Plenty of ways to get exposure to that stock without it going into the indices it is not qualified for.
Previously: "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718
It seems obvious in retrospect, but the fact that SpaceX will be "valued" at $1.75 trillion after the IPO is irrelevant when only $75 billion worth of its stock will be publicly traded.
$75 billion in float-adjusted market cap puts it around 180-190th in the S&P 500. So sure, it will likely get in there eventually, but there's no rush to bend the rules to get it in right away.
> To join the S&P 500, a company must demonstrate positive GAAP net income in both its most recent quarter and the sum of the trailing four consecutive quarters
(I also don't want them to create special exceptions. The S&P 500 has pre-existing inclusion criteria, and I'm glad they're sticking to their rules.)
That's like saying that if Nvidia performs way better than an index fund, then the index fund will shift to consist only of Nvidia.
In any given year, there are plenty of index funds that outperform the S&P 500. They don't freak out over it.
S&P 500 is volatile over 5 years - I'd argue even over 10 years (see the charts at https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-i...). The whole point of investing in it is for much longer windows.
So yeah, perhaps after 10 years they'll change once they'll see other index funds doing better, and have data to back up that in the long term, early inclusion didn't hurt.
Any individual can buy as much as they want.
Anyway, if other indexes add it, and it fails spectacularly, money will shift to those funds that do better.
I'm not disagreeing that people invest this way, but I'd like to point out that past performance does not imply future performance, and that investors should consider factors other than just past returns.
Neither SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic have a future. What's a shame is that had Elon not merged SpaceX with xAI it might've actually had a future - but he had to go and ruin it.
What an idiot.
I'm greatly relieved that at least one major institution in the markets is showing restraint and exercising caution. I'm also a little surprised at the rationality given what we've seen in the past year or so.
Okay? But the debate has been specifically about getting rid of new rules introduced in recent decades as they're incompatible with the purpose of the indices in the current situation.
The whole thing is disgusting and the financial sector should be collectively ashamed of themselves.
If you want to be active then keep your positions but just know and accept the active label.
And there are other reasons to be cautious. Many passive funds don't license the SP500 and instead mirror it with their own synthetic index. They are not bound to respect this decision.
You'll be shocked to know they have changed the inclusion rules a number of times.
I suspect if in 12 months these megacaps are still megacaps, they will revisit the profitability rules. It's hard to have an index with 500 of the largest, most significant companies leaving out companies with trillion dollar market caps.
The S&P recovered from Dotcom bottom in ~7 years while the Nasdaq-100 took 15 years. Likewise Nasdaq took 3.5 years and the AI hype to recover back to its COVID highs in 2024 while S&P had the same recovery in about 2 years.
This is the downside to Nasdaq having higher returns in tech bull markets.
So the indices have a very different volatility profile by design, we should be happy to have the choice rather than have them all converge to the same product.
I have 1 trillion shares, and I sold 1 to a mate for a dollar.
Total company revenue is like 50 bucks a month and profits are nil.
Can I be in the S&P 500 too?
I do wonder if any of these three companies are using AI to do their accounting and bookkeeping. What happens when there are AI hallucinations affecting those outcomes?
A friend gave AI access to his accounts to summarize his finances.
On reviewing the AI-generated report, he spotted a $500 monthly loan payment that he didn't recognize. He asked AI where it came from, and AI admitted that it was a mistake.
Perhaps in its training data, most people have a $500 loan payment, so AI just stuck one in there.
And on the same note, regardless of how many transactions there are, how come people are unaware about some of them? How does that happen? Do you have loan payments you take and then pay monthly but then get a 29 day amnesia every month on schedule? Were they banned by their bank from the banking app or something? I have ADHD (real, shittier one, not an Instagram version) which makes me forget both long term and short term things all the time, for decades. It doesn't prevent me remembering which big transfers I need to do, or done already, and what is the balance now or typically end of month. Just what kind of financial empire with offshore tax evasion accounts necessitates some 3rt party "audit" of one's individual finances?
CFO was at Bird (a SPAC flop) and CEO was previously charged by the SEC with a felony... for cooking the books.
Everyone wants you to believe that a giant wafer is the future (and soon enough layers of wafers), but a P/E of $500, just doesn't make sense for a company selling AI fast tokens.
Especially with a whole bunch of other solutions just waiting for tapout and competing with everyone else for more and more memory allocations to be able to hold the models.
