They Change the Rules and Pick Your Pocket

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In mid-June, SpaceX goes public — in just over two weeks. Around 1.75 trillion dollars in valuation, the largest IPO in history. If the price holds, Elon Musk could become the world's first trillionaire.

Sounds like a success story. It's more like a manual for quietly picking the pockets of millions of ordinary savers.

In the End, You're Left Holding It

An investor put it bluntly in the Financial Times: this IPO feels engineered so that the small players are the ones left sitting on worthless shares.

In a normal IPO, 90 percent of the shares go to institutional investors, 10 to ordinary people. SpaceX flips that: 30 percent for "Main Street."

Sounds generous. It isn't. When an IPO suddenly hands that much to retail investors, it usually means just one thing: the professionals didn't want to buy at that price.

And the price is absurd. SpaceX brings in around 19 billion dollars in revenue a year, almost all of it from Starlink and government contracts. Yet the company is valued at roughly 90 to 100 times its revenue — more expensive, measured by sales, than practically any stock in the S&P 500. One FT editor calls the valuation simply "batshit."

The Real Scandal Is the Index

Here comes the part that really annoys me. Because the lever is the one financial product that has ever served ordinary people: the index fund.

An index is just a list. A fund mirrors it. When a company is added to the index, every fund that tracks it has to buy the shares — not because it's a good investment, but because the list demands it.

Until now there was a safeguard: "seasoning." A new company had to trade publicly for months, sometimes up to a year, before it could enter the Nasdaq-100. Time for the market to find the real price.

In spring 2026, Nasdaq scrapped that rule. Since May 1, "Fast Entry" applies: a huge company now gets in within 15 trading days. No seasoning. Wall Street loved it.

Translated: your retirement plan buys SpaceX whether you want it or not. They're wrecking the index.

That's why my conclusion is simple: you have to look for indexes and ETFs that don't take such stocks in the first place. Not every "broad market" is still clean once the rules get rewritten mid-game.

"Enshittification" — the Word Is Too Cheap for Me

In the Financial Times this gets called the "enshittification of markets," borrowed from the platforms. First they're good for users, then for business customers, and in the end they squeeze everyone.

Something in me resists the word itself. "En-" sounds like a negation, like "no longer valid." The opposite is meant — something is being turned to shit. A clumsy word for a serious thing.

And it doesn't fit everywhere. Facebook? Sure, that's garbage today. Google? Locks a lot of things down, but it's still often useful. Amazon? Honestly, I don't quite get that one. You shouldn't slap the buzzword onto everything — least of all so carelessly onto the financial world. That one isn't simple.

Musk

Maybe Musk had a few good ideas at the start. A real vision. By now most of it is just laughable — and oddly self-destructive.

SpaceX is just the biggest, most visible example of a pattern. It's not about one company. It's about the rules of the game.

And the AI Companies I Use Myself?

You have to be honest with yourself, too. With Anthropic and OpenAI I'm not sure — I use both every day.

Anthropic is supposed to post a profitable quarter soon — for the first time. One quarter, not a whole year. How believable that is, I don't know. Maybe that, too, is the next hype that will eventually pick someone's pocket.

Will Anything Change? No.

The FT piece calls for "new ground rules." If only.

I think that's naive. The rules are made by whoever needs them — Nasdaq writes them to suit itself, Wall Street applauds. Whoever has the money rules the world — nowhere more openly than in America right now.

What's left is a sober remainder: the index was for a long time the only way ordinary people could share in the wealth at all. And that's exactly what they're now wrecking.

So watch who's picking your pocket.

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