My issue is that so many people have forgotten the purpose of the S&P 500 index (i.e. it's a benchmark to reflect the large-cap U.S. equity market), and instead treat it as a list of approved companies they should blindly invest their 401ks into. These people do not want to invest their retirement funds into the upcoming IPOs of the overpriced & unprofitable (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI), and then are arguing the benchmark index should not include these companies.

But at a fundamental level, the S&P500 index exists to track the market. It was created decades before passive investing even existed. These companies are all large enough to qualify as major members of the index. If S&P started arbitrarily excluding parts of the market they find uninvestable, then that's compromising the integrity of the index, and defeats the purpose of the index entirely.

Reading this thread, there is so much confusion happening.