Comment Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. If you already thought the stock market’s booming reactions to this geopolitically chaotic economic moment were irrational—well, it’s about to get much more surreal, because the rules governing the trade are about to change dramatically. You can thank Elon Musk and the Trump administration for that. Right now, the indexes are seeing a reinvigorated boom—in spite of coming Strait of Hormuz supply shocks and other mounting recession indicators—because investors are looking to what may become the biggest IPOs in history, courtesy of artificial intelligence. OpenAI, Anthropic, and most importantly SpaceX (which now owns xAI) all hope to hit the charts this year with trillion-dollar valuations, in an unprecedented global first. It may seem like a great opportunity to get more transparency from these notoriously private firms, but the opposite is likely to happen. The incoming IPO wave is rewriting stock market rules in real time so that companies can attract massive public investment with fewer safeguards, less transparency, and more risk pushed onto ordinary investors, as well as the funds that will determine how comfortably you’ll be able to retire. SpaceX, which aims to debut in June and is estimating a public net worth of nearly $2 trillion, will not be like any other ticker. Per the terms of the filing, shareholders’ ability to challenge CEO Musk’s decisions, whether through the board or the legal system, will be so limited as to make the chief executive all but invincible. Big banks have already been acquiescing to Musk’s unusual demands, including paying up front for Grok subscriptions, thus juicing SpaceX’s flagging A.I. revenue. (The megacorporation actually makes money from its satellite internet services and rocket contracts, but xAI, which includes X and Grok, is a major drag on the company’s revenue.) Plus, the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 are making room for SpaceX by rewriting their rulebooks: Pre-IPO SpaceX investors will be able to cash out right when the stock goes public, and the index funds that hold your 401(k)s and pensions will be forced to buy up SpaceX stock in order to retain their market ties. This is entirely for Musk’s sake; financial institutions are more psyched about the types of investments the megacelebrity CEO can attract, and committed to guaranteeing a baseline level of trading volume for this trillion-dollar treasure chest, than they are concerned about those who’ll be most exposed to the stock’s erratic nature. As New York and California pension managers put it in a concerned letter to SpaceX, the company will be “an unavoidable holding in our portfolios,” even though its unique arrangement scraps any “baseline protections” for stockholders. Advertisement