If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong.

In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong.

There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their astounding growth and margins. For a long-term investor, Anthropic is looking a lot more like Google not AOL.

I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation.

Vibes are almost always wrong. Ignore the vibes and focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins.

I don't think it's really doom and gloom, that's mostly on here.

The normies are all still excited/scared and the valuation based on secondary trading is going up and up.

Maybe not quite as crazy as the dot com boom but I'd say the current environment for AI and related equities is a lot closer to the mid/late 90s than 2004

Normies are on fire for SpaceX, where the economics are horrible and the hype is off the charts.

Normies have never heard of Anthropic, where the economics are incredible and doom vibes are pervasive.

I think both have a similar amount of people who know about it. But it might just be my circle which is mostly in finance and some in engineering/medicine. These are also the type of people who actually invest. There's little doom vibes among those who're older if anything they're the one who think we'll get to some agi type situation.

I don't buy Anthropics narrative around their "incredible" economics, actually, I feel a lot of wework vibes from them.

> astounding ... margins

Citation needed for that one.

"until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation"

I doubt you will. Most likely IPO reference price will be like SpaceX's, 100x ARR or so.

You're better off buying Google who own a huge chunk of Anthropic at a much saner average.

If it's 100x ARR then I'll watch from the sidelines.

But if it's 40x in October, and inference margin is strong, and revenue is still growing 20% per month, then I'm in.

For reference, here's an NYU prof's website which shows typical ARR valuation multipliers by industry (see Price/Sales ratio column):

https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...

100x is staggering. These companies are priced as though we are already chewing through the solar system to create AI computronium. I'll pass--I expect I'll get a UBI when that scenario happens anyway.

Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004.

I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market.

Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took you directly to the first result. Which I used.

Curious, why do you say that as if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't still on the homepage in 2026?

I couldn't even tell you when I used the Google search page. It's been years at least. I wouldn't be surprised if many other people also don't go there to search. I assume most search straight in the url bar.

Home pages are still a thing are are often set to google

Because it is useless now.

Because it’s not there on mobile

> Alta-Vista were still loading

Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end.

The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.

This is inaccurate. When I was running AV operations around 2000, we were running on a couple dozen huge Alpha machines for the index layer and queries. We had a bunch of smaller machines for Web serving, and a high memory set of Alphas as a caching layer.

See https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... for the 1997 server count, which was before we got to the three tier architecture.

We also spidered constantly. A couple of those huge backend Alphas were dedicated to holding the constant spider index. AV had a well earned reputation for quick discovery, although I think Google wound up faster. We suffered a bit from maintaining separate indexes for the main corpus and recent pages, and I imagine Google handled that better.

But the period of time when our main index went to hell was the period of time when we failed to do a new main index crawl for several months. I won’t get into why that happened politically because my memory isn’t perfect and I don’t want to criticize anyone who won’t see this to stand up for themselves, but it’s absolutely the case that we let the index get stale.

And I will say that I think the execs were distracted by the idea of challenging Yahoo by buying a shopping site and a local news site of sorts and, unlike the Google of the time, they lacked the wisdom to focus on our primary product.

And now I fade back into the hedges, until the next time AV comes up… I suspect a high percentage of my HN comments are on this exact topic. It makes me sad.

FWIW, I preferred AltaVista over Google back in the day.

I stand corrected. Thanks for all your work.

And I still miss the AltaVista illustrated diagram (Java Applet) that would allow you to drill down and specialize the search results. No modern search has ever matched that, again.

That feature sounds amazing! I tried searching wayback etc but wasn't able to find any more details. Do you happen to know of any screenshots / deeper descriptions for it?

Perhaps we could nerd snipe Marginalia Search to add it :)

I remember it being a Java applet with animations, but my memory could be terribly faulty at this point.

Following your comments and trying to trail things out, the only thing I can find is a reference to AltaVista LiveTopics.

https://dannysullivan.com/why-search-sucks-you-wont-fix-it-t...

I suspect what I used was that "GRAPH" button in the AltaVista Refine picture.

