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In my opinion, SpaceX is the death knell passive investing. Not because it is a bad business, but because it could be an extraordinary business taken public at an absurd price (billions in losses, 100x sales!).
Space will IPO at a potential $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation, but with only 3% to 4% of shares floating publicly. That means a tiny supply of shares could meet massive demand from retail investors, institutions, and eventually passive funds.
If SpaceX is added quickly to major indices like the Nasdaq-100 or S&P 500, passive funds will not ask whether the valuation makes sense. Their mandate is to track the index. So ETFs, index funds, target-date funds, and retirement accounts would have to buy SpaceX simply because it is included.
This creates a feedback loop. The valuation is high, so the market cap is huge. The market cap is huge, so the index weight matters. The index weight matters, so passive funds buy. Passive funds buy, the price rises, and the valuation gets validated by mechanical demand rather than fundamentals. Basically, mechanical momentum dressed up as diversification.
In that scenario, ordinary retirement savers become exit liquidity for early private-market investors who owned SpaceX long before the public ever had access.
The challenge with passive funds has always been that they cannot distinguish between a great company and a great investment. They buy size, not value. Nonetheless, passive investing has worked well so far because major index providers did not bend their rules to gain favor with particular companies. Size was the product of merit, but not anymore.
The discrediting of passive investing post-SpaceX is a major boon to active managers, which have struggled for too long to justify their higher fees versus passive indexers. Active manager can avoid the forced buying, wait for a better entry point, or own better risk/reward opportunities elsewhere.
Potential beneficiaries could include active and alternative asset managers such as: T. Rowe Price, Franklin Resources, Janus Henderson, Schroders, Man Group, Ashmore, Ninety One, Impax Asset Management, Federated Hermes, Brookfield Asset Management, Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone, firms whose value proposition depends less on mechanically owning the index and more on judgment, access, allocation, and discretion.
I strongly believe this kind of discretion will be increasingly valued as the enshittification of passive investing takes hold.