Comment Finally, a group of institutionalists has managed to humble Elon Musk in a way that will actually trouble him. The rebel leaders are, uh, the people in charge of the S&P 500. If this sounds like wishful thinking, you can hardly be blamed. Musk is on an all-time run of occasionally looking as if he’d be laid (relatively) low by some party or other, only to come out smelling like a rose. Get forced to buy a social media platform he doesn’t want? Well, it’ll turn out to pay for itself many times over by rendering Musk a kingmaker among conservatives. Illegally destroy large chunks of the federal government, leading to a toxified reputation and an investor perception that he’s distracted, thus dragging down Tesla’s stock? Well, it recovered those losses and then some. Have a public falling-out with Donald Trump after all that? No big deal, apparently, as Musk continues to enjoy government contracts and use his slopified platform to tilt our discourse to the right. There has been no beating this guy. But what S&P Global decided on Thursday will at the least annoy the hell out of Musk for a while. The corporation behind the famous stock market indexes announced that it wouldn’t fast-track SpaceX for inclusion into the S&P 500. It will deny billions of dollars in stock purchases of the company, Musk’s latest to go public. And it will preserve credibility for the most important index on the market, while keeping unwitting buyers from subsidizing a business that has not earned the right to their largesse. Musk is going to hate this, and for a rare change, there’s nothing he can do about it except hope that the people across from him change their mind. Inclusion in these indexes or the stock exchanges they’re tied to means many billions of dollars pouring into those stocks. Think of it this way: If you’re reading this, you might never buy stock in a Musk company on its own. But if he’s in the S&P 500, you’re purchasing a little chunk of Tesla, which makes up about 2 percent of S&P index funds, every time you put money into such a fund. That’s many millions of people pushing the price of his stocks even higher, with their fund provider taking their money and using it to lift Musk’s holdings. Advertisement