We might want to archive that image. It seems like the only evidence that this stuff ever existed.

Thanks, AltaVista LiveTopics is a good keyword. I found:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Alta-Vista-LiveTopic-Gra...

which has some different coverage.

I did try to archive the blog you linked but unfortunately the owner is blocking it with robots.txt

User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /

That hyperbolic tree looks very close to what my faulty memory recalls.

I suspect it was a later incarnation that I used.

It was a fun place to be. Sorry if I came across as curt — rereading that I was a bit more blunt than I intended. Sick cat has been stressing me.

No offense was taken. It's always good to hear from the people who actually did stuff to set the record straight.

> It was a fun place to be.

It was. I was in the hardware side during the Hostile Giveaway(tm) to Intel and Compaq.

Good luck with your cat.

From the oral history interviews, it seem one of the tricks was keeping the core algorithm in cache completely.

I was not a software engineer but yeah, I think so. Every now and then we’d have to go get Mike Burrows to do some consulting work to rewrite a bit more of the code in assembly.

Thanks for replying, now I remember why I used to spend all day on this site :-) A lot of the political changes and my exposure to some of the VC people outside of public view have soured tech for me. That and the current cult-like behaviour and clear fraud from the crypto and now AI waves... anyhow, I digress.

We were big AV users initially, I think for 2 years? This was 94-97 so my memory of the time periods is fuzzy. When Google came along I have very vivid memory of it providing not only better search results but also faster loads times.

I wonder if Google was already geo-distributed at the time? Latency was real then, it wasn't uncommon to hit 350ms (compared to 20-50ms to Europe) and the difference would have been felt back then. It was a killer for Counter Strike.

Webcrawler was faster than both!

No it wasn't. Google had a tiny front page back then, Alta-Vista was visibly slower. Very similar to Excite. All of the others were terrible.

Yea, that's easy to say now.

I was a relatively early investor (2008), but I was very hesitant early on because Microsoft was building an integrated search function, which became Windows Live Search, which became Bing. I definitely remember it took me to the beginning of the financial crisis to finally decide that it was going nowhere. I suspect it was the development of Google Maps that changed my mind.

"Google" of today is really AdSense ($102M, 2003) -> Android ($50M+?, 2005) -> YouTube ($1.6B, 2006) -> Google Docs ($50M+?, 2006)

Without those prescient and lucky acquisitions, we'd be talking about a "Google" that looked much more like Yahoo.

It wasn't search proficiency that built the empire, it was leveraging a transient search quality advantage into cash flow, then plowing that cash into acquisitions to construct a durable moat.

I remember late 90's, early 2000's Google. Search result quality was still better than the competition (mainly Altavista...)

But that only would have lasted until the next search innovation and/or competitors copied Google's indexing.

There were many search engines around during that time. Yahoo, Excite, Microsoft Live Search, Lycos... I don't recall any of them improving enough to rival early 2000's Google.

None of those scaled as quickly as Google in terms of revenue (read: AdSense), and Microsoft lost interest.

AdSense wasn't a thing until 2003. Google didn't have much revenue before that. However, they still surpassed their competition in quality of search results long before...

Yes. My point is that Google had a temporary search quality advantage… then AdSense-fueled revenue allowed them to convert that to a durable moat by outspending their competitors.

That didn't happen because they were magically amazing at search forever.

It happened because Google had a good business plan and could afford to throw gobs of money at engineers and infrastructure, in quantities that even Microsoft was unwilling to match.

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

Erm 2008 isn't early, I had been using it for almost a decade by then. They had won by 2001. No-one who knew Microsoft thought that they had a chance with Bing. This was post-Gates and Microsoft were already a laughing stock in 2008 with respect to the web.

When did Google pivot to advertising?

Before the IPO; AdSense came out in 2003. Before that they really make much money.

Simple text ads to start. It was built on MySQL, Java and C++ and became how they made most of their money.

So you're raising the topic of vibes, to tell us to ignore them.

