Is Wall Street Rigging the Game for SpaceX? Plus, What Investment Banking Really Teaches You

Nasdaq 100 has changed its rules so that a mega-cap stock can be added to the index just 51 trading days after its IPO, down from a three-month seasoning period. The S&P 500 considered shortening its own 12-month requirement and waiving its profitability rule, but ultimately declined to make any changes. The obvious target of these moves is SpaceX, which is expected to go public with a valuation around $1.8 trillion, with OpenAI and Anthropic likely to follow in 2026. Between them, these three companies represent a huge chunk of market capitalization that has been built entirely in private markets—and that is the source of the resentment.

The Chump Train and the Index Dilemma

Galloway acknowledges the anger. He describes the IPO market as "the last stop on the chump train," where retail investors get in after private institutional investors have already captured all the growth from zero to a trillion dollars. When Google went public at an $80 billion valuation, retail investors could still get a 500-fold return. That kind of upside is gone for SpaceX. At the same time, he pushes back against the idea that index inclusion is some kind of rigging. Indices are supposed to reflect the most important companies in the market, and by any measure, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic already are that. "If Anthropic was founded five years ago," he says, "it would be one of the five most