It’s that passive investing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because regardless of the company situation the funds have to buy the shares at any price, which has made it simpler for incumbents to grow and stay growing while burning profitability to the ground. Hence why there’s been a recent change to the rules on the Nasdaq so SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic can be included on the indices 15 days after IPO rather than having three months of price discovery on the markets first before index funds start having to buy huge amounts of their shares and keeping their (likely imaginary) price afloat.

It’s a huge structural flaw in the markets right now, yet it seems a flaw that isn’t really going to break anything which is weird in itself. I can’t help but feel that Wall Street is going to find the right place to kick at some point in order to have the whole house of cards come tumbling down for a while so they can buy cheap and negate/steal years of contributions from people buying index funds. Not sure how or when but I’m sure they’re working on it.