Most of the time, they're wrong half the time.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Drawing these comparisons to the Dotcom bubble is only of limited utility. I think there's good reason to believe that recursive self-improvement is a bust, and LLM models will become a commodity. The real value lies in multi-modal integration and good harnesses. The current frontier labs are theoretically in a good position to capitalize on this, but it is far from obvious that they will succeed. I think Google and some of the chinese giants are in a far better position to actually go the last mile.

They've changed the rules that will force these companies into every ETF commonly held by people's 401ks. The doomer narrative doesnt matter, they're forcing the common man to be the exit liquidty for the elite before the bubble pops.

>I can only hope the doomer narrative dominates until I can get a few shares at a reasonable valuation.

I conjecture that some amount of the "doomer posting" is a consequence of other people realizing what you realized here and attempting to sway public sentiment for personal gain.

I doomer post because I see three basic possibilities:

* It's a bubble, it crashes (no moat etc.)

* It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's not nice, it squishes us all like bugs

* It's not a bubble, we get superintelligence, it's nice, we all get UBI

From the perspective of your personal financial security, the range of scenarios where you want to invest in Anthropic seems rather narrow. And I don't like to fund the creation of something which might squish me like a bug.

Ah yes, time tested and battle hardened inference margins.

Anthropic is selling a commodity item that was just invented. It’s like investing in someone who is blowing lightbulb glass by hand.

We’ve already seen a startup make a chip which generates a hundred pages of text in milliseconds. When companies start bringing out hardware like that for cutting edge models, the entire business is dead. AWS will just eat the market.

Anthropic is a software company.

> focus on revenue growth rates and inference margins

And ignore debt you can't pay back? Fine during ZIRP era because there was always another $50M around the corner. There is no extra $50B around the corner.

They've all over-invested in AI, same as the railroads, and it will collapse the same way.

I don't see how they can keep their margins with all the pressure from Chinise models. It got to be race to the bottom on margins.

They (together with OpenAI and maybe Google) can have better margins on frontier models, but the demand on those got to be much lower

Exactly. Many people will choose the cheapest possible model that's smart enough for their use case. "Frontier" is a transient property; open models tend to catch up in 6 months or so.

I am really surprised that people are comparing dot com with AI. Atleast dot-com era was deterministic, comparatively AI is just a probabalistic unreliable slop

  The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

- Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, in 1998, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/10/26/internet-fax/

(Why do people try to criticise AI as "probabalistic" like this matters? Unreliable I get, but early Wikipedia and Geocities were as deterministically unreliable as the amateur and fiction sections respectively of a bookstore)

An economist exytrpolating tech trends is already a hard sell. And deterministic unreliability is atleast deterministic meaning you can choose to ignore, this is still better than probabilistic AI hubris

You've covered both bases here.

The issue is that the way the rules have been changed, risky stocks have been added to a product that is meant to be stable.

A 401k, any retirement focused product, is not serving its purpose when it tags on risk.

Having people in the later part of their lives find they are broke, becuse despite them doing everything right, a loophole was created to extract their savings.

This is simply not right.

Revenue growth might be great, inference margins might be great. Where's the moat?

I'm not against a fundamentals-based argument. The revenue growth is wild and their margins are reported to be great. But the existential concern remains: what happens if models start plateauing?

I could be wrong, but the margins are so good because there isn't a "substitute" for the frontier models. The performance difference between the latest Opus and a more open model provider is large enough to justify the extra cost. If that difference shrinks, I think the cost people are willing to pay will go way down.

I would argue models have been plateauing for quite some time now.

you cant have it both ways, the public can either have exposure and capture the upside or not.

there are ways for you to manage your risk if it in public markets, theres nothing you can do if its in private.

I thought you could intelligently allocate 401k. I don’t think mine was etfs of nasdaq or s&p for some time now. Ever since Tesla got in

Most (all?) 401k plans limit you to a pre-picked list of ETFs and mutual funds you can invest in. Not to mention the standard advice for decades has been 'broad market index fund'.

