Why your pension may be forced to buy a $2tn loss-maker eyeing Mars

Heavily in debt, loss-making, aiming at Mars

The submission is John McManus in the Irish Times, and its target audience is unusually specific: not traders, but ordinary people whose pensions track an index. The framing in the article is that you may end up owning SpaceX without ever choosing to.

The governance ledger

McManus stacks the numbers against the romance: a valuation of $1.75–$2 trillion, around $29 billion of debt, and a company still losing money. The mechanism that drags pensions in is passive investing — funds that track a market index must buy listed stocks proportionally, so roughly 25% of the IPO is expected to land in passive hands automatically. Irish pension exposure alone he estimates at 0.04–0.15%.

The sharper critique is governance. Musk retains "85 per cent of the voting power through 'super-voting shares,'" the board is loaded with loyalists, and shareholders face "various waivers" that make holding him to account difficult. McManus reads the float as "an exit mechanism for insiders to cash out" and dismisses the Mars colony mission statement as "megalomaniacal nonsense."

The thread defends the strongman

The top reply in the discussion inverts the whole thesis. "Does anyone seriously believe that an independent board of investors can deliver better results than a founder?" asked a commenter on founder control, listing Meta, Google, Tesla and Nvidia as proof that "singular control by the people in charge" is the feature, not the bug — and calling the rest of the piece "non-sensical" for arguing both that everyone is forced to buy and that it will crash.

A reader on SpaceX's moat supplied the bull case the article skips: "Because they're going to be propped up by the US government for a long time… SpaceX has launched more rockets than anyone in the last few years. Including 3x more than China's space agency." The launch dominance is the fact the debt figures don't capture.

And at least one reader took McManus's advice literally: "I already emailed my pension mangers to divest from the fascists," wrote a commenter voting with his portfolio — the rare case where the pension-holder the article addresses actually answered back.

The unresolved bet

The disagreement isn't about the numbers — both sides accept the debt and the voting lock. It's about whether concentrated founder power is worth the corporate-governance hostage situation. The article says you're being handed risk you didn't choose; the thread's reply says that's the only kind of risk that ever paid off.