Comment by karmakurtisaani
11 hours ago
Destroy is a strong word. Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.
11 hours ago
Destroy is a strong word. Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.
> Rather, it will make the pension funds and passive investors the bag holders for the oligarchs.
Care to explain the mechanics? I’m an investor (both in passive and more active vehicles) and don’t understand what you mean.
Index funds buy companies, for the most part, according to their market capitalisation.
They own more of bigger companies than small.
There's the option of "equal weight" or other strategies but the overwhelming majority is market cap weighted.
Index funds are also really, really big now and contain a lot of money earmarked for retirement/pensions.
In theory if you had a temporarily very frothy market into which you could sell a part of your unprofitable company to some people at a very high valuation, index funds would then mechanically move in and need to purchase and add significant support for insiders to sell into.
In this case, Elon has moved the wildly unprofitable XAI into SpaceX. SpaceX will IPO with a trillion dollar valuation, while only releasing a small number of shares for public trading.
Due to the high valuation, index funds are required to buy SpaceX stock, which Elon will presumably slowly sell them in order not to crash the stock. The funds will be left holding the stock, while eventually the price will crash, because the company will simply not make enough money to justify the valuation.
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Ok, but how does this "hold the bag for the oligarchs"? And which specific oligarchs do you have in mind when you say this? Are you thinking of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and Elon Musk?
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