Afaik this is the first time that an IPO is big that it immediately gets a significant share of a broad market index fund. The rules among the providers are actually quite diverse, so it's complicated. The Rational Reminder podcast discussed it in April: https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/406

Their conclusion: It might be bad, but so be it. No need to change strategy.

if you want to personally manage your risk you can by taking a small short position or buying long dated puts.

It being in the public markets is something you can deal with if you want.

It being in private markets means you cannot choose to participate in the upside if you want.

The episode was excellent

Definitely not all. Look into 401(k) self-directed brokerage accounts.

If your plan uses Fidelity you can move your 401k into Brokeragelink and that lets you pick individual stocks. Schwab, TIAA, Alight and some others also have something similar.

Good thing is that index funds don't hold stocks at market capitalization but only at free float value. So a company whose shares are mostly held by founders, employees, and strategic investors gets a weight well below its headline valuation.

Most don’t. The one that is the center of much of the controversy around these IPOs, NASDAQ-100, doesn’t use float adjustments.

A lot of people have been using it to passively invest in AI (via QQQ).

It’s nonsensical for a variety of reasons but we live an era of the stock market just being another casino…

I believe it's the opposite :) All major indices (S&P500, MSCI, FTSE...) use free-float adjustments. And recently also NASDAQ - they've changed to cap of 3x the value of free-floating shares.

You are correct. That’s what I intended to say but I see that worded that comment unclearly.

95% of people do not bother and just park everything in S&P 50/100

With BrokerageLink you can invest in anything

> corporate investors

What? No. VCs, pensions, etc aren’t corporate investors in any common terminology.

Amazon was founded in 1994

And who would have thought it was the online bookstore that would be the big survivor of the dotcom era? They were a comparatively small player relative to AOL/Yahoo/etc at the time of the dotcom bust. Which company is the 1994 Amazon of AI now?

Cohere is the forgotten AI company founded by the Attention is all you need team....

Apple.

As I recall, Amazon also famously didn't turn a profit for ages - but they were also capable of turning one much earlier than they did.

Are AI companies capable of turning a profit today if they turn some knobs?

The narrative is that inference on existing models is profitable. All of the profits and many billions of additional capital invested go into training the next model, which is some multiple more expensive to train than the last. Each new model generation also leads to more revenue growth, mainly due to higher capabilities. Newer models are more compute-efficient when distilled (so could possibly be higher margin) but also they work on longer time-horizon tasks and can make greater use of test-time compute which increases token counts. So the inference ROI on each model can pay back the cost of training it, but future growth demands put all that money and more into training the next model. The numbers we’d need to prove whether this is true are not public, but it makes sense and fits what info we do have.

Theoretically, if training more expensive models stops resulting in better capabilities or isn’t economically viable, the labs can shift gears into making profit on old models. A lot of future growth is priced in so this would lead to a collapse in share price if it happens anytime soon.

There’s a story out that Anthropic might be profitable this quarter. This is in one sense bad news - it means that the company wasn’t aggressive enough about acquiring capacity last year, because they didn’t foresee how fast their inference business would grow. Anthropic is now forced to make suboptimal choices about serving existing users vs. training the next model (need to scrounge for capacity by paying other players like SpaceX). And as a Claude Code user I feel like I’ve been affected by that, what with the random outages and performance degradations.

Wait till people find out you can have the same or close to the same output at 1/100th of a price.

You cant possibly believe we'll be just spending more and more in tokens endlessly.

And if the margins are so good for anthropic they will collapse. There's too much competition in the field.

I don’t believe similar scores on small bounded tasks mean models are interchangeable. I’ve found that heavy token-burning workflows are good for my productivity (letting multiple sessions run async working of different stuff). Claude ultracode is an easy example to point to, but there are tons of harnesses out there doing similar things. I find using a higher quality model matters because it affects how far it can get unattended before heading the wrong direction. I’ve tried using the cheaper/faster models and it’s a real downgrade (or completely useless). A model that’s even smarter with longer time horizon would be even better for my productivity. I don’t think we are at the ceiling for model quality or price. My employer pays a lot for my tokens but it’s still a lot less than they pay me.