Do we need that software so fast? We are able to manage our complex world just fine with support people answering questions within next 48 hours.
So a PE of 500 means it would take 500 years for the earnings of the company to equal the current market cap (price per share X number of shares). This implies absurd (almost certainly impossible) growth over the next 500 years. Of course anyone expecting to pull their investment out and spend it on retirement can’t be looking at a 500-year investment horizon. I suppose the 1% can, though. What the hell else are they going to spend their cash on?
I think that’s not how that works today, but I’m sure that it could and will one day.
Like many other sectors quality is gradually turning to slops as people “let the AI do it”.
Then a big "risks" section is added basically excusing all the authors of responsibility when something "unexpected" happens.
That really didn’t need to be said and it seems to be sourced from memes from Reddit. It is the kind of infantile patronizing feedback you would get if you asked for comments on financial statements from chatGPT.
You can also game things a bit like Anthropic is showing better figures just now due to an introductory discount on getting compute from xAI. Those tend to fade out with time.
I don't understand. Guilty until proven innocent, because they... are too successful? What could possibly be the generalizable idea here?
Should we have a speed limit for too successful companies, even if they might be doing super valuable work? Who would we trust to be the judge of the potential havoc that bad capital allocation in such a moment might cause?
EDIT: To be more clear, I don't have any particular qualms with the S&P committee maintaining it's position. That part I find mostly interesting and goes towards the second paragraph.
The first one is reserved for the quote, which I do have qualms with. "Nobody knows" feels a bit weak when the implication, that someone could be doing something illegal, turns into a guiding principle.
Since the start, the S&P 500 has had a simple and consistent profitability screen. Your company must be GAAP profitable in the past quarter, as well as for your past four quarters when summed up.
The S&P 500 committee isn’t targeting these companies. They are simply choosing to keep the rules they’ve had in the beginning. And when these companies can deliver one year of profitability, like every single company added to the S&P 500 since inception, they too can join the index.
Refusing to change longstanding rules that make sense (remember: companies are supposed to be profitable!!) isn’t unfair.
It’s not active rejection, they simply don’t meet the criteria to join the S&P 500 yet. The inclusion rules don’t completely prevent garbage stocks from being added, but it helps keep out the most egregious frauds, but even then an Enron will happen every so often.
If somebody comes up to you on the street and claims to be the wallet inspector, should I cry “guilty until proven innocent!” when you refuse to hand yours over?
These rules ensure some stability before a company gets included in an index. That’s all. No company has a right to be included just because of their valuation at some moment.
But as so many ETFs have a significant stake in large-cap US tech stocks (the top 10 holdings of the iShares MSCI World ETF is entirely comprised US Big Tech, making up 20% of the value of the ETF), I found S&P 500 Equal Weight to be pretty attractive.
As for SpaceX itself? I feel the numbers involved all sound a bit unbelievable to me. I fear that there will be a rug-pull sometime post-IPO, and retail investors (and taxpayers, if the US Government ends up taking a stake, as they have recently indicated they might do for OpenAI) will inevitably be left holding the bag.
The rebalancing required to maintain equal weights means constantly selling your winners and buying more of your losers. That creates volatility drag. Stock returns are highly skewed: only about 4% of stocks outperform the market, and are responsible for most of its gains. By keeping your allocation to those stocks small through constant rebalancing, you are missing out on a large part of their gains. The vast majority of stocks underperform.
Maintaining the equal weighting also requires constant trading, which generally means higher fees. A market weighted fund, in contrast, naturally maintains its desired balance in response to price movements, without any trading.
Also, the equal weighting ignores the amount of outstanding float for each company. If the fact that NASDAQ has not (historically) been float-adjusted (a common anti-SpaceX talking point) gave you concern, this is even worse, due to the multiple orders of magnitude difference between the largest and smallest companies in the S&P. If enough money enters the equal-weight index, this can spark large amounts of buying in (relatively) small companies that is divorced from their economic performance.
The equal-weight index has outperformed the market-weighted index in some periods (not in recent memory), but with higher volatility (so worse risk-adjusted returns). That outperformance can mostly be explained by factor tilts implicit in the equal weighting (e.g., a higher allocation to mid-cap value stocks).
You would probably be better off with a mix of market-weighted funds explicitly designed to give you the factor tilts and risk exposure you want.
