortable with valuation gets fully onboard including retail.
Even in this best case scenario SpaceX would have to sell at the lower end of the target range or go even lower and still end up being short matter what, because there could simply be not enough money in the market.
I think you have to temper the skepticism a bit though.
SpaceX has dramatically lowered the cost of launching things into space. They are still the leader here. They can put a kg into orbit cheaper than anyone, even heavily subsidized state operations (EU and China).
Their order book continues to be full. Every single launch vehicle they roll off the line was pre-sold years ago, including its re-use flights.
I agree that Elon is their biggest potential problem and a big risk but their launch business is sound and wildly successful. If you believe access to space will be a growing segment of the economy in the future it isn't exactly a bad investment.
I remember all the people putting Tesla down when they IPO'd. I bought $4k of stock (all I could afford at that time). Sold $100k of it a few years ago, still have the other half worth near $220k. Their numbers at IPO time were garbage and it wasn't clear they would even survive. Then they started shipping hundreds of thousands then a million cars.
YMMV, consider all sides and make your own judgement. Just be careful about trusting the anti-SpaceX case. Even if everyone is technically correct about them it can still be a huge miss not to invest! The future is not static and if they can put the raised capital to productive use the IPO could end up being a fantastic deal. And FWIW I also agree the largest immediate risk is they are over-valued. Only time will tell on that front.
Tesla IPO'd at 1.7B and is worth 1.4T today. Giving you the benefit of doubt since it would be closer to a 1000x gain rather than the 100x gain that you didn't buy right at IPO, I will point out that there's a world's difference buying in at 1.7B, because there's still room for the stock to 1000x, but there's not much gain to be had buying in at 1.7T valuation.
Even the most highly company in the world Nvidia is less than 3x that valuation, so it's not a good comparison with Tesla's IPO.
At current launch numbers it may not be worth 1.5+ trillion but valuations aren't about current, they're about discounted future cash flows.
It seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower. Prices are quite extreme currently, a standard 3U cubesat (loaf of bread size) is $300k and that's just for orbit.
There could be lots of startups that want to try robotic space mining but launch costs just make that mostly impossible currently so there are only a select few. It's like valuing the Dutch East India company based on the trade volumes in 1603. Of course people are not going to be buying much pepper or nutmeg if it costs them weeks of labor, but build lots of reusable ships, and with each voyage, more people can afford your pepper and nutmeg until it's a common household item.
discounted future cash flows is discounted by risk. There is a lot of risk on growing future revenue is the point.
>seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower.
This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
The non Starlink component of revenue has not massively grown beyond what size the market in 2015 to today. SpaceX isn't lowering launch price to induce demand beyond out being the cheapest just by enough, they would be going lower if cost was the only barrier for more revenue.
It not that businesses aren't possible there at lower launch prices. Starlink is testament that it is.
The problem is that rest of the world is not able to innovate fast enough to take advantage of it even after 10 years. The industry struggles with things like manufacturing satellites at scale or raising money for it, or executing on innovation etc.
What that means for SpaceX is that even if launch costs are cheaper than now, the launch market simply may not grow quick enough for the valuation number to make sense. They would need to enter a lot of new markets directly and be their own launch customer beyond Starlink. This comes with its own set of execution, regulatory and other risks. The data-center[1] in space play is an attempt to do this.
Either DC play or something else, they will need to find and sustain a large business to grow, maybe they will, maybe not.
It is not very clear now and that is a lot of risk so any future cash flow projection has to be discounted heavily.
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[1] I am not qualified to comment on the technical feasibility, however to analyze the company finances that is not needed, it is just one more risk factor, depending on how you feel you can assign 0 or 1 or anything in between.
> This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
It did play out: there are many more launches today, it's 5x in 20 years. The 75% of SpaceX starlink launches (which account for nearly 50% of all launches) were quietly financed by their other launch customers, exactly because the real cost to launch dropped so much.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but you do seem to forget that SpaceX, as its own customer, knows the number of launches is going to rise exponentially. They obviously choose to manufacture for where the market _will be_, while you don't see the market before its there. Which is good for them.
