Flying high on impunity – Heather Marsh

Flying high on impunity

Published by

Heather Marsh

on

June 1, 2026

What very interesting times we live in. On the one hand, we are about to make batteries out of sodium instead of lithium, and grow bones from sheep’s wool instead of punishing anyone with weakening bones with the worst pharmaceuticals in existence. On the other hand, Elon.

On May 15 2026, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old contractor from Donna, Texas, was killed due to an improperly secured beam at SpaceX’s Starbase complex. In January, OSHA issued seven serious violations for a separate incident, failing to properly inspect a crane before it collapsed at Starbase in June 2025. OSHA data analysed by TechCrunch shows Starbase’s injury rate far outpaces industry peers. A Reuters investigation in 2023 documented at least 600 unreported injuries since a 2014 worker death at the McGregor, Texas test site, and found, despite an OSHA injury reporting requirement since 2016, SpaceX "failed to submit reports for most of those years". OSHA’s maximum penalty for the crane violations was $115,850, roughly three minutes of SpaceX’s Q1 2026 revenue. SpaceX, like Musk himself, has been flying high on impunity for a very long time.

SpaceX, which includes Twitter, Starlink and Grok and will probably soon include Tesla, is itself a time capsule of this moment. In June, that entity will launch an IPO. The stock will be called SpaceX, but it is a trash bag of Musk ventures and crimes. In the last quarter, the space portion of SpaceX only accounted for 13% of $SPCX revenue. The child predator tool xAI accounted for 76% of capital spending. The business is public coercion and terrorizing of women and children, camouflaged with occasional exploding rockets.

Last month, I wrote about the increasingly ponzi scheme nature of the stock market. The SpaceX IPO looks like a fire sale. Nasdaq and other indexes have changed their rules specifically to fast-track entry for SpaceX, and S&P Dow Jones Indices has proposed eliminating profitability requirements, with implementation expected the week before SpaceX is listed. These changes shorten entry times and reduce requirements for the new stock to be included on funds that track the entire index and automatically own a slice of every company on the list. This means the indexes have created forced buying of SpaceX (Twitter, Grok) by passive funds like savings and retirement funds, pension plans, trusts, NGOs, and union funds before normal price settling can occur and without the profitability guarantee they had before.

Nasdaq has already changed its rules to fast-track entry, and S&P Dow Jones Indices has proposed waiving its profitability requirement for megacaps, with implementation expected around 8 June.

These funds have no alternative but to invest in high risk stocks, bonds, or commodities because even gold is now a high risk commodity. Those that can no longer get a pay cheque have no place to trust with their income security, even before this capitulation to tech-bro pump and dumps. Investment advisers and retail stock enthusiasts keep repeating the same lie to each other: If you just stay invested, dips are always brief and you will always make money over a year, or five years. This is a lie. If you invested money in the stock market between 1965 and 1974, it was worth less in real purchasing power for the next 14 to 20 years. This lie of the invincible stock market has taken complete possession of the internet, but it is still a lie.

So funds for the most vulnerable will be forced to invest in the exploitation of women and children, but that’s not all. This scheme is relying heavily on both the passive inclusion and the Musk fan army of retail investors to take on his debt. The reddit retail forums and other retail hangouts are being inundated with claims that the stock is a "generational opportunity" to finally get instantly rich. For this increasingly desperate group of people with poor risk assessment, the increasing gamification of the stock market and Polymarket betting have become their life plan.

A standard IPO bars all insiders from selling for 180 days after listing. SpaceX is allowing insiders to sell in tranches, with the first 20% eligible to offload within weeks. But a lot of looting already happened before the stock is even listed. In the first months of 2026, SpaceX spent $2.413 billion buying stock from xAI employees and $1.933 billion buying out existing shareholders. Tesla invested $2 billion into xAI in January, which converted into SpaceX Class A shares just before the IPO. Goldman Sachs arranged a $20 billion bridge loan for X/xAI debt, and the IPO proceeds are expected to repay the loan. These moves are all a deliberate sprint to cash out as much as possible pre-listing, and then let insiders and pre-IPO holders exit while public buyers absorb the unmanageable debt load of a terrifyingly unprofitable company. Just as the existing...