If the SEC was doing it's job, there would sanctions or jail time for those numbers.
The only substantial effect I've seen of the influencers who were doomsplaining this decision was some minor churn in retirement assets from low-cost S&P 500 followers to higher-cost funds. (The market, broadly, never priced in a rebalancing of the S&P 500. So this was almost entirely whipped up by influencers.)
Broadly speaking, if you were actually considering trading on the back of S&P's decision, or worse, if you actually did, consider trimming who you follow for financial advice.
And if you had seen it what would have that pricing looked like?
S&P requires 4 consecutive profitable quarters, amongst other requirements, so if one of the new mega caps like SpaceX or Anthropic or OpenAI get included, you’d probably want to get the benefit of their performance.
Put differently, if one previously specifically picked an index fund that is not equal weighted, why would you change from that strategy?
What performance? None of these companies have established "performance" and they are all still burning money in a race to be the industry leader.
There is no evidence these companies can be profitable without some kind of significant hardware advance.
Also, S&P500 has a current market cap of $67 trillion, 0.3% of that is some $200billion. That is essentially a wealth transfer to the rich. They don't need it.
That's one way to look at it. At a personal level, it's a small sliver and if it were to drop, its influence on your balance isn't much. So that's true.
Another way to look at it is that with ~200 million people owning index funds, all their funds balances together, even a tiny fraction of a percent is a massive amount of money being force-fed into spacex, which is to say, mostly into Elon's pocket (since he owns vast majority of the shares).
So why is it fair to change the rules to give this massive wealth transfer to Musk, who certainly does not need the extra money?
If it is not the end of the world, cover my losses.
I will go drive my old German car now, and get a bit drunk in a bottle of Nebbiolo while listening to some French lunatic with a piano.
Enjoy your trip to Mars and your self driving toy cars. The world is off its rails. Bit time.
It always boggles my mind when someone who is middle to maybe upper middle class tries to time the market or buys/sells stocks in reaction to random news like this. At best you're going to be up maybe 50% on this trade, and you're going to pay commission to your broker, and may even need to pay taxes. At worst you're going to be down a lot and still pay the broker.
A conservative 10% return on a 2 million dollar investment is a very nice 200 000. A conservative 10% return on a 20 000 dollar investment is just 2000.
If you're not born rich in this world, there are but a few doors that are open to you to try to improve your station in life. Hard work will never help you out of the hole. Not even dangerous work. Nor will an education. At least with high risk investment you have a fair chance, and at worst you loose your savings and are back where you started. You're not going to lose your life or your limbs.
I don’t disagree with your basic idea, but not being able to articulate alternatives so that you know when they make sense is going to hurt you.
We are possibly seeing a major failure mode for passive for the first time.
So, no weapons for Ukraine?
And I will enjoy my trip to Mars, when there are nice hotels there. But it's gonna be a while.
It's a good time to be alive.
(I obviously don't know your circumstances but am commenting about a general phenomenon I see parroted by many professionally successful SWEs who seem to take glee in being ignorant of economics/finance while enjoying the spoils.)
What is naive in a completely different set of ways. We really don't need more instability coming from your side.
Electricity is overhyped anyway. Nikola Tesla is a scammer with his crazy ideas. Not to mention the scam that is Bell's telephony. Electricity is causing a copper shortage for us common folk. This electricity bubble is built only on hype, and will pop soon enough!
This decision alone is worth several trillion dollars.
It’s incredibly dumb that it was ever even under consideration.
"Smarts" has nothing to do with anything there and never has, so at least IMO, it's noteworthy that they didn't just sell out the index.
S&P - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global - is a business intel & analytics firm, not an investment firm. Their S&P 500 list just one of many datasets that they manage and sell. Cleverly trying to pick future winners and losers has little potential upside for them, and could put them into direct competition with many of their customers.
This is a ridiculous situation, a ridiculous valuation, and a very risky business (data centers in space? c'mon, be serious).
People don't buy the S&P 500 because they buy the index because it spreads risk. That they won't get maximum returns is the intended risk tradeoff they want.
That people consider the S&P 500 as a vehicle for "maximum money" is precisely why it should be considered in a bubble. And why actions like the NASDAQ's fast-track exceptions are so concerning.
The moment you start making exceptions to the rules because "gotta push the stock index higher", it's game over for the entire economy.