In 2024 66% of their launches were for Starlink. So it’s not quite correct to suggest there’s a vibrant external market for their product, a lot of it is sort of self dealing.
> it’s not quite correct to suggest there’s a vibrant external market for their product
There is a very large demand for launch services. SpaceX balances launching customers and launching Starlink. It's not like they give every launch slot to customers and then launches Starlink whenever there's an opening they couldn't fill.
This is missing the point of their valuation. SpaceX will internally use their launch capabilities to build industries that no one else can. Starlink is already their main revenue stream. Starship will open up new realms of possibilities.
I think you have to temper the glazing a bit though.
These people and their endeavors are thoroughly, irredeemably corrupt. It’s nice you got a taste, but their impact on society has been calamitous, and will take decades to recover (if at all).
>There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade.
It's very different from WeWork which was basically just subletting office space with beer taps. At least SpaceX had done significant stuff with the rockets and Starlink.
The comparison was not about the strength of the business, it was about how the attempt to IPO and the original S-1 was the trigger for more realistic price discovery for Wework
My comment was that it is possible that by trying/becoming public SpaceX also will go through that same
process once their numbers become available.
I am not an expert, but my understanding is most funds don't change allocations immediately, but it would be part of normal rebalancing, e.g. VOO and other indexes that track the S&P500 do it quarterly
They all smear the purchases and sales from index changes, but I don't think they publish on what timescale. Most funds try to minimize tracking error. There are funds that take this to a different level. When a stock is added to the big indexes, it tends to do poorly over the next year, and on the flip side when a stock is removed it tends to perform well. Dimensional funds have automatic rules to take advantage of this type of thing. There are other companies that have funds of this style, but overall they are much less widely used than the big index funds from vanguard, blackrock, state street, etc.
S&P500 held fast to their rules on consecutive quarters of profitability and forced TSLA to meet them (must be profitable in qX + sum to net profit over the past year). If they hold to them this time, SpaceX would need to be profitable over a year while public to enter the index.
They have instituted rules and gone back on them eventually (most notably for several years they had a "no going public with different classes of voting shares designed to allow control forever, if IPO is after today" rule that they eventually dropped) but they are generally pretty good about following rules.
If you have $100k, you can do it with direct indexing at Schwab. The management fee is 0.40%.
I looked into it, but there are gotchas with wash sale rules and taxes. You really need $500k-$1M to avoid tracking errors. End of the day, the overhead seemed more problematic than the problem, so I ended up increasing my global allocation instead.
If you have a big enough portfolio, direct indexing (using something like Frec or Wealthfront) could be an interesting option, and weighting the companies that you don't want at 0.
Wealthfront offers the ability to blacklist stocks in your account (the feature is meant for people legally prohibited from investing in certain tickers).
It won’t exclude from regular indexes, but it will exclude from the direct indexing. I’ve been using it to exclude NVDA ever since it peaked (or at least reached the peak valuation I’m comfortable with)
Wealthfront’s portfolio minimum used to be $100k, but I think they have a new direct indexing product with a $5k minimum.
Based on the list of businesses at the top, the stock market seems like it rewards profit margin and profits, by businesses that sell meaningful products and services.
Can you provide an example of any of the businesses on that are on that list due to "mass stupidity"? They all seem to operate factories, employ many highly qualified people, and make a material difference in many or even most people's lives around the world.
Meanwhile, SNAP has returned -14.98% per year to its shareholders since it IPO'd (Jun 3 2017), and at an $8.27B market cap, it makes up a negligible portion of any broad market index fund, so not sure how SNAP's shareholders have been rewarded by mass stupidity, especially given that the founders still own half of the business. They would have been far better off liquidating their shares and investing in SP500.
Tesla is a great example. It’s 30% retail, 25% elon and insiders, and the remainder institutional, mostly index funds.
The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.
The bigger issue is the death of small cap. Massive venture, sovereign wealth and PE funds don’t need the public market capital anymore, so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.
Snap, cool as it is, is a social media loser. The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.
> The investment thesis for Tesla is absurd. They built the market cap on hype and it got big enough that it remains a force. It’s a flailing company, kept afloat by bullshit.