I agree Anthropic faces some risk they could get commoditized, but on the other hand if things go well they could end up leading adoption into more industries. There are upside and downside scenarios. Recursive self-improvement is obviously an important unknown and could lead to winner-take-all.

You can use Claude Code with DS4, I'm doing it as my daily driver.

There's the "how much of my company exists in a black box controlled by some asshole" angle as well, but in my mind the biggest issue is that current models are already capable of saturating a dev in like four hours.

Yes - IIRC, Amazon was profitable on books by 1996, with other sectors following as they expanded and it was clear that they could post profits any time they wanted by slowing expansion. It was surreal through the bubble years to see “analysts” equating them with companies which were losing money on every sale with no clear way to change that.

Exactly right. Even though ride sharing industry lost money in subsidy arms race and side bets it was likewise fundamentally sound in major metros since very early on. Popular "analyses" kept equating Uber/Lyft with firms losing money on every sale with no path to fix it but the demand was always there as riders had already left taxis and transit on reliability and convenience grounds.

There is a big difference between "Every customer is a loss" and "We are profitable and re-investing all of our money". Amazon continued to grow, and reinvested its revenue with solid business fundamentals.

Reminds me of this... During Apple's 1980 Initial Public Offering (IPO), Massachusetts regulators banned residents from purchasing the stock. The state's securities regulators deemed the offering "too risky" and "over-valued," enforcing a state rule that prohibited IPOs with a price exceeding 25 times earnings.

And it was probably prudent to wait. The investors who wanted to take more risk could do that.

Retroactive reasoning with investments (if I just bought X) is insane.

Indeed.

They IPO'd in 1980, yet their stock price was below the IPO price for the majority of 1980-1987.

It also fell to its IPO price for an extended period of time between 1996-1998.

You hypothetically could have waited 20 years after the IPO before investing without giving up theoretical gains.

> The investors who wanted to take more risk could do that.

What? How? By moving out of Massachusetts? I could understand banning such a speculative stock for e.g. pension funds or whatever, but blocking private individuals from buying with their own money seems insane.

You’re right. I read this as banned the state from buying it (pensions etc). I agree that’s absurd if you were not allowed to buy through a broker.

Well Apple followed being a disaster for two decades.

Well we are far more corrupt and in the last stages of late stage capitalism. 15 day waiting period for Nasdaq 100. Your 401k is now the exit liquidty for the country's 5k richest people.

I really dont see how America doesnt collapse on the weight of its own corruption. But maybe the was the plan all along....

Maybe don't buy QQQ in your 401k then if you're concerned about nasdaq100 inclusion

Tell that to everyones 50 year old mother who doesnt even know how to login to their account, let alone modify their allocations.

50 isn’t old? I would expect a 50 year old mother to be competent.

Oh yeah, we should just get rid of all securities regulation too. Everyone should be competent on their own to avoid being duped by guys with billions of dollars. Its the elementary school teachers fault if they get scammed by a billionaire.

It's like the very first golden rule, do not expect competency from another human being.

I learned computers and investing from my mother. She’s pretty competent approaching 80.

I mean, idk what's in your 401k fund choices, but in all mine I'd have to take serious manual effort to get in to QQQ or equivalent

The stock market (and in particular the US stock market) has been an incredibly positive influence on the average American's 401k... Great driver of allowing Americans and beyond to share in the upside of successful companies... big reason why Americans can retire.

Of course, it doesn't always go up...

I think you have an oddly negative bias.

I think you have too much trust in a class of Elites that see us as pigs to be taken to the slaughter. The lindy effect isnt real, just because it has been positive doesn't mean it will continue to be that way

The levels of greed in our society our unmatched. Planes, mansions and yachts for a few thousand people while 10s of millions struggle to buy basic medicine for their children.

Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the blood of the people.

> last stages of late stage capitalism

how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade.

Empires usually go through a long period of decline before they collapse. I'm not sure why you'd think this Empire is immune to collapse or decline.

You're going to lose everything and your children will have no future. When they're old they'll be speaking from a similar perspective to the people who lived through the decline and fall of the USSR. Keep coping though.