Breaking the rules but it does feel very much like Facebook or Reddit where there are distinct hive minds on topics and it just becomes a pissing match between brain-dead individuals.
Also, how would you even know the deterioration? You have been barely 2 years on this website. Once again you gave away your shill nature.
This fatigue also causes a lot of readers to skip the AI threads, meaning less self-moderation of the forum through voting.
I think Elon owned companies are just a third rail for any kind of intelligent discussion because it turns into Elon fan boys arguing against Elon haters.
Absolutely agree with your statement. Most top comments are just upvoted from the hivemind. Elon topics are always the worst because nobody even uses critical thinking and will just upvote/downvote based on the theme of Elon = Good or Bad.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/tech-stocks-sink-rc...
Strong job numbers + increasing inflation = overheated economy = goodbye interest rate cuts. In fact, there's a significant chance that rates will go up this year. Perhaps even more than once.
That means cost of borrowing will increase, which is bad for business growth.
It dropped because tech dropped and it still has a lot of tech.
This is why QQQ was down far more than SPY, as QQQ is more tech heavy and will be adding these companies.
The point isn't that the impact would have been minimal. It's that changing the rules to suit the rich and connected is the literal definition of crony capitalism. Why should SpaceX get exemptions from entry requirements to the S&P when every other company before it didn't?
Trying to justify it based on an argument that it would have been 'just' $200 billion, is absurd since that $200 billion is coming largely from the public via index funds that would have been forced to buy SpaceX shares.
The rules have never been set in stone and changed a number of times since the S&P 500 was created. The current set of rules are based around the old way of companies IPOing and growing into something that could be included. Now, companies are staying private longer and IPOing with huge valuations.
Take AI/Elon emotion out of it for a second, and there is a rational debate to be had if multiple 1T+ market cap companies should be accommodated for in an index that's supposed to represent the 500 largest/most influential US companies. If these companies are still in the 1T+ ranges a year from now, I suspect the S&P may change some rules to get them in with the idea that the market has spoken.
The S&P grandfathers in loads of shit. Google and Berkshire got to be the only special babies with multiple classes of stock for a few years.
The S&P tries to represent large cap American stocks. There was a genuine debate around whether SpaceX et al represent large cap stocks. Elon et al tried to put their thumbs on the scale, of course, but that wasn't the driving concern, this has been a debate that has been happening for a while.
The weird thing is linking it to Elon is absolutely titillating. So that's what influencers did. It's a maddening story. But it really isn't true, and it was even less true when the S&P rule changes were being misrepresented as faits accomplis.
Wasn't this after their entry into the index?
I could give you a lot of non-stocks related examples of why rules should not be set in stone.
Anthropic is becoming "profitable" while burning a series H of 69 bns usd. Does it count as profitable?
I'm curious if someone well versed in finance can answer, because from my uneducated perspective, it's not profitable to burn billions in order to make a billion.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-...
S&P requires profitability (i.e. net income) according to GAAP. That definition incorporates both ROA and operating income.
This is to say that your idea isn't bad, it's just that if someone had a strategy to beat the market they'd be using it already, and other investors would be looking for a way to screw over that person and leave them holding the bag. That's why passive investments are diverse and fairly low risk - they should ideally track the whole market rather than trying to pick winners and losers. Index funds are good for this.
if I get it this is an index to invest in common in distributed wallets chosen and managed by an organization named S&P?
I'ld be interested in something similar, but aiming at growing cooperatives, non profits, externally checked for alignment organisations striving to benefit humanity as a whole. It doesn't have to be something that have strong garanties of direct personal financial profits, just no way it makes me in personal bankrupts, zero personal gain would be ok, staying ahead of inflation nice to have, and having some profits back would be acceptable.
Please be kind or hold from losing time and energy for everybody with aggressive answers.
I'm just considering ways to make sure as few as possible resources end up in the control of techno fascists.
There are a lot of investment funds like this, usually called something like "ESG" (environmental, social, and governance) funds.
"SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" (bloomberg.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718
Ars used to do deep insightful articles a couple of days after the news but today it's just regurgitated blogspam that is 2 days old news. And way more political. It's sad.
These are just some somewhat recent IPOs that come to mind, I am sure I am forgetting some.
In the case of GPRO, look up their first quarterly reports after the IPO. Pure comedy gold.
