SpaceX Stock Price Fraud

Every index fund sells the same promise: you will never have to pick a winner, because you will own all of them. The fine print is that you also own the losers. You just do not find out which ones until the statement arrives.

SpaceX went public June 12 at $135 a share. Four days later it peaked at $225.64. As of July 29 it trades at $112.55, down 50% from that peak and 17% below the price of its own IPO.^1,2 Six weeks. Half the money. Gone.

Some of the funds that rushed to add it are already underwater, and they did not stumble in. They were required to.

VanEck's Space ETF put SpaceX at the top of its portfolio the day the stock cleared the fast-track eligibility bar, June 22, at the fund's maximum 20% weight cap.³ Not a bet on the company. A bet on the rulebook, taken at the largest size the rulebook permits. SpaceX remains WARP's largest holding at roughly 21%.⁴ The fund has fallen from a 52-week high of $41.77 to $18.31, a 56% loss⁵, with its favorite holding doing most of the damage. The prospectus called that concentration a feature.

Then the machine took over. The Russell 1000 added SpaceX on June 26, forcing iShares' IWB and Vanguard's VONE, roughly $59 billion between them, to buy in regardless of price, and the mechanical buying across all Russell-tracking funds is estimated at $22 to $27 billion.⁶ Nobody at those firms analyzed a rocket company. An index committee moved a name onto a list, and twenty-odd billion dollars of other people's retirement money went out the door at whatever the market was asking that morning. That is not investing. That is a payroll deduction with a launch video attached.

The weight is small enough inside those diversified giants that no clean per-fund dollar loss has been published. Convenient, that.

The Private Shares Fund disclosed a 13.68% SpaceX position worth $151 million as of December 2025, months before the IPO.⁷ Whether it sold into the June peak or is still riding the slide down, the fund has not said. Sitting on a 13.68% position through a 50% drawdown is the kind of thing a manager mentions quickly when the answer is good. We will keep asking.

One index said no. S&P rejected the fast-track proposal, so SpaceX cannot enter the S&P 500 until at least mid-2027⁸, which means Vanguard's VOO and every fund shaped like it sat this one out entirely. Same passive religion, same disclaimers, one committee that declined to suspend its own waiting period for a hot ticket. The gap between those two outcomes is not luck. It is governance, and it is the only thing that protected anyone here.

You were told indexing meant never having to pick. What it actually meant was that somebody else picked, on a schedule, using rules written before anyone asked what the thing was worth. The rocket flew. The rulebook bought at the top. And the bill, as always, went to the guy who thought he was being careful. MUCK YOU, passive investing.