By the end of 2026, it’s likely that SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI will all have gone public, asking investors to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into the companies and assigning them valuations of upwards of $1 trillion or more apiece. Some people — for instance, the banks helping these firms IPO and the firms’ owners who will become even more cartoonishly rich as a result — think this is terrific news. Others not so much, opposition that likely has to do with fears about artificial intelligence destroying the environment, displacing workers, killing independent thought, and also literally killing people in war, to name just a few things. Given the ever-growing resistance to the technology, people with not-great feelings about AI — like, say, the Pope — might comfort themselves with the thought that, at the very least, they will never own shares of these companies, thereby taking a small stand against giving them even more money and power. But actually, a whole lot of people will, whether they want to or not.
As the New York Times notes, “If you own a broadly based U.S. stock index fund” — and the majority of U.S. retirement accounts do — “you are likely to own shares of these companies soon, regardless of your personal preferences. Many of the institutions that construct major stock market indexes have declared that they will include them within days of their first sales. That includes CRSP, FTSE Russell and MSCI,” with the S&P Dow Jones Indices expected to soon follow to keep up with its competitors.
If that bothers you, you probably will be equally unhappy to know that the rules are being changed specifically for the benefit of these companies; previously, in order to join the S&P 500, a company had to (1) trade publicly for at least a year and (2) show four straight quarters of profitability, guardrails that were put in place after the dot-com bubble burst. We don’t yet know how much money Anthropic, which filed with the SEC this week, has made and lost, nor do we have an inside look at OpenAI, which is expected to soon follow. But we do know Elon Musk’s SpaceX lost billions last year and $4.3 billion in the first three months of this year alone, losses the company attributed to spending on AI. While SpaceX has been primarily seen as a rockets-and-satellites company, with its acquisition of xAI last year, it is also very much in the business of artificial intelligence.
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