Maybe, or maybe they are one of the few businesses people want to bet on to be able to create new streams of revenue. Intel used to be big, and now it isn’t. It being big didn’t help stop its demise.
> The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss.
They didn’t. The biggest investors, the founders, still have almost 50% of the shares. Also, SNAP peaked at $131B in September 2021, 2 years after SNAP went public at $27B.
Would you have written then that “The investors cashed out their shares to the public, who took the loss”?
Of course not. Because index fund investors did not cause it to go to $131B, and they didn’t cause it to go to $6B.
The fact that founders still own 50% of the shares doesn't mean that they didn't sold some of ones they had. Also Snap gives very generous stock options to their C-team, meaning that they can sell overtime while keeping their large stash.
> so they harvest the vslue and spit out the company late in the value cycle.
So SNAP executives IPO’d at $27B, and over the next 4 years, the market cap increased to $131B, which anyone in the public could have benefited from.
Yet now you are saying SNAP execs are wrong for selling their equity over time?
It doesn’t seem like there is any winning here for SNAP’s executives, even though they gave the public the ability to quadruple their money in 4 years. What more can you ask for?
you wrote "can you provide an example" and I provided an example.
If you wanted to say "I think the market mostly does this, with large caveats" then we're in agreement.
Sorry, I forgot how I phrased that. Although I disagree that Tesla’s sustained market cap over many years is what it is due to the market rewarding mass stupidity.
The company has recently successfully executed at making and selling a new type of product, so it is not unreasonable for investors to bet on further advancements.
Or maybe they think the leader is just sufficiently willing to be or adept at being corrupt that they will also benefit from his shenanigans.
The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.
For general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.
They are, but SpaceX is trying to get rules changed. They want the index to buy at a multiple of the float, so they release say 5% but get bought as if they had released 15% float. They also normally wouldn't be eligible for index inclusion for ~1 year, after showing multiple quarters of good stewardship, etc. They're trying to bypass all that
I don't know about the funds, but it's really about the index. Both for the index funds that use the index, and the active mutual funds and index funds benchmark to that index.
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.
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.
ok so it seems pretty bad that they changed the index rules both to allow spacex in early and the wonky weighting stuff.
But if one already has index-based things that are likely to be captive on the wrong side of this, and one wanted to benefit or at least balance out, to confirm my limited understanding the goal would be:
- buy shortly after the IPO, ideally less than 15 days
- and sell less than 6 months later when lockups would end and insiders are set to cash out?
Thank you for posting that. I also read that on some less authoritative source I don't remember. It's truly scandalous. I wish ETFs will revolt and apply the old rule for inclusion, but I have no illusion it will happen.
Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.
The operators of the fund are allowed to do whatever they outlined in the prospectus to track the index, some funds allow futures, options, and swaps along with equity shares to maintain parity with the index.
There are ways to gain exposure to a single stock without directly purchasing shares, options and swaps being the most common. Owning the actual shares makes things easy for the fund operators, but there are other ways.
Why do people keep claiming that every 401k invests in the NASDAQ 100? Few do, and you probably have a choice of a couple of 401k plans, at least one of which will not include SpaceX.
I can see both sides of it though. The old rule made more sense when companies ipo’d at small valuations. It could be argued it’s wrong to keep one the top five market cap companies off the sp500 for a year.
But a low stock float. I once had a meeting with a guy who said his company was worth $100m. How did he get that valuation? He sold 0.4 % of stock to friends and family at $400k.
Is there something about why spacex wants to go public ? if not then this is definitely about xai... to hide unprofitability and offload it on general public ASAP.
"If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch."
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
My 401k has BrokerageLink set up and invests in VT/VTI. It takes less than 15 days so if your company offers BrokerageLink, you can avoid investing in SpaceX.
SpaceX will not be part of the S&P 500 when it lists, so you can avoid owning SpaceX for now by sticking with non-NASDAQ funds. IIRC it would take about a year for SpaceX to qualify for the S&P 500, four consecutive profitable quarters is needed I believe.
If you own a NASDAQ fund or total US stock market fund, you will have exposure to SpaceX.