This is not a useful response to "how long does this last? I've been hearing it for a decade."

The phrase "late capitalism" itself has been used for just over a century now[0]; while I believe the USA is destroying what made the nation successful and will therefore probably[1] go into decline before 2035, there's no particular reason to tie the weird aspects of the economic system to the USA's political nonsense.

Also, the USSR would be the opposite example of your first sentence, as the collapse was a big surprise to everyone (both inside and outside the bloc) even a few years before it happened.

The Roman Empire would be the example for long-term decline, as that took one or more centuries depending on where you count the zenith (180 CE to 376 CE as the start, the Western Roman Empire was definitely dead by 476 CE).

But you seem to want to present it as a "in our lifetime" kind of thing; for that, I would suggest the British Empire, which peaked just before WW1, yet was obviously a broken power by the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956 just 42 years later though full decolonisation took longer (and if you ask Sinn Féin, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP, isn't really finished).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

[1] There's a very narrow path where enough anti-corruption votes combine for a government which does something that, ironically, Trump promised in his first term: "drain the swamp". It can't just be "Dems win", it has to be broad consensus that not only takes this seriously but also is seen by the world to do so.

Just to put some numbers on it, under current rules and valuations, if all 3 of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic were to go public with their current valuations and be part of the nasdaq 100, and you were 100% allocated to that, you’d have ~8% portfolio exposure to them. I suspect if you are the type of person who is 100% allocated to QQQ I’d guess you’d want _more_ exposure to those symbols than that.

For someone holding VTI its closer to 3% and a 2050 fund its more like 1.5%. Indexing is how most people are investing in their retirement accounts because controversies like these just don’t matter much. Hedging this off is going to cost more than its worth.

Apple was a pretty crappy stock till the late 90s so you would have had to wait almost 2 decades to make decent money

imho Anthropic publicly posting accurate information about their revenue and operations would be a step in a healthy direction for the economy/markets if there's an "AI bust blast" coming. This filing is movement towards that

The filing isn’t the problem. The indices dumping into them is.

Agreed. Ben Felix has a video about this, I think he focused on SpaceX in it. The problem with the standard total market funds is they gobble it up right away. There are funds that do wait some period of time to purchase new ipos to let them smooth out, but I'm not sure those are typically available in 401k plans.

Hedge funds already know broad based mutuals will have to purchase these so can sneak in before them and then sell to them for a marginal gain. Mayhaps the newest strategy for exiting is generating so much hype that you're guaranteed an exit by retail retirement funds?

AI seem hard to go bust from the potential, but there is a point where it always can if numbers grow just right.

If your 401k is in QQQ then I'm not sure you're going for a low risk portfolio

Yeah. Sure. But, If you are charging for intelligence, I want in.

So big banks and Wall Street are about to get another bailout paid by taxpayers? Great.

Look at the P/E ratio Amazon has had for years and come back with a better argument.

[edit:typo]

Amazon has assets in the form of warehouses though. What assets do these AI companies have other than rapidly depreciating GPUs.

It's the indices we need to be concerned about and it's especially the bloated carcass of xAI hanging onto SpaceX.

SpaceX was a profitable company, it was heavily invested into R&D and had managed to build a tidily profitable connectivity business in Starlink. Now the company is being burdened with all the worthless debt of X and xAI with a likely merger with Tesla following launch just to hand Musk a big check when he hits the valuation targets.

IPO inclusion on indices should be illegal, the price discovery simply hasn't happened yet and it's a direct grab at the most vulnerable retail investors - the passive index huggers that were told that if they just buy an index it'll never be spectacular and it might dip but it'll steadily go up.

I would not be surprised if the US Government ends up bailing out retirees over this and cements the country's descent into debt. Pretty much everyone can see it coming, but we have to act as if Elon is valuing his companies in good faith and not just trying to rob a payday.

Let's get it in perspective though. The S&P500 market cap is currently $70T.

Assume that Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all IPO and get included in SPY with the new fast listing rules. They are likely to be worth $3-4T combined, which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it.

