Experts sound alarm over Elon Musk's 'coup' that's 'about to rob your 401k'

Financial experts sounded the alarm Monday over what some have described as a financial “coup” being carried out by Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and fierce ally to President Donald Trump, one that could see tens of millions of Americans unknowingly prop up his unprofitable company SpaceX through their retirement accounts.

“The richest guy on the planet is about to rob your 401K,” warned content creator Zack Nelson, writing in a social media post Sunday on X to his nearly 1 million followers.

In a move that one of the United States’ largest unions warned “defies financial logic,” private index providers – the companies that decide what stocks go into major market indexes – have fast tracked SpaceX to be added to indexes like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, indexes that millions of Americans buy into via their retirement accounts.

On aggregate, SpaceX operates at a loss, a factor that would ordinarily make the company ineligible to be added to certain indexes without the “newly announced fast-entry rules,” Reuters reported.

“Amazing,” noted investor and market commentator Ari Paul, the chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, in a social media post on X to his more than 230,000 followers. “Pensions forced to buy SpaceX IPO (initial public offering) en masse even if it’s unprofitable. Impressive coup by Musk.”

Ian McMillan, a portfolio manager and market technician at Client First Tax and Wealth Advisors, was more blunt in his assessment.

“Listen, I’m a big ‘the index is the index’ guy, but they are openly looting the coffers,” he wrote in a social media post on X to his more than 130,000 followers. “This is 100% fraud.”

SpaceX is expected to be catapulted to become “among the world’s most valuable companies” once it goes public, Business Insider reported, despite its first public financial report released last month showing that the company posted a net loss of $4.9 billion in 2025. With the company now on a fast track to be quietly backed by tens of millions of Americans – many of them unknowingly – economic commentator and journalist Ben Norton condemned Musk for what he described as his pursuit to become the world's "first trillionaire."

“The world's richest centi-billionaire oligarch used his power to change the rules, so he could dump his garbage company (which is cartoonishly overvalued, unprofitable, and incinerating cash) on retail investors, using trillions of dollars in retirement funds as exit liquidity, all in order to become the first trillionaire,” he wrote in a social media post on X.

“This is the perfect metaphor for the US economy as a whole, which is entirely based on bubbles and scams.”