According to Bloomberg Business, the Baron First Principles ETF (RONB) holds a massive 22% weighting in the private rocket company SpaceX, with its second and third largest holdings also being Elon Musk’s Tesla and his private AI firm, xAI. The $484 billion asset manager Janus Henderson announced a deal to buy investment firm Richard Bernstein Advisors, adding $20 billion in assets and making it a top-10 model portfolio provider in North America. This comes about a month after Janus Henderson itself agreed to be taken private by Trian Fund Management and General Catalyst in a $7.4 billion deal expected to close mid-next year. Elsewhere, the New York Stock Exchange is building a blockchain venue for 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs, and Invesco is launching a new euro-denominated AT1 bond ETF. Meanwhile, the proposed Tuttle Capital Government Grift ETF (GRFT) can’t find a major U.S. exchange willing to list it, with its manager hoping the new Texas Stock Exchange might step up by June.
The Private Company In A Public ETF Problem
Here’s the thing about that Baron fund’s huge SpaceX bet: it’s a fascinating outlier. Most ETF issuers are terrified of doing this. And for a pretty simple, old-school reason: liquidity. Or rather, the lack of it. An ETF is a daily-valued, liquid vehicle. You can buy and sell shares with a click. A stake in a private company like SpaceX is the opposite—it’s illiquid, hard to price precisely, and can’t be easily sold to meet investor redemptions. That’s why JPMorgan’s Jed Laskowitz is so hesitant, even as he acknowledges the massive $20+ trillion private market. Putting an illiquid asset in a liquid wrapper is a fundamental mismatch that requires extreme care. So while the potential “pop” from a SpaceX IPO in 2026 is tantalizing, the structural risk keeps most big players on the sidelines. They’d rather stick to their mutual funds for that kind of exposure.
The Model Portfolio Wars Heat Up
The Janus Henderson move to buy Richard Bernstein Advisors is a pure power play in the booming model portfolio space. Think of model portfolios as pre-cooked investment strategies built from ETFs and mutual funds that financial advisors can serve to clients. It’s a huge, growing business. By grabbing RBA, Janus isn’t just adding $20 billion—it’s buying a brand. Richard Bernstein has a reputation as a savvy, sometimes contrarian macro thinker. For CEO Ali Dibadj, who’s been on a deal spree since joining in 2022, this is about scaling up and grabbing market leadership before the firm itself goes private next year. It’s a smart, defensive-offensive move. The real story? The asset management industry is consolidating, and the battleground is shifting from individual funds to these packaged, advisor-sold strategies. Whoever controls the models controls the flows.
The Blockchain And GRFT Side Stories
Two other snippets from the newsletter highlight the edges of the ETF universe. The NYSE’s blockchain project and F/m’s request to tokenize part of its Treasury ETF are early, tentative steps toward a future where fund ownership is recorded on a digital ledger. It’s about operational efficiency and, maybe one day, 24/7 trading. But it’s still a proving ground. More entertainingly, the saga of the “Government Grift” ETF is a perfect example of the limits of the “anything can be an ETF” era. Matthew Tuttle can launch a meme stock fund, but apparently, satirizing government spending is a bridge too far for the major exchanges. His hope for the Texas Stock Exchange is hilarious, but it shows that even in a wild market, there are still guardrails—or at least, listing committees with a sense of self-preservation.