This place discusses SpaceX technical things all the time. But SpaceX is not a research lab. It's a company. That does business. And is going public. Taking a little time off from arguing about thrust and payload to talk about their business paratices, lobbying and late-stage capitalism is not only appropriate here...
Look around you. This may be called "Hacker News," but it is run by and for the benefit of a business, YCombinator. Speaking bluntly, if you come here only to talk tech, you're only getting half of the HN value proposition. The value of HN is that it mixes business with pleasure, so to speak. Many people here will either work for a tech business or found one. You can find technical discussions everywhere. Business discussions tailored for tech? That's actually very, very valuable.
Prior to cars walking anywhere in any street was completely normal. You can watch movies filmed before the 1920s and city streets are full of people walking around or congregating.
If a wagon or trolley hit someone that was considered the fault of the driver, every time.
When cars started arriving and being driven around by people who were wreckless and bad at it, you started getting manufacturers and "motorists" lobbying for the concept and laws around jay-walking. Even the word was a way to delegitimize what used to be normal. "Jay" was negative slang for country-person (think red-neck). The idea was "modern city people stay out of the streets!"
"Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length.
The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity).
This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon.
People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know.
If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.
"Cruise missile carriers" are what the Burke class destroyers are.
It's also what Russia built their navy around. How'd that work out?
The US carriers have been involved in every naval action since WWII. They're hardly unused.
But attacking a country of 90 million people and a high level of military sophistication AND who's been expecting the attack and planning for it for many years was always going to be a tall order.
Nasdaq announced today that their Fast Inclusion policy as official starting May 1st.
15 days of price discovery for SpaceX instead of 1 year for inclusion into indexes. Will be one of the largest wealth transfers from common people to the wealthy since it'll exploit all passive investments to provide exit liquidity for elon and his investors.
Billionaires love AI chatboats so much because they invented the digital Yes-man. They agree obsequiously with everything we say to them. Unfortunately for the rest of us we don't really have the resources to protect ourselves from our bad decisions and really need that critical feedback.
It's not whataboutism, it's a legitimate question. How does it increase safety on the road to reject local SSH connections by a dumb user, when that same user can mess with the car physically?
Simplest example: a driver could probably disable attentive driving checks by pasting a script in from a web search in a few minutes. Nothing like an inattentive 3750 lbs weapon.
Yeah and they could hire a professional driver or a engineer and IPO for billions a life sized driving AI powered crypto robot too. Look, like clearly google + ctrl-v scripting or running an one click deployment exe on your computer on a whim is different than physically ordering/picking up something and then installing it into a vehicle?
Of course they're different, but you're trying to argue that the former takes objectively less effort than the latter, and it doesn't. One or the other may take less effort depending on who you are and what you know.
In most cases I agree with this, but maybe not for potentially dangerous things like cars? What if someone roots into their car and disables some essential safety feature - maybe even a legally mandated safety feature?
More concretely, the expertise-required-to-access-root is in a different field to the expertise-required-to-make-wise-changes. i.e. you might know how to hack a car, but that doesn't mean you know how cars operate.
Given electric cars are responsible for much bigger responsibilities than combustion cars (avoid driving into that bicyclist), there are new concerns here which beg extra consideration.
I actually think we should be asking more of safety regulations here with regards to the design of electric/computerized cars.
Think of it this way: every concern you have about a teenager having root on their electric car is the same as any sociopath hacker (AI enabled for modern nightmare fuel) who finds a root vulnerability and decides to not be a good person with it. If a teenager can mess with the collision avoidance, e.g. Israel can modify it to murder anyone who talks shit about Israel in the car. Or the CIA could turn it into a weapon. Or one day some dev could push a bad OTA update. Et cetera. Our safety regulations should mandate design features to prevent a malfunctioning computer from posing any greater safety risk than any other modified part in the car.
Up until v recently cars were not remotely accessible and part of a command-and-control network which Teslas are (perhaps other modern cars are too, I only know Tesla because I have one).
