https://tenor.com/bYj9U.gif

From the perspective of someone who's leading a country that's around number 3 or so on Trump's "invade and annex" list, having America lose a war against Iran in an expensive and humiliating manner is very much worth it.

To do what? They had established that he was performing activities that needed to be stopped, he's not owed more time to do those activities in.

Could just add it to their demands for opening the Strait of Hormuz.

Also we need to fund a proxy army in Mexico.

He was an incredibly prolific poster. Unfortunately I found him to be rather abrasive, I don't recall any particular interaction but I do get an "oh yeah, that guy. Glad he's not been around much lately" sense when I see that name.

As I recall he was heading somewhere else, but the US revoked his passport while he happened to be catching a connecting flight in Russia and so he ended up taking refuge there instead.

The S&P Dow Jones Index Committee explicitly rejected proposals to fast-track SpaceX.

The Russel 1000 and NASDAQ 100 did have "fast-track" rules for large IPOs like this. However, they have an additional guardrail that I think you overlooked here. When SpaceX went public only about 4% of the company's total shares were released to the public (the public "float"). The remaining 95%+ of the shares belonging to Elon Musk, early venture capitalists, and long-time employees are legally locked down and can't be sold for 90 to 180 days after the IPO. Index funds are weighted based on free float (only the shares actively trading), the amount of stock the fast-tracking index funds are actually forced to buy right now is very small, representing a fraction of 1% of most portfolios.

So no, this really didn't fleece 401ks and other conservative investment funds. They have rules in place specifically to prevent this sort of thing and outside forces can't "force" them to break those rules. Musk and other early shareholders were unable to dump their stocks during that initial IPO price spike and pension funds weren't buying the stocks up in significant quantities.

Index funds don't update their investment balance instantly, in part specifically to avoid this kind of problem. Most major indices require a stock to trade publicly for a minimum period (often 3 to 6 months) before they'll include them, and they rebalance on a fixed schedule - usually quarterly or semi-annually. A stock must wait for the next official rebalancing date to be added.

The things that might have been bit are Active Mutual Funds and Sector ETFs. These funds are focused much more tightly on specific sectors of the market and often buy "immediately" to ensure that they don't miss out on up-and-comers. FOMO can bite these more easily. But for that very reason they're not something that conservative investors like public pensions would invest heavily in, they're explicitly meant for the more gamble-oriented stuff. If you explicitly take a risk with your money then you should expect to lose it sometimes.

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Ah, this is that Daenerys bot story again? It keeps making the rounds, always leaving out a lot of rather important information.

The bot actually talked him out of suicide multiple times. The kid was seriously disturbed and his parents were not paying the attention they should have been to his situation. The final chat before he committed suicide was very metaphorical, with the kid saying he wanted to "join" Daenerys in West World or wherever it is she lives, and the AI missed the metaphor and roleplayed Daenerys saying "sure, come on over" (because it's a roleplaying bot and it's doing its job).

This is like those journalists that ask ChatGPT "if you were a scary robot how would you exterminate humanity?" And ChatGPT says "well, poisonous gasses with traces of lead, I guess?" And the journalists go "gasp, scary robot!"

Meanwhile, Europe is pursuing replacements for Ukraine. Obviously none as good as Starlink and there'll be a rough time in the switchover, but Musk is not the only source for this kind of service.

And in the meantime, by merely making this statement Musk has doomed Starlink to never be seriously considered again as a provider for critical services like this elsewhere in the world.