Just now! Wall Street has brought the "dumping sickle" from the crypto world to NASDAQ, and your pension is being legally harvested.

You may have already noticed that when venture capitalists inflate the valuation of private companies to trillions of dollars, they are finally ready to cash out. But there’s a problem: who will take over?

Let me clarify, I am not accusing San Francisco’s venture capitalists of illegal activity. What I want to say is that what they do is extremely unethical, and they are destroying the original contract of capitalism.

The old agreement was simple: the Baby Boomer generation is the last to enjoy the era’s dividends. The U.S. doesn’t have the high welfare system like Europe, nor did it originally need one. The socially accepted rule is— the stock market is the welfare system for Americans.

Fixed income pensions have been replaced by 401(k)s, social security is only enough for a safety net. The implicit logic is: every ordinary worker becomes a shareholder, and the dividends from rising capital grow along with everyone.

Even if wages don’t increase and the wealth gap widens, it’s okay. Because your retirement account is compounding, and your employer’s assets are also compounding—you’re all on the same train.

Passive index funds are the purest embodiment of this contract. Cashiers, teachers, plumbers—all can share in the benefits brought by professional capital discovery for free.

Back then, the capital market was a public dividend pool for all.

But this contract was based on three premises: the open market must be the place where value is created; the dividends from wealth growth must benefit the masses; every new capital growth must be included in index funds.

These conditions once held, but now they are all abolished.

When companies remain private until their valuation reaches trillions and only go public then, the open market no longer creates value; it only fulfills value. Everything happening in the stock market is just wealth distribution, not compound growth.

Every penny that should have gone to pension funds during the company’s growth phase now ends up in the pockets of pre-IPO equity holders.

Within weeks of Figma’s IPO, its valuation was halved compared to private funding; Klarna’s valuation plummeted by 90%. This is not an accident; it’s the designed outcome of this system.

The industry also realized that retail investors are being excluded from dividends, so they spun a narrative: democratize investment, broaden channels, bridge the gap, open up private markets for retail participation.

But the reality is quite the opposite: they are just enabling retail investors to take over the chips accumulated by insiders at a valuation only one-thousandth of the current price, at the peak of a ten-year private bull market.

Private venture capital products aimed at retail are not investment opportunities—they are tools for distributing internal chips at high levels. Even Naval Ravikant’s own promotional logic confirms this.

He is the leading advocate for democratizing Silicon Valley’s private investments, promoting ordinary people’s private investments as a way for venture capitalists to exit at high valuations and harvest retail liquidity.

This harvesting tactic has been mastered earliest in the crypto space.

Early on, the $ETH project foundation held a large amount of locked tokens; retail buying power dried up, and as the unlock date approached, no one was willing to take the tokens. So they came up with a plan: package these neglected locked tokens as compliant equity assets, allowing traditional financial institutions to buy in.

Tokens that retail investors would never buy directly suddenly became stocks; institutional compliance allowed them to buy, and retail investors could also participate through brokers. Chips were smoothly distributed, regulators turned a blind eye, and project teams successfully cashed out. The new holders from the start became targets of the harvest.

By the way, Naval was involved in crypto early on and is well-versed in this.

Seeing this tactic work in San Francisco’s venture capital circle, they scaled it up to the trillion-dollar capital market.

The first channel is private venture products for retail; the second is Nasdaq’s plan to revise listing rules.

Nasdaq’s new regulation plan: for companies with very few freely tradable shares at IPO, their index weight will be increased fivefold, and weights will be updated each quarter during rebalancing.

Take SpaceX as an example: suppose at IPO only 5% of shares are tradable, with an overall valuation of $1.75 trillion. Under the new rule, passive index funds will be forced to buy in at $438 billion, executed just 15 days after listing, without market value refinement.

The company’s internal lock-up periods will precisely coincide with the next index rebalancing. When the weight hits maximum, passive funds will unconditionally buy large amounts, and insiders will justifiably cash out.

SpaceX plans to go public mid-year, and with the index rebalancing at year’s end, the entire process fits perfectly.

Originally, index funds were a shield for ordinary retail investors against internal capital harvesting, but now they have become tools for capital to cash out and exit. Your retirement savings are being quietly harvested by this mechanism.

The routines in crypto and venture capital are exactly the same: insiders first hold low-cost positions in markets inaccessible to retail; asset appreciation is completed; native market buying power cannot support high-volume selling; then they create a new packaging vehicle to connect another round of capital—namely, pension funds and passive index funds that buy blindly without regard to price.

Internal capital smoothly exits, while new retail investors take on high-level chips. The entire process is fully legal because the packaging itself is compliant; regulators are virtually absent because this institutionalized harvesting is not considered illegal within the rules.

Many current anomalies stem from this: Sam Altman being criticized by public opinion, autonomous vehicles being vandalized, data centers facing protests. Those initiating resistance don’t understand liquidity exit theories, but they feel directly: the world is divided into early entrants and late takers, and the gap is widening faster than individual effort can bridge.

Elites in the tech sector prove with reality: ordinary people’s public capital is being continuously harvested to create excess wealth for the already advantaged groups.

The wealth gap will become more extreme. The next downturn won’t be a normal market correction, because a correction presupposes participants still believe the rules are fair. Today’s protests and conflicts are fundamentally evolving into social political conflicts.

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