Let the People In

A video has been making the rounds, produced by a nonprofit newsroom called More Perfect Union, with a headline designed to make your blood boil. "Did Elon Musk Just Rig the Stock Market?" The argument is that Musk wants a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation for SpaceX, and to get there he had the rules changed so that index funds, holding the retirement savings of millions of Americans, are forced to buy in. Retirees take the losses. Insiders cash out. The system is rigged.

It is a compelling story. It is also, in my view, exactly backwards.

Two weeks ago I published a piece on this site arguing that the SpaceX offering is the most consequential IPO in modern history. I have not changed my mind. If anything, the very rule changes this video is attacking have strengthened my conviction, because they are the mechanism that finally lets ordinary working Americans own a piece of the most important company of their lifetimes. I want to walk through why the criticism is wrong, and why what is actually happening is something to celebrate, not fear.

What Actually Changed

Three of the most important index providers in the world have updated their inclusion rules in recent weeks. Nasdaq moved first. S&P Global Dow Jones Indices opened a consultation on similar changes. FTSE Russell followed. Here is what they did, in plain English.

A new IPO used to wait twelve months before it could enter the S&P 500. Now it can enter after six. For the very largest companies, Nasdaq cut the wait to fifteen days.

The old 10 percent public float minimum is being relaxed for megacap companies, with weightings scaled to reflect the shares actually available.

The strict twelve month GAAP profitability test is being eased for the largest companies, recognizing the reality of how modern category leaders are built.

The video frames this as a conspiracy. I see something far more ordinary and far more sensible. The rules were written for a different era, when the largest companies in America went public early, small, and profitable. That world is gone. The most valuable companies of our time now stay private for a decade or more, reaching enormous scale before they ever touch a public market. The indices are not being corrupted. They are being updated to reflect how value is actually created in 2026.

The rules were written for the companies of 1980. We are trying to index the companies of 2030 with them. Of course they need to change.

The Core Accusation, Answered Directly

Let me take the strongest version of the critique head on, because it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal.

The accusation is that index inclusion forces retirement funds to buy SpaceX, that this is involuntary, that ordinary people bear the risk while insiders take the reward, and that retirees could suffer huge losses. Each piece of that deserves a response.

"It is forced buying."

Yes. That is what an index fund is. The entire premise of index investing — the single most beneficial financial innovation for ordinary people in the last fifty years — is that the fund mechanically owns the market without trying to pick winners. When Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, or Tesla qualified for inclusion, index funds were "forced" to buy them too. Nobody called that a scandal. They called it participation. The mechanism that the video frames as sinister is the exact same mechanism that has quietly made tens of millions of average Americans wealthy by giving them automatic ownership of the best companies in the country. SpaceX is not the exception to that system. It is the system working as designed.

"Ordinary people take the risk, insiders take the reward."

This gets the history exactly upside down. For the last fifteen years, the reward from the greatest companies of our age went almost entirely to insiders, venture capitalists, and a small circle of accredited investors who were legally permitted to buy private shares while everyone else was locked out. By the time companies like these went public, the easy multiples had already been captured in private rounds. The genuine scandal of modern markets is not that ordinary people are now being let in. It is that they were kept out for so long. These rule changes begin to close that gap.

"Retirees could suffer huge losses."

Any equity can fall. That is true of every stock in every index. But the implied alternative — that working Americans would be better off with their retirement savings deliberately excluded from the single most consequential company of the century — is not protection. It is a guarantee that they miss the upside while the connected few capture it. A diversified index fund holding a fractional weighting of SpaceX is precisely how an ordinary person should get exposure to a company like this. Not by betting the farm, but by owning a sliver, automatically, as part of a broad portfolio. That is the safest possible way for a normal family to participate in a generational opportunity.

The lockup, and why it matters. Critics point to the thin initial float as a danger. I see the opposite. As the post-IPO lockup expires and more shares come to market, the float deepens, and the natural buyers of those shares are exactly the funds and indices that represent ordinary people. That is the flywheel working. Private wealth converting into broad public ownership. More shares available, more index demand, more everyday Americans on the cap table. This is the healthiest possible distribution of ownership in a company this important.

We Have Seen This Movie Three Times

The overvaluation panic at the center of this video is not new. It is one of the oldest songs on Wall Street, and the people singing it have been wrong at every turn that mattered.

Apple, 1980

Apple went public at 22 dollars a share, reaching a market cap of roughly 1.778 billion dollars on day one. The skeptics had real arguments. Apple's own prospectus warned of brutal competition from IBM, Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Wang, and Radio Shack, which had over 5,000 stores to Apple's 750 dealers. Within a few years the stock had fallen below its IPO price, Steve Jobs was out, and the press was writing the company off as beleaguered. A 1,000 dollar investment on that derided IPO day is worth roughly half a million dollars now.

