What very interesting times we live in. On the one hand, we are about to make batteries out of sodium instead of lithium, and grow bones from sheep’s wool instead of punishing anyone with weakening bones with the worst pharmaceuticals in existence. On the other hand, Elon.
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On May 15 2026, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old contractor from Donna, Texas, was killed due to an improperly secured beam at SpaceX’s Starbase complex. In January, OSHA issued seven serious violations for a separate incident, failing to properly inspect a crane before it collapsed at Starbase in June 2025. OSHA data analysed by TechCrunch shows Starbase’s injury rate far outpaces industry peers. A Reuters investigation in 2023 documented at least 600 unreported injuries since a 2014 worker death at the McGregor, Texas test site, and found, despite an OSHA injury reporting requirement since 2016, SpaceX “failed to submit reports for most of those years”. OSHA’s maximum penalty for the crane violations was $115,850, roughly three minutes of SpaceX’s Q1 2026 revenue. SpaceX, like Musk himself, has been flying high on impunity for a very long time.
SpaceX, which includes Twitter, Starlink and Grok and will probably soon include Tesla, is itself a time capsule of this moment. In June, that entity will launch an IPO. The stock will be called SpaceX, but it is a trash bag of Musk ventures and crimes. In the last quarter, the space portion of SpaceX only accounted for 13% of $SPCX revenue. The child predator tool xAI accounted for 76% of capital spending. The business is public coercion and terrorizing of women and children, camouflaged with occasional exploding rockets.
Last month, I wrote about the increasingly ponzi scheme nature of the stock market. The SpaceX IPO looks like a fire sale. Nasdaq and other indexes have changed their rules specifically to fast-track entry for SpaceX, and S&P Dow Jones Indices has proposed eliminating profitability requirements, with implementation expected the week before SpaceX is listed. These changes shorten entry times and reduce requirements for the new stock to be included on funds that track the entire index and automatically own a slice of every company on the list. This means the indexes have created forced buying of SpaceX (Twitter, Grok) by passive funds like savings and retirement funds, pension plans, trusts, NGOs, and union funds before normal price settling can occur and without the profitability guarantee they had before.
Nasdaq has already changed its rules to fast-track entry, and S&P Dow Jones Indices has proposed waiving its profitability requirement for megacaps, with implementation expected around 8 June.
These funds have no alternative but to invest in high risk stocks, bonds, or commodities because even gold is now a high risk commodity. Those that can no longer get a pay cheque have no place to trust with their income security, even before this capitulation to tech-bro pump and dumps. Investment advisers and retail stock enthusiasts keep repeating the same lie to each other: If you just stay invested, dips are always brief and you will always make money over a year, or five years. This is a lie. If you invested money in the stock market between 1965 and 1974, it was worth less in real purchasing power for the next 14 to 20 years. This lie of the invincible stock market has taken complete possession of the internet, but it is still a lie.
So funds for the most vulnerable will be forced to invest in the exploitation of women and children, but that’s not all. This scheme is relying heavily on both the passive inclusion and the Musk fan army of retail investors to take on his debt. The reddit retail forums and other retail hangouts are being inundated with claims that the stock is a “generational opportunity” to finally get instantly rich. For this increasingly desperate group of people with poor risk assessment, the increasing gamification of the stock market and Polymarket betting have become their life plan.
A standard IPO bars all insiders from selling for 180 days after listing. SpaceX is allowing insiders to sell in tranches, with the first 20% eligible to offload within weeks. But a lot of looting already happened before the stock is even listed. In the first months of 2026, SpaceX spent $2.413 billion buying stock from xAI employees and $1.933 billion buying out existing shareholders. Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI in January, which converted into SpaceX Class A shares just before the IPO. Goldman Sachs arranged a $20 billion bridge loan for X/xAI debt, and the IPO proceeds are expected to repay the loan. These moves are all a deliberate sprint to cash out as much as possible pre-listing, and then let insiders and pre-IPO holders exit while public buyers absorb the unmanageable debt load of a terrifyingly unprofitable company. Just as the existing stockholders are selling their first tranches, passive funds, bought by risk-averse people and entities, will be required to buy them as part of the new rules adopted for SpaceX.
The increasingly cult-like retailers and the funds belonging to the most vulnerable will be the ones left holding when it all crashes. And then they will get the OpenAI IPO in the fall, featuring even worse financials than SpaceX. Three companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are targeting valuations between $852 billion and two trillion, so they can extract somewhere between $60 and $75 billion each from public markets in a single year. The entire US IPO market combined raised about $45 billion in 2025. This is the people on the top of the ponzi scheme inserting a very deep straw to vacuum up the most money they can of what remains at the bottom.
But that’s all ok as long as you don’t buy their stocks or the passive funds, right? No. The mega stocks, like the so-called Magnificent seven, have been siphoning public money for years. The money is finite. As I pointed out last month, when people say the stock market is up, they are really talking about seven companies and a few adjacent to them. The S&P 500 has already been looking like the profitable seven plus the spare 493 since 2023, when the seven rose by 76%. The imbalance was just starting to recover somewhat, but this year will put an end to that.
And what does that mean for all the people who are not even sure what the stock market is? It means the trade economy ponzi scheme, what I also call wealth endo-idealism, is at its sunset. If it looks really bright right now, that is because it is flaming out.
The reason capitalism is called capitalism is because those in power provided capital. Now they don’t. You do. Or your better off counterparts do. While the Poors have been told that communism is Very Bad and they have to earn every red penny they can glean from the machine with their own red blood, the rich have been happily practicing communism since 1602. Every company that lists on a stock exchange is a public company. No, not for that public. Only for the rich public. This communism has only been for those who could afford the entry fee. If you had enough money to buy shares in an index fund, you shared in communal profits from all the top publicly traded companies, like a good communist. This is what the top part of the capitalist ponzi scheme has looked like.
Lately, the markets have reached out to include much more of the population. 62% of the US now own stocks. According to the World Economic Forum, around 45% of Gen Z and millennials began investing in early adulthood, compared to just 15% of Gen X and boomers. BUT. At the same time that far more people are participating in the stock market, the share of wealth is funnelling to the top with increasing speed. As of Q3 2025, the top 0.1% hold 24% of all US stock market wealth, the top 1% hold 50%, the top 10% hold 87-90%, the bottom 50% own 1% . The top 1%’s share rose from 40% in 2002 to 54% in 2023.
The lower income investors are the most likely to own passive funds. They have the least ability to opt out of scams like SPCX, the least time and education to understand what is happening, and the smallest positions relative to the potential loss. The wealthy have active management, the ability to exclude individual stocks, and in many cases, pre-IPO access through private funds. They are the ones who have already been paid out, or will be by the IPO. They will make a fortune.
Investing in the stock market right now is like entering a gambling den where you can only see your own cards, but the house can see everyone’s cards. The house also creates the rules as it goes along, and plans games for months which you have to react to in seconds. And you have to react while working your day job and dealing with an interface that may ban you at any time if you trade too much or too quickly.
A ponzi scheme collapses when the well runs dry. When all the money has dried up and the top few have absconded, the entire thing collapses. The new mega IPOs are all pumping as much money as they possibly can while they still can. Those they are pumping money from are increasingly people who do not have far to fall.
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