While market bulls eagerly await their opportunity to purchase stocks the second they become available, others warn that the safeguards were in place for a reason, and without them, there could be a serious threat to people’s retirement nest eggs.
“We put in place guardrails after the dot-com bubble for a reason,” Elizabeth Wilkins, director of the worker power and economic security program at the Roosevelt Institute, told Fortune. “Because we remembered that there’s real downside risk to tying retiree savings to the fortunes of not only corporate America generally, but specifically the tech sector.”
Wilkins sees the changing of the rules for companies like Anthropic and SpaceX as a red flag. “In a moment of extreme uncertainty, instead of continuing to rely on those rules to make sure that people are protected from downside risk, we’re dismantling them.” She drew a direct parallel to a separate Department of Labor proposal that would allow increased investment of retirement savings in private credit and private equity, part of a broader pattern, in her view, of capital markets’ appetite outrunning protections for ordinary savers. “We are allowing the kind of insatiable hunger for capital to erode our safeguards for ordinary savers.”
She added the caveat that only about six in 10 Americans own retirement accounts at all, meaning SpaceX and Anthropic’s public debuts affect only a select few in the population, who may be better positioned to weather whatever short-term turmoil may occur in their 401(k)s. “We’re actually really already only talking about the most financially secure Americans to begin with, based on the way that we have created our retirement system,” Wilkins said.
“The basic framing that the everyday saver should get to enjoy the rewards of corporate America has allowed companies like SpaceX to say that everything they are doing is good for everyday savers,” she said. “When really there are seriously divergent interests, especially when risk is extreme.”
He acknowledged that uncertainty cuts both ways: if SpaceX and Anthropic perform well during the period, they would otherwise have been held outside the index, and fast-tracking their inclusion will look prescient. “However, if firms such as SpaceX do well following their accelerated inclusion in the index, those who changed the rules will look like geniuses, and investors won’t complain.”
Specifically regarding SpaceX’s governance, Fried’s longer-term concern centers on succession. “He’s locked himself into a position of control of SpaceX forever,” he said of Musk. “But even if such control is good for investors in the short- or medium-term, it doesn’t mean it will be good for investors in 20 years, when both the world and Elon Musk will have changed considerably.”
For Wilkins, the scale of these valuations is precisely the problem. “We have gotten ourselves into a position where we really need to reevaluate: is what’s good for SpaceX really good for the vast majority of savers or not?” she asked. “And if not, what kinds of values and rules should we have around retirement to make sure that we are actually delivering to people what they want, which is long-term financial security?”