I know that the car reports practically all user events to Tesla in real time over the cell network (eg, open door), and I know it has root access. I don't know if that root is available remotely and I don't know if foundational commands like steering, acceleration and brake are accessible via the CLI (they are computer controlled actions locally)
THUS I would not want to drive a Tesla if there was the possibility of all cars being rooted and remotely controlled by an unauthorized actor.
No one should have nuclear weapons, we aught to have robust policy, institutions, and vigilance to prevent their proliferation and use.
Computerized vehicles aught to be strictly regulated in terms of how computers may affect the physical operation of the car, such that a reasonable standard of safety can be ensured outside the usual risk one takes when hopping in a motor vehicle. The fact that a hacker can possibly kill people by rooting an infotainment system is a symptom of the general disregard for security in design, and we continue to ignore it for engineering expediency.
Then why wasn't it a problem before? People have always been able to install aftermarket or possibly even hacked together physical parts. If there was liability you'd expect some sort of shield blocking access to, for example, the hydraulic system for the brakes.
As it turns out though blatant irresponsibility is quite rare (depending on your definition anyway) since people have a strong self interest in not endangering their own lives or wallets. It's similar for homeowners - many states explicitly carve out a requirement that insurance companies cover DIY modifications that are within reason and this generally works out since you have a strong vested interest in not destroying your own house regardless of any insurance policy.
People get killed by changes to exhaust, height (lift kits), bumpers (bull bars in particular), etc pretty often, though. And I can imagine software changes (exhaust is part of that actually) could kill people too.
Maybe you think daytime running lights are stupid and want to disable them for instance.
Sure. Point is nothing has really changed. Largely there's no problem and to the extent that bad things happen it isn't something novel that's only just come up. It's not in and of itself an excuse to erode private ownership. If intervention is required then regulation should be passed deliberately by the legislature.
Well both of those examples could potentially electrocute you or start a fire and both can be done by a homeowner if he feels like it.
I don't disagree that it's a bit different in certain ways but I feel like that's drifting off topic. It shouldn't be up to manufactures to determine these things unilaterally but rather the legislature. Particularly any justification to the contrary rings hollow in this case because there's a very strong conflict of interest.
It is. Thousands of people have died because of aftermarket headlights. Harder to assess, but probably much larger, is the number of excess deaths from nitrous oxide etc. emitted by modified cars.
There are about 3000 deaths per year in Sweden attributed to position from cars, and 300 physical accidents. So it is a really big issue, but it is almost impossible to make people understand that their car use and modification mains people.
Modified cars can release 1000x more polution, on streets with 800 daily cars that will have an affect.
You can ban modifying your car to pollute more (which we do) without banning modifying your car.
This isn't complicated FFS.
The difficulty against this in the US is the unfortunate reality that the people coming to these shops to enable their stupid trucks to roll coal are the people who should technically be raiding and shutting down these companies. This can be fixed.
Physically, you can already modify your car to be controlled by a stupid program and that has been possible since at least the 90s. You can do the supposed harm by not being aware of damage to your exhaust system.
The solution to exhaust harms of ICE engines is electric cars, not a reduction in consumer rights.
The EPA heavily regulates any emissions defeat devices. The problem is they spend most of their time going after tuner shops where most cars run on ethanol rather than diesel shops who cater to brain-damaged customers who think rolling coal is "cool"
In Spain (but I think in every EU country) you must go through legal inspection and certification if you do modify your car. And most of the aftermarket mods people install are totally illegal and would not pass that exam. I mean changes like putting a spoiler, lowering the height from ground etc
I don’t think that’s the reason, seeing as a car is already endangering everyone around it by existing. More likely about keeping the tooling to diagnose issues proprietary and expensive.
That kind of thing is always the stated justification but never the real reason.
Almost invariably when that excuse is trotted out, there are are usually many things that are much more common that are also far more dangerous. For example, texting while driving or driving with bald tires in the wet are both 100x more dangerous than anything almost anybody would do by modifying the car's software.
Four 9/11s worth of people die every year from drunk driving. If we can't even get that under control, I don't see why being able to modify your own car is a big deal.
Enforcement is abysmal for stupid reasons. Courts are reluctant to remove the ability for people to drive because America purposely made itself dependent on cars, and cops are reluctant to actually arrest a lot of people for drunk driving because they tend to be buddies, or worse. You can find plentiful examples of off duty officers trying to get out of drunk driving simply by being a cop.
