Misaligned Markets

Today is SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. The company is offering 555.6 million shares at a fixed price of $135, raising $75 billion and targeting a valuation of $1.77 trillion. This is the largest IPO in history, by a large margin. All for a company that lost nearly $5 billion last year. Institutional interest in SpaceX is high, as the offer was oversubscribed. That is to say, there is more demand for stock among financial institutions than there is stock…

When I was in my 20s, I wrote dystopian fiction. I imagined many worlds like one, for example, where the elite lived in technological enclaves. Their privilege granted them sheltered existences, shielded from news of wars and climate collapse, and they were only tethered to reality through interaction with humanoid robots piloted by the poor and incarcerated. At the time I couldn’t tell you why I wrote such stories, but now I realize I wanted to explore how the social context of a technology…

My goal with Misaligned Markets is to understand how markets incentivize behaviors that lead to market failure. While I’ve leaned on analogies like corporate kung fu and capitalism as a computer system, I want to isolate patterns that work at a more granular level. To that end, have started thinking about games, sports, and other competitive activities. This has helped me understand how rules in role-based systems can be abused to create action asymmetries that allow an actor to take actions…

Don’t look to the dot-com bubble to understand the consequences of the current one.

We know simple metrics can’t work for complex problems. So why do we build systems that measure the wrong thing?