Doomers gonna doom
I don't care about profitability, sustainability, ESG scores or anything like that. If the market is pricing unprofitable company at hundred of billions maybe there is a good reason for it. I do care about market having time to evaluate the company so index funds buy at fair prices. For this you need time and enough float and volume. Time being the main factor.
Of late the markets have become a casino. There is a large retail population that bets on options. Betting on IPOs is just another opportunity for such folks. By bending the rules Elon and others are trying to make it a more favorable bet for retail ensuring a near-term pop.
Kudos to S&P for standing up and sticking it to the man. And, woe to JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley etc for pushing overpriced paper, and on nasdaq etc for bending rules. This will be remembered later as the peak (my opinion).
S&P 500 rejects MPT when it decides not to issue a waiver from its ordinary rules which require at least a year long track record, a rule that is clearly a throwback to slower days when companies would invariably grow their way to be among the largest 500, and not IPO at that size. This old fashioned view throws a monkey wrench into the universally recommended, least-risk MPT/CAPM investment strategy of diversification because investors will need to individually buy these individual stocks to balance their ETF portfolios to reduce their overall risk, and then sell these stocks when they get added to the indices, incurring capital gains taxes that they wouldn't otherwise pay.
Not really. One, it was unlikely to happen. The market not pricing in any rebalancing communicated that. Two, the magnitude–even for the S&P 500–would have been small. About a third of stocks are in passive strategies, about 15% in any index, and while most of that is the S&P 500, the index market is incredibly competitive.
S&P made the right move. But the tragedy this episode has revealed, at least to me, is in how venal and influential this new breed of financial influencers on YouTube and X are, and the degree to which they're willing to misinform to get clicks.
The risk S&P takes by doing this is that they will still be forced to buy SpaceX, but a year after everybody else. Given that there is a massive amount of capital that you know will have to buy this stock in 12 months, that itself provides speculative reasons to buy it now.
The indices are in an unenviable position: a race to the bottom. The S&P 500 may be setting up its index funds simply to be the last buyer in a Ponzi scheme.
There is no guarantee that the market will find the “true value“ of SpaceX in the 12 month interval. Markets are frothy and speculative already, and they now have a built in exit liquidity provider.
S&P may very well end up buying SpaceX, but it will be through the standard mechanism they have been using for decades. Not in a last second bum-rush deal that NASDAQ made to grant special favors.
One year from IPO, the insider lock-up periods will have expired, so insiders who want to get out will have had an opportunity to dump their shares in a risk-based approach without a guaranteed payout from index funds.
Pension funds don't tend to follow the S&P 500, much less automatically. They're sophisticated institutional investors like CalPERS [1] who dabble in everything from public stocks to private equity.
It's other retirement assets, e.g. 401(k)s and IRAs, that tend to follow the S&P 500. But again, with substantial variation.
S&P including these companies would have driven a lot of money towards them. But there was a lot of misinformation around the magnitude of that drive, as well as the breadth of whom it would affect.
Adding these to the index immediately would force passive index funds (multiple trillions of $) to buy this stock, and thus not allow the market to make performance based decisions.
It's truly a shame that the NASDAQ caved and I will definitely reduce my position in such index funds (I have less trust in it now).
> However, the S&P Dow Jones Indices did “carve out one concession” by changing the investable weight factor rules for “lower-profile benchmarks” such as the S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, according to Quartz. That could allow an IPO faster entry into those indexes.
I think these total market indexes are used as benchmarks for US total market ETF's and funds?
squints
Is that an institution working for long-term stability instead of short-term gain?
looks through binoculars
Holy hell... it is!
NASDAQ has an incentive to offer early entry into the index (they want SpaceX to list on their exchange), whereas S&P has no incentive for early inclusion; it could only increase risk for them. Even if they /wanted/ to add SpaceX early, that could create a precedent with unpredictable consequences.
Since most shareholders I know plan to hold for another 20 years, waiting a year to get into the S&P average seems fine. Congratulations to S&P for sticking to principle.
There are countless other indices that are not well known to request seasoning time of these mega companies.
Shifting to S&P 500 seems prudent at the point. Besides S&P does anyone know which indices will be safe from these IPOs?
SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718 - June 2026 (509 comments)
Previously: "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405718
*People who justify stealing from others by lazily giving a small pittance away according to a list some other guy showed them and they thought about for 5 minutes.