This is what you get when you can vote on the sheriff and judges who insist they are "Tough on crime" because they sentence a dude smoking a joint to years in the joint while ignoring real problems like, you know, murder and theft and violence and all the shit their buddies are doing. The "Tough on crime" people are the ones drunk driving often enough.
Even as a well trained software engineer who works on transportation software including ECUs (heavy equipment not cars), I'm not sure there is much I could do with root. IF I had full source code to my car's radio I might try to add android-auto back in (it has android-automotive so I know it can do it), but if that isn't easy I'd probably give up. Without source code and a lot of time doing anything is impossible - as anyone else who works on complex software knows.
You can feel that way, but plenty of car configuration has always been locked away and walled off, and manufacturers make a tidy profit selling software licenses to dealers and mechanics to perform basic diagnostics. Proprietary software is big business what can you do.
Definitely not always. It used to be that a mechanic or a skilled owner could tune, modify, repair or replace absolutely anything in your car. That was basically since the invention of the car, up to somewhere in the 2000s. And even then, various hackers and pirates made sure almost anyone could get their hands on the software. In fact, many mechanics these days use 3rd party software because the manufacturer refuses to sell them their version or even that version doesn't have all the features.
That is the recent (and gradually worsening) situation but it is not in and of itself a justification. Effectively you're saying "it's currently this way therefore it's okay for it to be this way".
Manufacturers have increasingly restricted control over products as they've gradually been digitized. Prior to the digital era anyone could do anything to personal property (regulations notwithstanding ofc); more expensive items typically came with circuit diagrams for the purpose of repairing them.
>> Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles
No i'd push back on this because the entire workshop manual is available for free without even registration required. You can literally google and land in the relevant sections and it is of a far higher quality than ford, VAG or bmw as three examples i'm pretty familiar with. I haven't seen the John Deere stuff.
Tesla does have "special tools" for some repair procedures, a practice as old as the auto industry but they don't rely on them to the same extent as BMW for example. Anecdotally, the special tools i'm aware of are genuinely useful - for example, the tool for disconnecting seatbelt anchors saves time vs the traditional bolt - where special tools on other marques are often clearly to workaround a failure of packaging or engineering resulting in tight access for a regular tool.
Their online API access is a little bit annoying, or at least unfriendly to casual home user, specifically the workflow to register an OIDC client, but not insurmountable.
> No i'd push back on this because the entire workshop manual is available for free without even registration required
That's because they were forced by Massachusetts expansion of Right to Repair laws. Before that in 2021, service manuals were withheld and required $3,187 a year or $371.88 a month to see them. Before that in 2018, it was $100/day to view them. Before that, you had to pay and book an appointment and go in person to view them.
If Tesla making the service manuals free is due to the Massachusetts right-to-repair law, then how do other manufacturers (eg: Ford) still get away with not doing so?
I don't think there's a requirement that they give access for free but they are alone i think in doing so.
Here in the UK (where i also have free tesla repair manual access) i have to pay a daily rate (there are annual subscriptions available) for other marques and i would say it's not cheap.
For example, ford charges me £20/hour or £75/day for access to manuals, wiring diagrams, online connected diagnostics (which sounds more impressive than it is, the UI will show vehicle status like fuel tank level or error codes reported by the various ECUs, without physically connecting to the vehicle, i.e. it's done over the vehicle telemetry link), and the ability to connect via a data link connector device for diagnostics and some reflashing activities. Security activities like key coding require a further (chargeable) registration).
The same setup is available by at least VAG, BMW and Fiat Chrysler (the latter has an annoying extra device registration step the others don't). All chargeable.
> "Tesla is the same pattern applied to consumer vehicles"
It really isn't. Unlike John Deere, Tesla is actually pretty good on right-to-repair. All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone. The service/diagnostics software ("Toolbox") is also available to anyone, albeit for a (not entirely unreasonable) fee.
(There is also a service mode built in to the car which can do many basic diagnostics for free)
> All of their technical and repair manuals are available for free to anyone.
