The Toll on Both Sides of the Road

With the #1 work app, the world’s lightest 4K headset, and their own AI agent, Immersed owns the entire tech stack for the future of work. 1.5M professionals already rely on their software.

Invest Before the Round Closes on July 30.

In 1860, a financial analyst named Henry Varnum Poor had a problem with railroads. They were the hottest investment in America — and the most dangerous. Promoters sold bonds backed by track that didn't exist. Investors had no reliable way to tell a sound railroad from a swindle. So Poor did something radical for his era. He published a book — History of Railroads and Canals in the United States — compiling the financial details of every railroad he could find. For the first time, investors could compare one company's books to another's.

That book became a business. That business became S&P Global.

I checked my retirement account last week. The largest position was an S&P 500 index fund. I have owned it for years. What I had never thought about — until I started pulling the thread — is that a small fraction of my money flows to the company that owns the index itself. Not the fund manager. The index. S&P Global licenses the S&P 500 to every fund and ETF that tracks it. Each one pays a fee based on assets under management. The more money the world puts into passive investing, the more S&P Global collects. I checked — and more than $15 trillion in assets are now indexed to or benchmarked against S&P Dow Jones Indices. That is not a product. That is a tax on capital.

Most people know the S&P 500 as a number on a screen — a green or red line on the evening news. What they don't realize is that the index is a product, owned by a company, and licensed for a fee. And that company also runs one of the two dominant credit rating agencies on earth. If you issue a bond — corporate, sovereign, municipal — you almost certainly need an opinion from S&P Global Ratings. Together with Moody's, S&P controls roughly 80% of the global ratings market. One company collects a toll when you invest. The same company collects a toll when you borrow. The toll booth sits on both sides of the road.

The lineage runs 165 years. Poor's manual led to a publishing company. In 1906, Luther Lee Blake founded the Standard Statistics Bureau. In 1941, the two merged to form Standard & Poor's. In 1957, the company launched the S&P 500 — a 500-stock index that became the single most-referenced benchmark in global finance. McGraw-Hill acquired Standard & Poor's in 1966. The company renamed itself S&P Global in 2016. And in 2022, it merged with IHS Markit for $44 billion — adding energy data, automotive intelligence, and commodity pricing to the empire.

Here is the math. In fiscal 2025, S&P Global reported $15.3 billion in revenue — up 8% from the year before. Net income reached $4.5 billion. The adjusted operating profit margin was 50%. Half of every dollar collected drops to profit. The Indices segment alone runs at a roughly 71% adjusted operating margin. And the company returned more than $5 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks in 2025 — its 53rd consecutive year of raising the dividend.

Elon Musk did it again! After self-driving cars…

Reusable rockets that land themselves…

And brain chips that let paralyzed people control computers with their minds…

Elon just filed this patent (click here and see it for yourself) to protect his new invention…

A new form of AI so powerful he called it an "infinite money glitch."

And it could help send shares of this little-known Elon Musk supplier to the moon.

That $15 trillion figure is the one I cannot stop thinking about. It does not depend on S&P Global selling anything new. It does not require a customer to sign a contract. The money flows in because the index exists — and because an entire industry of passive funds, ETFs, pension plans, and robo-advisors has been built on top of it. Asset-linked fees — the royalties S&P collects based on how much money tracks its indices — accounted for 65% of the Indices segment's 2025 revenue. When markets rise, assets under management grow, and S&P collects more. When new money flows into index funds, S&P collects more. The toll rises with the tide.

The credit rating side works differently — but the lock-in is just as strong. If a corporation wants to issue a bond, institutional buyers typically require a rating from at least one of the major agencies. Regulators reference credit ratings in banking capital requirements. S&P Global Ratings maintains more than one million outstanding ratings covering roughly $46 trillion in debt across 128 countries. Issuers pay for the opinion. They have no real alternative.

Martina Cheung — who became CEO in November 2024 after 14 years at the company — called 2025 an "excellent year" in the fourth-quarter earnings release. She noted that the company achieved its 53rd consecutive year of dividend increases and returned more than $5 billion to shareholders. Under her predecessor, Douglas Peterson, revenue had grown from $4.45 billion to $12.50 billion over a decade. The company's market cap climbed from $16 billion to over $135 billion. That is not growth from invention. That is growth from owning the infrastructure the financial world runs on.

The flywheel here is structural. More money flows into passive investing each year — and every new index fund that tracks the S&P 500 pays a licensing fee. Meanwhile, global debt issuance grows — and every new bond that needs a rating pays S&P for the opinion. The company does not need to build new products. It needs the financial system to keep functioning. And it does. Every day. In every market. In every country that borrows or invests.

WHY THIS WORKS

Henry Varnum Poor published his railroad book in 1860 because investors were flying blind. A hundred and sixty-five years later, his company's opinion still determines what every bond on earth costs to issue — and his company's index still determines where trillions of dollars get invested. The tollbooth he built was made of information. It has never been disassembled.