Elon Musk is about to become the world's first trillionaire. If it falls apart, the money in your retirement account helps pay for it. On Friday, June 12, SpaceX goes public at a valuation near $1.8 trillion, the largest stock debut in history.

As reported by More Perfect Union's Eric Gardner and broadcast on Democracy Now, the offering is engineered to do one thing: turn the paper wealth of Musk and his insiders into real cash, using ordinary Americans as the buyers.

Gardner's own words: Musk "has essentially financially engineered this IPO as a massive wealth transfer from everyday investors to insiders."

Here is how the trick works, and you do not need a finance degree to follow it.

A normal company is valued at a few times its yearly revenue. A healthy restaurant doing $3 million in sales might sell for $9 million, three times revenue. SpaceX is asking for 94 times revenue.

The Financial Times editor who looked at it called the price "nuts." Because it is.

When a price is that insane, professional investors refuse to touch it. So how do you find buyers? You reach into the retirement accounts of people who never agreed to anything.

Roughly a third of all American stock is tied to index funds, the safe, passive funds inside most 401(k)s.

When a company joins an index, every fund tracking it is forced to buy the stock automatically, not because it is a good investment, but because the rules say so. SpaceX was not eligible for the Nasdaq-100.

New companies normally wait up to a year. So this spring, according to Reuters, Musk made his decision on where to list conditional on one thing: Nasdaq fast-tracking SpaceX into its index. Nasdaq changed the rule. No regulator approved it. A former SEC official confirmed they did not have to.

That means millions of Americans are about to own SpaceX whether they want to or not. As one analyst put it, every sign points to the stock being built to spike right after it prices, then fall hard, leaving regular savers holding the loss.

And what are they buying? A rocket company that lost over $4 billion last year after Musk merged it with the money-losing remains of Twitter and his AI company, all to fund data centers in space that even his own advisers say may never work.

Insanity.

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