That should be the bare minimum. Ford charges you 40 dollar an hour for it and unless you know exactly what you are looking for you will spend several hundreds on it.
Too bad ford killed their old site, the print form was unauthenticated and you could print the entire schematics to pdf if you knew the internal model number. Or do what I did and run a script to dump it to higher res PNGs.
charm.li covers Fords and many other makes too up to 2013 ish. It is a pirate archive site holding workshop manuals for thousands of cars. Very useful. Very free. Long may it stay hidden.
More legitimately, alldata.com has repair data, workshop manuals for most marques up to today and will sell you either single vehicle (called "DIY") or a package aimed at independent mechanics where you can access anything. Same manuals either way, but you pay per vehicle with DIY (and have to contact support to switch.)
I love whoever is behind charm.li very much- after the bad old days of Haynes manuals and broken PDF links on make-specific forums, it's a breath of fresh air to have one repository like that.
I didn't know they had shop manuals. That's been a pretty big limitation of my spouse's Buick is that there isn't any information or exploded-view diagrams of anything so we basically have to pay an hourly for someone else to change emissions parts in response to trouble codes.
ETIS is dead and Ford finally pulled the plug, though since the current backend is some semi-custom IBM bloat I would not be surprized if you could get by that without too much hassle (took them three years to find out I was downloading all my car's travel and charging logs before they banned the dummy account, but now they track it and discontinued most of it anyways).
I won't go into details but searching around with the "forum" keyword and etis might get you somewhere (at least that did the trick a few years ago, now with LLM slop I don't know, and what the other person posted).
This is a misconception. The Massachusetts right-to-repair law didn't force Tesla to make their manuals free.
As others have pointed out here, other manufacturers like Ford and Toyota still charge for access to their manuals, even in Massachusetts. Tesla gives free access to anyone, worldwide.
>The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car."
What does that mean? "The software" is a specific configuration of the hardware you own. How can you own the hardware and not the specific copy of whatever data is on it? Note that I'm not confusing the copy of the data with the IP rights to it.
Because American courts have entertained utterly moronic claims for decades now and the DMCA eliminates any sanity in consumer rights around IP products.
When you bought a DVD, you didn't "Own" the movie, but you had a legal right to do things with that data you didn't "own" anyway, like format shifting and selling that physical object on to another person. You could copy that data off and do things with it. I think technically it would be a copyright violation to then put that movie file into Movie Maker and cut up your own personal highlight reel, but good luck finding a judge willing to hear that case if you don't upload it to youtube.
Now, thanks to the DMCA and courts being absurdly credulous of bullshit arguments from corporate attorneys, you no longer have basic consumer rights. If you try to even inspect the code that runs to protect your literal life, that can be a crime. You own the literal hardware, but if you try to act like you own it, that's a crime. You technically still have the right to format shift a BluRay for example, but bypassing the math protecting that data overrides that "right" and you are guilty of a crime. A CEO's wet dream.
If the DMCA was older, IBM could have prevented the existence of the Clone PC market and ensured a locked up market. We would all be stuck on absurdly shit hardware because that's what was more profitable for IBM.
Pre-DMCA, Sega was told that their trademark rights were overridden by the innate market right to interoperate with their product. IP rights used to be fairly weak! Sony could not prevent a company from selling a software product that ran playstation games. To this day, Nintendo simply pretends these court cases didn't happen.
This is part of why China has so much success in manufacturing and product development IMO. They don't need to develop purposely worse versions of things just so some other company can sit on their hands for 20 years collecting rent. If you want a fast moving market, the ability to lock things down for 20 years is fundamentally unacceptable, only enriching a few owners, and outright harming our country. Basically every time in history that IP rights are weakened or nullified, you see a burst of development and advancement in products and solutions.
I would love to lobby to change how the law works for these cases: for some definition of "firmware" (informally "software that ships with hardware and is not intended to be selected by the consumer like a computer operating system"), add a copyright exception so that modifying the firmware in situ is treated like modifying the physical hardware, because in practice they are in fact the same thing: a single component that does a single thing.
