Index Inclusion Could Bring SpaceX $25 Billion in Passive Demand

SpaceX’s inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 is central to Joel Shulman’s near-term market argument. Ed Ludlow described the mechanical issue for fund managers tracking the QQQs or the underlying index: they need to adjust portfolios so that SpaceX and its index weight are represented.

Shulman said the inclusion was bullish over the long term, even with SpaceX down around 5% intraday on Bloomberg’s on-screen market panel. He said the Nasdaq had about $800 billion in passive money behind it. At a 1% weighting, that would imply roughly $8 billion of demand. He added that SpaceX had been trading about $19 billion per day, so the passive demand would not all enter at once.

He then separated QQQ-specific flow from the broader index complex. Shulman said the QQQs alone would represent about $4 billion of buying, while Russell, MSCI, and other passive-linked buyers could bring total passive demand to about $25 billion. He said that money would help boost the stock “for a period of time,” not that it removed volatility.

Bloomberg’s lower-third described Shulman’s view as “SpaceX has set its price floor.” In substance, the floor he described came from index inclusion creating a class of buyers whose mandate is replication rather than discretionary valuation work. That structural demand was one part of his bullish case; the other was the operating thesis he laid out for SpaceX itself.

Joel Shulman said ERShares’ XOVR ETF had grown its SpaceX exposure from roughly $246 million before what Ed Ludlow called the IPO to about $370 million. Shulman attributed about $130 million of profit to SpaceX, including $84 million in June alone.

That June gain mattered at the fund level. Shulman said SpaceX contributed a 5.3% return and accounted for about 75% of XOVR’s performance for the month, at a time when the broader market was down and the S&P 500 had fallen as much as 2.7%.

Bloomberg’s on-screen market panel showed SpaceX trading intraday around $151 per share and down roughly 5.5%. Shulman did not treat that move as the central fact. His view was that Nasdaq inclusion and related index mechanics had created support under demand, even if the stock was down on the day.

Joel Shulman said ERShares was “the first” ETF sponsor to put SpaceX into this kind of product while it was still private. XOVR was rebranded, relaunched, and repositioned in August 2024, and the first SpaceX position was purchased in December 2024 through a special purpose vehicle.

The SPV structure carried the concern Ed Ludlow raised about private-company access: what investors were really buying, and what they ultimately received. Shulman said ERShares later repositioned the exposure into what he called a “00” structure, with no management fee and no carry. The firm increased the stake several times, including twice in the second quarter of 2026.

By the time of the IPO, in Shulman’s description, XOVR had built SpaceX to roughly a 14% position. He also said the firm used a shareholder-protection plan to prevent a surge of short-term inflows in the week before the event. Many ETFs, he said, have drawn large inflows ahead of major corporate events; ERShares chose to keep that money out to preserve existing shareholders’ exposure and weighting.

Shulman estimated the firm turned away more than $1 billion in potential flows, and possibly several billion dollars. New money arriving just before the event could have diluted the payoff for existing holders.

Joel Shulman acknowledged that ERShares had seen outflows of about $200 million after SpaceX went public in June, but contrasted them with heavier pressure at some other funds that had added SpaceX later. He said one fund that entered in late March was down about 30% in return terms and had lost more than half its assets. Another ETF, he said, had lost three quarters. He did not name either fund.

The distinction he drew was that XOVR is not a space-only ETF. The strategy is tied to the Entrepreneur 30 Total Return Index, which he described as having a 21-year track record and among the strongest performance records. SpaceX was the top holding at roughly 17% to 18%, followed by Nvidia. Shulman also cited Astera Labs, which he said had risen 400%, along with AppLovin and other holdings.

That framing was central to how Shulman described the SpaceX outcome. SpaceX is the defining holding, and he said the IPO was the most important event of his career, but he presented the fund’s process as a “VC lens” applied to public equities rather than a pure space vehicle. He pointed to Nvidia as an example, saying ERShares bought it in 2005 and has held it for 21 years.

In that line, “that” referred to Nvidia: a long-duration position rather than a one-event trade.

Joel Shulman described SpaceX as a “three-engine empire.” The first engine is launch. He said SpaceX dominates roughly 90% of the launch market and that even competitors use it. He also said SpaceX has 10,000 satellites in orbit, a clear moat in that market, and a cost structure competitors have not matched.

Shulman contrasted SpaceX’s launch costs with NASA’s. He said SpaceX had reduced costs from about $54,000 per kilogram to around $2,000 per kilogram, while NASA over the past 30 to 40 years had gone from about $54,000 to about $58,000. His conclusion was that SpaceX is the cost leader. He compared Elon Musk to a modern-day Rockefeller in his focus on costs.

The second engine is Starlink, which Shulman called the “crown jewel” of the business. His emphasis was not only satellite coverage, but pricing architecture. He said Starlink has a five-tier model, naming domestic, defense, maritime, and aviation among the tiers. His wording on aviation pricing was garbled — “five times, 313 times more” — but the point he was making was clear enough: the same satellite infrastructure can support different customers at very different price points, with aviation the strongest piece in his view.

The third engine is optionality: “data centers in the sky.” Ludlow connected this to neocloud businesses. Shulman said that if SpaceX could pull off orbital data centers, the valuation could be justified in a different way. The elements he named were 24/7 energy and solar power at five to 10 times the relevant baseline he was describing. The upside was explicitly conditional: SpaceX would have to execute on that idea.

For Shulman, the SpaceX IPO was not just a profitable trade. He said it “repositioned” the fund and put a spotlight on its VC-style lens: selecting public companies in the way venture investors select companies. Nvidia was his comparison point; SpaceX, in his telling, is another long-duration holding rather than a one-event trade.