➺ June 2, 2026

Roughly 90% of Americans with household incomes over $165,000 own stock, and the bulk of that exposure — thanks to 401(k) contributions — sits in index and target-date fundswith inscrutable tickers like SPY, VOO, and QQQ. This kind of passive investing is popular to the point de rigueur because it mitigates the risk of stock-picking while letting amateurs "buy the market." But funds define the market in different ways. SPY and VOO track the S&P 500, QQQ the Nasdaq-100, VTI the total market — and each has its own rules for what gets listed, which means passive investments are governed by committees that write and rewrite those rules. Those committees are highly motivated not to look stupid — which is what happened when the U.S. Index Committee of S&P Dow Jones Indices declined to add Tesla to the S&P 500 for months after it qualified and ripped, blocking SPY holders from capitalizing on its historic run.


In an effort not to look stupid, committees are now rewriting rules so SpaceX gets listed quickly after its looming IPO. A Fortune 500 by revenue, SpaceX hangs a $1.8T valuation on astonishing tech and the promise to carry "the light of consciousness" (a phrase used repeatedly in the S-1) into the cosmos, loses nearly $5 billion a year, and is controlled outright by Elon Musk. Historically, unprofitable, founder-controlled companies were excluded from indices as a matter of course, but… TSLA. So SPCX will get listed, but not all at once. I will hit VTI within a week, QQQ within weeks, and VOO not until late 2026 or early 2027. The net effect: Some passive investors will be exposed to the early volatility (good or bad – early investors and employees will want liquidity) – and some will not. If anything interesting happens, FOMO-ing passive investors will wind up learning about listing criteria, share classes, and inclusion dates. Passive will get less passive. Sure, fund-picking will remain far safer than stock-picking — but the whole point of SPY was not having to look.

Every high-school freshman is taught — usually by a borderline alcoholic — that the passive voice is never to be written in. But it is quickly learned, in any decent school district, that agentless sentence constructions are a must when bad news has to be delivered. People can't be fired, but positions can be eliminated. Therapists can’t end appointments, but time can be up. And, when there's nothing left to say... it just is what it is.

A whole social order can be reverse-engineered from the ==unconscious grammatical choices= made by alumni of the School of Soft Knocks. Of course, no one in their right mind would do that....

In the 1974's The Gambler, James Caan plays an uptown New York lit professor who's forty-four thousand dollars down to the sort of people who don't read the right Russians, but definitely know the wrong ones. The pointedly named Axel Freed (what happens when a bike hits a pothole) articulates his view on life by telling a back-row yuppie that two and two may make four, but the man who insists it's five has "pure will."

The Gambler was a modest hit that gave James Caan a post-Godfather bump, but got flattened by Taxi Driver in the cultural memory. Nevertheless, it was remade in 2014 with Mark Wahlberg (who gives lit professor the same way Mickey Rooney gives Asian). The reboot was worse than the original boot save for a soliloquy defining "Fuck You Money" delivered by a mathematically minded loan shark played by John Goodman. YouTube viewers have watched clips of Goodman’s out-load calculations (written by William Monahan of The Departed fame) over 4M times. Fuck You Money is now a touchstone for the both degens and numerate clock punchers.

You get up two and a half million dollars... you get a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at 3% to 5%… that puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of 'Fuck You.' Someone wants you to do something? Fuck you. Boss pisses you off? Fuck you! ... A wise man's life is based around 'fuck you.' ... You're a king? ... Fuck you! Blow me.

Fuck You Money buys you the right to fire your boss and not hire another, but there's a nasty irony afoot. Because Fuck You Money inflation runs hotter than dollar inflation, collecting it requires intense self management. Not only is the real money harder to come by than Goodman lets on, the "Fuck You" inevitably winds up getting shouted into a mirror.

Goodman's number is neither right or wrong, but it is very specific. At 4%, his $2.5 million throws off $100,000 a year, which was more (even after taxes) than the median American household spent to get by circa 2014. It would have only cost the gambler about $2.1 million in 2014 to lead a median life forever. But that’s not enough because the gambler hasn’t lived a median life. He’s had a cushy job. He’s had access to family money. His normal would have required more than the loanshark’s $2.5M. A house that holds its value near a decent liberal arts program would have run $800,000, leaving $1.7 million minus the "25-year roof" and the "indestructible economy box" (about $22K each) throwing off $63,000, taxable at +/-15%. Buy health insurance on the open market, around $17K for a family, and the fortress of solitude nets roughly $36K a year. Used paperback money.

And the math has only gotten worse. The average family healthcare premium has risen 60% in the decade since the remake (medical prices outran the broad index), housing costs are nearly double, a Honda Accord retails for $28,400, and tariffs have jacked up the roof market. Wild as it sounds, the upper-middle life the professor is fleeing now runs about $196,000 a year, which means an upper-middle class fortress run $4.9M – particularly bad news given that the number of listings on the Modern Language Association's job board is down more than half since 1974 and the salaries are effectively 75% lower than Freed's quoted $1,500 a month.

And that's just the money. The bigger problem is the stuff of Dostoevsky and the reason James Toback, formerly a gambling-addicted English lecturer at City College and futurely a serial sexual predator, wrote the film.

The idea of Fuck You Money is contingent on having someone to say "Fuck You" to, which is in turn contingent on what the French theorist Gilles Deleuze described as an "enclosure" view of the world. The family is an enclosure. The school is an enclosure. The factory is an enclosure. And all enclosures can be vacated by those with the means to pay off and curse out the guy at the door. But that's an old way of thinking, a mental model built on clear delineations between workworld and lifeworld. But where the factory was a building, corporations and loansharking operations are "a spirit, a gas." Participants become what Deleuze called "dividuals," self-managed, self-surveilling data streams. It's the predicament the great philosopher Bobby Axelrod unpacked memorably in the Billions pilot: "What's the point of having fuck you money if you never say fuck you?"

Toback was probably too busy harassing coeds to read Deleuze, but he got the idea. In one scene from the original, Freed, riding along with a collections heavy, remarks: “Look what you've got. Fresh air; open road; free afternoon.” A few minutes later, he's watching his chauffeur, who has outsourced morality and agency to his boss who has in turn outsourced it to the system, joylessly break a man's arm. That's how it goes in hierarchical orgs. As sociologist Robert Jackall wrote after spending the early 1980s embedded among corporate managers, morality has become "what the guy above you wants." And there's almost always another guy.

Unless you say Fuck You. But that requires more than confrontation. It requires confronting the self. The Gambler ends with Axel, freed from his debts, goading a sex worker into slashing his pretty face then smiling at the wound in a mirror. It's very New Hollywood, but it's also a rebuttal to even faulty arithmetic. The path toward freedom doesn't run through cold calculation, but through the will to be perverse, contrarian – scarred by the integrity of transgression.

The real math on Fuck You Money turns out to be largely irrelevant. The cost of saying fuck you is respectability. Disfiguring the pretty face in the mirror. Killing the little loanshark in your heart.