Microsoft, 1986

Microsoft priced at 21 dollars, above its underwriters' range. Bill Gates himself thought a valuation above half a billion dollars was too high. The New York Times gave the offering a single sentence. A 1,000 dollar investment on IPO day is worth north of 1.6 million dollars today.

Google, 2004

Google had to slash its IPO price from a planned 108–135 dollar range down to 85. Analysts argued that Yahoo, at 39 billion dollars, deserved a higher valuation than Google at 27 billion, because Yahoo was "more diversified." Critics flagged the dual class voting structure as a governance red flag — the same complaint now aimed at SpaceX. Yahoo was eventually sold for parts. Alphabet is one of the most valuable companies on Earth.

The Pattern

In every case the bears were intelligent, credentialed, and confident. In every case they were measuring a quarterly earnings stream when they should have been pricing a platform that would define the next thirty years of human life. And in every case, the ordinary investor who was talked out of buying — or who was never given the chance — watched the connected few get rich instead.

The people who called Apple, Microsoft, and Google overvalued were not stupid. They were just looking at the wrong frame. The investors who listened to them paid for it for the rest of their lives.

Let me put a number on it, because the abstraction does not do it justice. Imagine an ordinary person — not an insider, not a venture capitalist — who simply put 100 dollars a year into Apple starting at its 1980 IPO, and another 100 dollars a year into Microsoft starting in 1986. One contribution each year, at whatever the price happened to be, through every crash and every panic and every "this is overvalued" headline. Never selling. That person would have contributed roughly 8,600 dollars in total out of pocket across four decades.

$8,600 in, roughly $6.4 million out. Those annual 100 dollar contributions into Apple are worth on the order of 4 million dollars today. The Microsoft contributions are worth around 2.4 million. Combined, about 8,600 dollars of patient money turned into roughly 6.4 million on price appreciation alone, and meaningfully more with dividends reinvested. That is not a trader. That is not a genius stock picker. That is a person who recognized two generational companies, bought a little every year, and refused to let the noise talk them out of it.

Now ask yourself the obvious question. If that same discipline were applied to the most consequential company of this century, starting at its IPO, what would the person who did it be telling their grandchildren in fifty years? And what would the person who got scared out of it by a viral video be telling theirs?

SpaceX is the next one. Not the fourth on a long list. The next true platform company, because nothing that has gone public in the four decades since Apple has come close to what this offering represents. SpaceX is not the next Apple. It is the Apple of its century, except the platform it owns is not the desktop or the phone or the search bar. It is the corridor between Earth and everywhere else we are going to go.

Why I Wrote This

I wrote this because the framing in that video, however well intentioned, leads ordinary people to exactly the wrong conclusion. It tells them that being included is being victimized. It tells them that the gates being opened are a trap. It tells them to be afraid of the one mechanism that finally puts them on equal footing with the insiders.

I want the opposite for them. I want retirement accounts invested in SpaceX, because it is a generational investment and their future depends on owning the companies that will define the future. I want the lockup to expire and the funds and the indices to buy in, because those funds are ordinary people. And I want every individual with a Robinhood account or an E-Trade login to buy in directly too, with however much they can afford. That is not the system being rigged against them. That is the system finally working for them.

For the first time in modern memory, a company of this magnitude is being made broadly available to the public early enough to matter, rather than after the private markets have already harvested the gains. We should be defending that, not attacking it.

The Bottom Line

The SpaceX IPO is the most consequential public offering in modern history. The index changes that the critics are calling a scandal are, in truth, the most democratizing development in retail investing in a generation. They take a company that, under the old rules, would have been reserved for insiders and accredited investors for years, and they put it into the retirement accounts, the pension funds, and the brokerage apps of ordinary working Americans.

That is not Elon Musk rigging the market. That is the market, at long last, being opened to the people who were locked out of Apple, Microsoft, and Google when it counted.

So here is what I would tell anyone who watched that video and got scared. Do not be. Buy the share. Buy it in your brokerage account, and own it through your index funds, and let your children and grandchildren inherit it. A century from now, when humans are living and working beyond this planet, somebody in your family is going to look back at 2026 and say one of two things. Either thank God they were finally let in. Or how on earth did they let the chance slip away again.

I know which side of that conversation I want every American family on.

Let the people in.

Maury Blackman is Managing Director of Pierpoint Ventures, Founder and Chairman of Insight Integrity, and CEO of Velosimo. This article is a follow up to "The Most Consequential IPO in Modern History," published May 11, 2026. The views expressed are his own. This article is commentary, not investment advice.