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You shouldn't be downvoted because your point is completely valid. Matt Levine made the same point in the last Money Stuff podcast. These indexes are supposed to contain the largest, most significant, and in some cases all companies so people shouldn't be mad at the indexes for pulling in a company that's going to have a 1.5T market cap at IPO. Given the market cap, it would actually be weird to not have it in an index like the S&P500 or QQQ.

Instead blame the bankers and market who are putting buying in at 1.5T valuation.

If people really don't want SpaceX in their S&P 500 tracking ETF, we should see a S&P-ex SpaceX in short order.

The whole point of original rule was to have market discover price over time before adding a company.

It is absurd to blame "market" that did not had enough time to settle. "Bankers" are to blame for making this rules change happen.

It is entirely valit to blame people who changed the rules to allow this to happen.

> The whole point of original rule was to have market discover price over time before adding a company.

IPOs and indexes were not really built to handle companies that stay private as long as we are now seeing. SpaceX is trading at crazy levels in the private market right now. Even if it prices down to something ~1T, it would be silly for an index that is a total market or the biggest 500 companies to ignore it. With that said, it'll be float weighted and have about as much impact on the s&p 500 as something like DoorDash.

>>If people really don't want SpaceX in their S&P 500 tracking ETF, we should see a S&P-ex SpaceX in short order.

"People" don't know much about finance to put it mildly. ETFs are created by market demand. Even "factors" ETFs are often based on completely irrational things like dividends, P/E ratios and other meaningless metrics. This happens because people are easily seduced by narratives ("solid dividend paying stocks", "low P/E ratio - good returns") which are plainly wrong but tempting to an average person.

Most people realized they don't know anything about finance and would like to pay someone (their fund manager) to make responsible decisions and expose them to wide market while avoiding blatant manipulations. Unfortunately the incentives are misaligned here. The managers' incentives are somewhere else. They are not paid by long term performance of their fund and they are disproportionally penalized for taking contrarian decisions.

People being force feed those mega IPOs losing money on them is bad for others as well - there will be less wealth for productive investments and more in hands of "players" (or scammers if you want to call it out). There might be a crash. Trust in financial market will plummet and hostile regulation might arise which other market participants will pay for even though they are not to blame.

I will not have exposure to those mega IPOs but I am in privileged position because:

-My understanding of financial markets is much better than that of an average person.

-I have quite a bit of time to follow all of it and react in time

-I pay 0% capital gain tax and use a broker with nearly 0 fees which allows me to rotate for free (almost)

-I know where and how to move my money so I don't lose advantages of wide market exposure

It took me a lot of effort to set it all up like that. An average person falls short on all of the above and is not in position to avoid donating part of their pension fund to Musk and Altman though. It is still bad for me for reasons mentioned above.

> I pay 0% capital gain tax and use a broker with nearly 0 fees which allows me to rotate for free (almost)

How so?

So then, why change the rules?
What's really clever is that Musk could pull his Nazi salute at the inauguration of the president he bought, and the ensuing 'voting with your dollars' against him doesn't matter because he was able to orchestrate forcing people to pay him by cutting them out of the loop. I mean it's absolutely evil, but it's pretty clever - his team proved they can't run a country (they probably could, but don't want to), but they're incredibly adept at stealing.

I wonder if Musk chose rocketry solely because of the ability to use it to drain money from government?