With this, the John Deere approach to gatekeeping vehicle repair would no longer be legally protected by the DMCA or by copyright law. All the other protections afforded by copyright law would still apply: you cannot rip the firmware off the hardware and distribute it, the manufacturer is under no obligation to help you modify it, etc.
However, tools which patch or circumvent antifeatures of the firmware would now be legal to use on hardware you own: it would be legal to patch out software locks, retune engine computers, etc.
I think the law should regard the general thing being copied (firmware, software, etc) as different from a single copy. For example, the law could regard modifying a single instance of firmware similarly to the way it regards modifying a book. Right now you can take a book and mark it up or tear pages out if you want without any permission, and the only reason permission would be required for firmware is because of the ability to have telemetry and attestation. So it seems like a pretty good extension of copyright law to protect any modification of a copy but not the sale of additional copies.
If you're going to sell the car with the modified firmware, fine.
But at least in my jurisdiction, I can mechanically modify the car in any way I please, as long as it still has seat belts, brake lights, and bumpers of a certain height. It doesn't even still require a steering wheel; that's not specified in the law as far as I've been able to find. (Now, if I removed the muffler and made it louder than proscribed by law, I could be cited for a noise violation, but only at such a time as I womped on the gas and actually made the noise. The car itself being _capable_ of the noise is not, inherently, illegal.)
This blew my coworkers' mind once as I unplugged the passenger-side airbag while mounting a bunch of new stuff there. Apparently in some places, it requires paperwork and certifications just to unplug a connector? Weird.
The EU has explicit requirements in UNECE R155 and R156 related to cyber security and software update. A manufacturer will NEVER ever get a car homologated with root access, regardless if it is due to a vulnerability or by design. In fact, if some CVEs are found for your car that allows root access, you have to report this to the authorities and take immediate corrective action. It’s basically the same as if you found the car has defective brakes or airbags.
> The underlying tension is that "you own the car" means something very different from "you own the software running the car."
How is this different from the 2000s, or the 90s, or even before, when the normal thing to do with commercial software was to purchase a license to use said software and a physical medium containing a copy? You'd also then not "own the software", but you owned the right to install a copy on your own computer and use it. That worked without having to hand over the keys to your own computer.
Sure, the physical delivery medium is gone, but that's just a detail. Why do we now think that just because we license software for use, we can't be in ultimate charge of our own devices?
In 1990 Ford couldn't turn off your Mustang because you plugged a TwEECer into the J3 port and screwed around with the tune. Best they could do was void your warranty and deny you further upgrades (i.e. tunes flashed as part of a recall or TSB).
These days unauthorized access tends to lose you effective use of the hardware you bought because the hardware requires software features to work and that software often unnecessarily phones home so if the OEM toggles a field in a DB somewhere you lose access to back up assist or whatever other fancy tech features that you a) paid for b) don't strictly need to have dependencies that phone home to work but do "because reasons".
Tesla absolutely does not apply the same patterns as John Deere.
Everyone can fix Teslas. Parts are easy to obtain. Never had issues with them.
John Deere on the otherhand is the absolute evil of right to repair.
The problem is that it actually gets harder. I was a holdout against cell phones when I was young. Eventually payphones started disappearing. Pre-cellphone they were everywhere. By the time I finally caved and got a cellphone I knew where there still were some in important spots around Chicago. Plus you ran into changing norms. Before cell phones people would schedule a meetup (let's meet at noon in this square then go do what we were going to do) but after cell phones it became, "just call me when you get close."
I then tried to resist smart phones and stick with my nokia. But then you start to get into things like, the kiosk where they would print your boarding pass doesn't do that anymore. You need a QR code on your phone. You can't call places anymore, you need to do it on their website, etc.
Now the government is starting to treat a lack of social media or technology as a reason for suspicion. In the not-too-distant future I imagine it will not be possible to go to an airport without a smart phone and a digital history known to Palentir.
The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price.
Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock.
You might say this is an obvious flaw in how the indexes work if they start immediately accept a brand new IPOed stock with limited float. You'd be right, which is why they won't list for a year.
At least they wouldn't until Elon got them to change their rules: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-30/nasdaq-cl...
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