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FS Felix Salmon Felix Salmon Writes on finance and markets, now as a senior writer at Bloomberg, after years as chief financial correspondent at Axios, and is the author of The Phoenix Econ...

“This is the first time that I've started to almost second guess the utility of index funds, given how massive AI and the AI trade is to the stock market as a whole. And given that Anthropic and OpenAI between them are likely to be worth $4 trillion, and given that neither of them are public, and given that neither of them are going to be in the S&P 500 for quite some time, but they are going to be trading on the stock market and they are going to be driving the stock market.”

Slate Money · October 2026

“This is the first time that I've started to almost second guess the utility of index funds, given how massive AI and the AI trade is to the stock market as a whole. And given that Anthropic and OpenAI between them are likely to be worth $4 trillion, and given that neither of them are public, and given that neither of them are going to be in the S&P 500 for quite some time, but they are going to be trading on the stock market and they are going to be driving the stock market.” — Felix Salmon, Slate Money

Context

The panel was discussing Anthropic's S-1 and what its listing means for AI stocks. Salmon steps back to ask what giant AI companies trading outside the major indexes mean for ordinary index-fund investors.

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Transcript

Slate Money Around 11:52 into the episode
Felix Salmon

once you get habituated into needing a crutch, that's really good for the crutch companies.

Elizabeth Spiers

Yeah. So wait, so is and so Google had a bad week and Anthropic kind of had a good week. So is Anthropic? I feel like Anthropic

Felix Salmon

is looking good. And I mean, this is the first time that I've started to almost second guess the utility of index funds, given how massive AI and the AI trade is to the stock market as a whole. And given that Anthropic and OpenAI between them are likely to be worth $4 trillion, and given that neither of them are public, and given that neither of them are going to be in the S ⁇ P 500 for quite some time, but they are going to be trading on the stock market and they are going to be driving the stock market. I feel like we are going to really reach the point very soon, certainly after OpenAI goes public, but probably even after Anthropic goes public, where there has never been a bigger gap between what the stock market is doing and what the S ⁇ P 500 is doing.

Elizabeth Spiers

Maybe. I mean, tech stocks are doing very badly today as we record. So I'm feeling like, oh my gosh, is the whole house of AI trade cards tumbling down? Because it kind of feels like that. Yeah, I don't think that,

Emily Peck

I don't really think that's happening, at least not yet.

Felix Salmon

The thing that has really jumped out at a lot of those of us in certainly in the sort of philanthropyology space is the astonishing amount of wealth being created among Anthropic's employees. Anthropic has a much lower percentage of VC shareholders than most startups and a much higher percentage of…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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