_Arugably_ that's a pretty fair allocation for retail investors to have to these "moonshot" style companies.

Also - if any one of these IPOs don't go well; I suspect the other(s) will have to postpone, further reducing exposure.

Who invests in an index fund for "moonshots"?

Everyone I know who invests in an index fund is doing so to mitigate the risks of things like "moonshots" which are typically much riskier investments.

Is it? I thought the idea was diversity of risk, not "mitigating risk". You clearly don't want 100% of your 401k in OpenAI or Anthropic. But you probably do want 1 or 2% of it in, to give you the long term growth potential?

Regardless SPY is actually a pretty "risky" index fund on some measures - it pays a (very) low dividend compared to many other intl/ETF funds and is weighted very heavily towards tech stocks (atm).

If you genuinely wanted to mitigate risk you would probably not choose SPY.

> Is it?

Given that they've had to change the rules of index funds to allow for this, yes, this is not what people expect.

But the US has never had $1T+ IPOs before. And also a huge amount of enormous private companies that don't want to go public for various reasons.

Also, the rules have changed before. It's not the first time these rules have changed.

I see both sides of the argument (it's definitely _not_ good for 401k investors if Anthropic/OpenAI/SpaceX make huge leaps in technology that allow for far higher earnings that they aren't able to access, for example).

But my main point is that these investors regardless would "only" have 5% exposure to these. That surely cannot be considered a systemic risk that the OP is inferring.

That's justifying this because we've had rampant runaway inflation...

There's nothing special about the number $1T.

> Who invests in an index fund for "moonshots"?

> Everyone I know who invests in an index fund is doing so to mitigate the risks of things like "moonshots" which are typically much riskier investments.

The whole point of an index fund is to capture the growth of the whole market. If you wanted low risk you'd be buying bonds.

> which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it

If I'm not reading it wrong though NASDAQ introduced a 3x multiplier for low-float stocks like SpaceX is most likely going to be (and maybe OpenAI and Anthropic too if they see that it works). A 15% exposure is then going to be pretty big.

Don't think so - the 3x is a separate cap. It actually reduces it down from market cap.

Eg say spaceX has $50bn of float at $1.5T valuation. If there wasn't _any_ cap at all, the full $1.5T would be used as the market cap. With the (new) 3x cap, it means only $150bn of the $1.5T valuation is taken into account in the index weighting.

Before this change, SpaceX wouldn't clear the 10% requirement to be listed in QQQ at all. So the 3x basically allows them to be included but _does not_ increase their market cap from $1.5T to $4.5T.

Btw, for clarity, I'm not saying there isn't questionable behaviour going on here. My main point is that even if SpaceX, openai and anthropic all went to 0 (unlikely IMO), it's not going to have a material impact on people's retirements which is what OP was proposing.

The index don’t use the full market cap, they use free float. Except for nasdaq and the Dow which just pick numbers out of the air.

At least at first the spacex free float will be quite modest.

> 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it.

If they are the only moonshot style companies in their portfolio, and if they crater that's the physical equivalent of a 160lb person carrying a gallon of milk around with them wherever they go. At least until they've drunk it I guess.

Lots of "ifs" in that sentence now I read it back though.

OTOH it’s pretty bad if the the general public can’t participate in the upside of AI and it’s only concentrated in a few private investors.

> I'm bullish on AI

I started as being very skeptical circa 2024, became more open minded towards the end of 2025, and am becoming skeptical again now. Reason being, I interact with entrepreneurs now and I see what they hope for in AI. The universal desire seems to be "people will just talk to AI instead of me while paying me the same as before or more". This is typically covered with coping mechanisms (e.g. "I am not building a chat bot, I am building..." after which they describe a chat bot).

I think the crash is getting more likely because the disconnect between what the technology can be used for does not match what people want it to do.

I don’t think your first sentence is true. The hyperscalers have spent north of 1 trillion in the capex boom as a direct response to AI demand, If you’re a retail investor, you’re already quite exposed.

Myself, I am preparing to bet on the short of my lifetime.