Nasdaq's 15-day fast-track rule forced QQQ to buy SPCX at $160, leaving passive index-fund holders with roughly $500 million in paper losses. Anthropic's near-$1 trillion Nasdaq IPO could trigger the same forced passive buying, but prediction markets give OpenAI 83% odds of listing first. Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and SpaceX didn't make the cut.
Grab the names FREE today. Anthropic filed confidentially for a US initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, 2026, reportedly targeting a Nasdaq listing in September or early October at a valuation near $965 billion, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley reportedly leading an offering aiming to raise more than $60 billion. If that listing arrives on schedule and Nasdaq applies the same accelerated inclusion rule it wrote for SpaceX, tens of millions of retirement accounts could become Anthropic shareholders without a single account holder placing an order.
The SpaceX precedent shows exactly how that mechanism plays out. Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ:SPCX) joined the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, 2026, after Nasdaq accelerated its eligibility rule for newly public mega-cap companies from 90 trading days to just 15. JPMorgan estimated Nasdaq-100-tracking funds, chiefly Invesco's QQQ, needed to purchase roughly $4.3 billion of SpaceX shares, executed during the July 6 closing auction so portfolios would match the index at the next day's open.
ETF.com put total passive demand tied to Nasdaq-100-linked products into the tens of billions of dollars, with some estimates in the $22 billion to $27 billion range. The forced buying priced through around $160 per share. Index funds buy what the rulebook tells them to buy.
SpaceX has been volatile since. Shares climbed as high as $225.64 shortly after its June IPO, then fell as low as $104.83 following its first quarterly report, which included more than $18 billion in quarterly AI infrastructure capital expenditures, and ahead of a first lockup expiration that made more than 900 million additional shares eligible for sale by October. At the low, the paper loss to index-fund holders on the forced buy was estimated at around $1.4 billion.
As of the Aug. 13 close of $141.29, down 3.33% on the day, that estimated loss sits at roughly $500 million to $503 million, about 11.7% below the $160 forced-buy price. The stock recovered, rising 22.95% in the week from Aug. 6 to Aug. 13. SPCX remains volatile inside its $104.83 to $225.64 52-week range.
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