On June 12th, SpaceX debuted on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It raised $75 billion and first-day trading pushed the company's valuation above $2 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history. Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire before markets closed.  The overlooked reality: you're likely invested in it already (like it or not), or you soon will be.

How index funds work and why this IPO is different

Most people saving for retirement own index funds. An index fund's job is to mirror the market, not make judgment calls about individual companies. When a company grows large enough to enter a major benchmark like the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq-100, every fund tracking that index is required to buy it. Automatically.

At the turn of the century, passively managed assets (index funds) represented a percentage of total assets in the low teens. That share has grown to about 54% in 2025, reaching $19.1 trillion in invested assets according to Morningstar. For EVERY new dollar invested today, more than HALF goes into an index fund. Ten years ago, passive funds held roughly $3.2 trillion. That number has grown sixfold. The firms managing those assets are names you already know: Vanguard holds approximately $11 trillion in assets under management, and its flagship S&P 500 ETF saw an industry-record $143 billion in net inflows in 2025 alone. BlackRock manages more than $14 trillion in assets, with iShares ETFs alone accounting for about $5 trillion of the $19 trillion ETF market.  Those are just two.

These are the funds sitting inside your 401(k), your target-date retirement account, your pension. And they are the funds that will be required to buy SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic as each company qualifies for index inclusion. It's the same mechanism that quietly made everyday retirement savers indirect owners of Nvidia, Tesla, and Apple as those companies grew. The question is not whether this wave is coming. It's how soon.

Will SpaceX automatically land in your retirement account?

Here's where the story could be a bit more nuanced than headlines suggest. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on June 4th that it would not be relaxing its eligibility requirements for the S&P 500. To be included, a company must be profitable under GAAP accounting in its most recent quarter and cumulatively across the trailing four quarters. SpaceX currently fails that test. With existing rules unchanged, SpaceX's earliest possible S&P 500 eligibility is mid-2027, and that timeline assumes the company actually returns to profitability in the interim, which is not guaranteed.

The picture is different for other indexes, though. Nasdaq's revised methodology now allows any newly listed company ranked in the top 40 by market cap to enter the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days, with the minimum float requirement eliminated entirely. FTSE Russell has also relaxed its thresholds, meaning SpaceX could enter the Russell 1000 as early as September 2026. CRSP-tracked funds, including Vanguard's Total Market fund and other funds, could add SpaceX even earlier.

The timeline is not as immediate as many headlines suggest, but that depends on which funds you hold (and you may already have SpaceX in your portfolio). Tesla, for comparison, traded publicly for more than ten years before finally meeting the S&P 500's profitability requirement for inclusion in 2020.

What's inside the company

SpaceX brought in $18 billion in revenue in 2025, growing roughly 33% year over year. But it posted a net loss of $4.9 billion, a sharp reversal from a profit of $791 million in 2024.

Why the swing? SpaceX acquired xAI, Elon Musk's AI startup, in February 2026. The AI segment recorded a $6.35 billion operating loss in 2025, and Starlink, the satellite internet business, is effectively subsidizing those AI expenditures. SpaceX also carries approximately $17 billion in combined cash burn and up to $119 billion in planned capital expenditure ahead.

Does a net loss disqualify a company as a long-term investment?

No. Amazon ran losses for YEARS while building infrastructure that eventually made it one of the world's most profitable companies. Many transformational technology companies looked deeply alarming on paper.  But there's a meaningful difference between choosing to hold that risk and having it quietly added to your retirement portfolio by default.

A word about Elon Musk's track record

SpaceX's achievements in rocketry are genuinely extraordinary. But Musk oversees multiple major companies simultaneously, and his documented history across them is worth understanding before his ventures land in your retirement account.

Reuters noted that Musk has a long history of making ambitious promises and often under delivering or delivering late, something he has acknowledged himself, describing himself as "pathologically optimistic." His most prominent example is Tesla's Full Self-Driving software, which he first promised in 2015. In 2023, he publicly called himself "the boy who cried FSD," an admission of years of missed targets.

The Twitter acquisition tells a sharper story. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022. Within months, advertisers fled, revenue dropped by roughly half, and Musk himself estimated the platform had fallen to around $20 billion in value. Two years of erratic leadership followed, including a departing user base, an advertiser exodus, lawsuits over unpaid bills, and regulatory scrutiny across multiple countries. That same company, now called X, has been folded into SpaceX's financials alongside xAI, meaning its underperformance is now part of that package.

Meanwhile, Musk retains 85% of the voting power in SpaceX through special Class B shares, meaning public shareholders have very limited ability to influence the company's direction even as they bear financial risk.

SpaceX is just the beginning. OpenAI and Anthropic are next.

SpaceX may be the headline today, but it is not the whole 2026 story. Anthropic is targeting a public listing as soon as October 2026, aiming to raise $30 billion at a valuation of approximately $900 billion. OpenAI will likely follow in Q4 2026, though its CFO has cautioned the company may not yet be ready for public markets.

Together, the three IPOs could demand north of $200 billion from public markets, shifting liquidity risk onto everyday investors. For context, the entire US IPO market raised just $45 billion in all of 2025. This is an unprecedented concentration of mega-cap debuts in a single year, and each one follows the same playbook: enormous valuations, minimal public floats, massive exit opportunities for early private investors, and the same index inclusion questions now surrounding SpaceX.

S&P 500 inclusion for SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic requires at minimum 12 months of public trading and four quarters of positive GAAP earnings. None of these companies currently meets that bar. But for funds tracking other indexes, exposure could arrive sooner than most people realize. With $19 trillion+ now sitting in passive funds, the eventual forced buying across all three companies will be substantial, shifting risk onto retirement accounts and 401ks.

Index inclusion is not guaranteed, but the prospects appear favorable.

There are real gates still to clear, and those rules exist for good reason. But the sheer massive scale of what is entering public markets this year, three potential trillion-dollar listings inside a single calendar year, means this is a moment that deserves attention.

The debate isn't whether to own SpaceX. The reality is that you probably already do (or will soon).

Ready to take a closer look at what is inside your retirement accounts? Let's connect.

This content is developed from sources believed to be providing accurate information. It may not be used for the purpose of avoiding any federal tax penalties. Please consult legal or tax professionals for specific information regarding your individual situation. The opinions expressed and material provided are for general information, and should not be considered a solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security.