Sam Lessin: Capital gains taxes create an artificial floor under mega-cap stocks
Sam Lessin · Allbirds Pivoted to AI Data Centers | SpaceX $1.5T IPO, Anthropic $800B, $175M Seed Rounds · Apr 17, 2026 · at 16:25
Sam Lessin, general partner at Slow Ventures, argues that tax liabilities prevent investors from reallocating out of highly appreciated stocks like SpaceX.
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“I'd rather just be long it and hold it, because you'd have to believe, not only is SpaceX overvalued, you have to have the opinion that it's so bad, right, that it's gonna underperform the rest of the market by 50% from where it is, for it to be worth taking the tax burden of selling it. And I think a lot of what you see in these high marked positions, from my perspective, especially with people who like, if you're sophisticated, you can borrow against your positions, et cetera, is like, they get super marked up when they're right, and then you really can't sell them. And so that creates this floor on the pricing where like no one wants to rotate out of them. Like it has to be really painful to rotate out of them. Right. And that is a really interesting dynamic that, you know, is part of why the market is so disconnected from the economy, from my perspective.”
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