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Should one sell their 401ks ahead of the forced buying
Definitely not.

What Spacex/Elon are doing is sketchy as hell. But the numbers involved here are not terribly meaningful for your portfolio.

At IPO, $75B of Spacex shares will be bought/sold. The S&P 500 uses float-adjusted weightings, and the current float-adjusted total is $54T. If you are 100% invested in SPY, then about 0.14% of your holdings will be spacex on IPO day (75B/54T~=0.14%).

Obviously Musk and friends will start dumping some of the locked up float (~1.65T) when they can. But they definitely will not be doing so in a way that crashes the price or the market. That's in nobody's interest.

If you assume that half of the shares end up as float eventually (post-lockup), you'd end up owning around 1.6% of spacex in your S&P 500 etf (875B/~55T~=1.6%). That's not nothing but it's not significant enough that you should consider liquidating your 401k.

I'm picking on Spacex specifically because they are the biggest and imo, have the sketchiest/worst finances of the 3.

I think the idea here isn't the absolute numbers, but that if Elon manages to successfully fleece everyone's retirement, it will collapse confidence in the market, which could wipe out far more value than SpaceX alone.

IF SpaceX is actually worth 400-500bn and it's a few hundred billion dollars of fleece, sure, that's a "small" amount (still.. lord almighty it is never enough for these people). But the hazard is that it is a fleece. That would shake confidence in the system, the bear case is basically unlimited at that point.

I dunno won't index funds be forced to sell other stocks to buy these IPOs? Won't that possibly trigger a market crash if the IPO stocks loses a lot of value very fast after the IPO on top of investors predicting this fact and selling shares of other companies?

I dunno, the logical explanation makes sense, but markets don't work on logic especially on the short term. People fearing what other people will do and act in anticipation is known to happen.

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In general you should never "sell your 401k." Period. (Short of using it for income during retirement.)

What you should do is have an Investor Policy Statement[0].

This should contain at least two things:

- your desired Asset Allocation (e.g. 30% U.S. stocks, 30% International stocks, 20% U.S. bonds, 20% International bonds) which should be decided upon based on specific, personal goals and risk tolerance

- your strict policy rules for if and when to do anything, if ever, e.g. (don't sell anything ever, or... rebalance your portfolio if one of your allocations is more than 2% from the desired goal)

Now... if say U.S. stocks took a big dump in the next 6 months (while other asset classes either grew, held steady, or simply didn't drop as much), when it would drop below 28% of your allocation, and you'd open a spreadsheet and figure out which other asset classes to sell a few percentage of, to buy the reduced price U.S. stock funds. (This is a policy-driven buy low, sell high strategy.)

[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Investment_policy_statement

Thanks for being the voice of reason here. So many people make their investment/allocation decisions on the fly... it's only going to get magnified by these 3 big IPOs. (and their unexpected consequences)
Firms will look at your $600k 401k AUM, Investor Policy Statements, and laugh you out the door. They won't care, you have no say. Your 401k plan is between them and your employer.
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Not sure if OP meant literally sell, or just rebalance out of stocks. TBH I've been considering sliding over to all bonds for a time, since there is no tax event if funds stay in the account. But the numbers don't seem that high at the end of the day.
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"Be fearful when others are greedy". Greed is at an all-time high, so be careful. Whether that means buying or selling or staying put is for you to decide.
Any advice that confidently ends with "but whether you do A, B, or C, is for you to decide" can generally be safely avoided. This is providing 0 bits of guidance.
401ks probably have limited control, but in proportion to their share of your index funds, you could short these stocks or use options or buy an inverse ETF (if one will exist).
this is not an option for the majority of people