It has the LOAD, just not many passengers. From this Airbus webpage third paragraph:
"For its first flight, Airbus’ 21st century flagship, carrying the registration F-WW0W, took off at a weight of 421 tonnes / 928,300 lbs, the highest ever of any civil airliner at take-off to date. It is powered by four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines. In addition to water ballasts, the equipment on board the A380 comprises a full set of flight-test instrumentation to record the thousands of parameters necessary to enable in-flight performance analysis." (bold by me)
The water is carried in plastic containers arranged like seats.
I stand corrected. I need all the correction I can get, when the corrector is qualified, as you are.