If you’re saving for retirement, you’re probably helping Elon become a trillionaire

The grim truth:

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, you might be about to help make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

If so, you’ll also be risking your retirement savings while simultaneously bailing out X and Cybertrucks.

And to top it off: You have pretty much no say in the matter.

That’s because Musk’s SpaceX is IPOing next week, and it’s getting special treatment that allows it to enter many of the major stock indices without meeting the usual requirements to do so. What that means is that if you hold an index fund—which you probably do, if you have a 401(k)—you may be forced to transfer some of your wealth to this money-losing rocket company and, by extension, its megalomaniacal CEO. And you won’t really be able to complain if he screws up.

[…]

With this IPO, Musk also gets bailed out of some of his most embarrassing failures, which he’s buried under SpaceX’s froth.

For instance, X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, got shoved into SpaceX. So if you buy the shiny new spaceship company, you’re also buying a piece of Musk’s decrepit MAGA playground.

Same goes for other Musk screwups.

For example, when no one wanted to buy the ugly Cybertrucks whose wheels3 kept falling off, Musk-controlled Tesla found a willing customer in Musk-controlled SpaceX. SpaceX purchased nearly one out of every five Cybertrucks registered in the last quarter of 2025—meaning Musk booked around $100 million in Tesla revenue by selling trucks to his other companies.

The Boring Company, yet another Musk-controlled firm, is also being paid to do construction work for SpaceX.

In general, Musk has a tendency to take one business he controls and overspend to buy things from other businesses he controls. It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme, except every subsequent customer is yet another Elon Musk company.

How is all this possible? Why are people still giving this guy money, given these crazy valuations? There are three basic answers:

1. People are genuinely excited about commercial space exploration and think SpaceX is primed to capture the market and become super-profitable someday.
2. There’s a lot of dumb money out there that can’t evaluate the merits of #1 but believes Musk is a visionary. He is, after all, the richest man in the world, so he must know what he’s doing.4
3. There’s a lot of captured money out there that believes neither #1 nor #2 but doesn’t have the option not to buy. These investors are being strong-armed into buying SpaceX because they own index funds that are forced to hold the stock.

Passive, low-free index funds are the best investment for the vast majority of investors, but this is one collective downside.

The Sultan of Shrill has more on the Human Ponzi Scheme:

Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.

OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.

Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.

Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.

But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.

It’s an effective scam, and he turned a leading social media site fash out of the side pocket.