These are not isolated cases. They stem from a structural condition — and it has a straightforward remedy. Companies that have raised capital broadly from outside investors and grown beyond a defined scale should be required to list publicly within a defined period, making their continued growth accessible to all.
Over the past generation, public markets have steadily ceded ground to private capital. The number of listed companies in the US has fallen by roughly 40% since 1996, even as the scale and influence of private firms has surged. Today, some of the world's most consequential companies — in artificial intelligence, defence technology, financial infrastructure and communications — remain private well beyond the point at which they shape industries, labour markets and the lives of millions.
This shift has created a profound and growing imbalance in access to wealth creation. Approximately 62% of American adults own stock, most through retirement accounts and mutual funds. Access to private markets, by contrast, is legally restricted to a narrow and affluent class: generally individuals with a net worth above US$1 million or annual income above US$200,000.
Yes, some exposure to private markets reaches ordinary Americans indirectly, through pension funds and large endowments; but this remains a fraction of a fraction, filtered through institutions most people cannot influence or even see. The most dynamic phase of corporate growth increasingly occurs in a domain most households cannot legally enter.
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The scale of the exclusion is massive — by any reasonable accounting it runs well into the trillions. OpenAI was valued at US$852 billion in its last funding round. Anthropic is reportedly in discussions to raise capital at a pre-money valuation exceeding US$900 billion. Stripe, Databricks and others remain private at valuations from the tens to hundreds of billions each.
This is one of many reasons behind today’s palpable discontent. Many Americans are not simply frustrated that extraordinary fortunes are being created. They are frustrated that those fortunes are increasingly created in places they cannot reach.
Public markets historically served not just as financing mechanisms but as engines of broad participation in economic growth. The public corporation was one of the central democratizing institutions of American capitalism. Its migration away from the centre of economic life is not merely a financial evolution; it is a narrowing of economic citizenship. Companies now remain private through the steepest portion of their growth curve, going public only after much of the profit potential has been realized, primarily to provide liquidity for early backers rather than to broaden ownership.
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For smaller companies, the rationale for remaining private remains completely legitimate: insulation from short-term earnings pressure; more manageable administrative burdens; flexibility during rapid experimentation. Those arguments weaken dramatically as companies grow larger. At valuations measured in the hundreds of billions, Securities and Exchange Commission compliance costs are economically insignificant.
Public markets already permit dual-class shares and founder-control provisions that protect against unwanted interference. What begins as a reasonable developmental preference increasingly becomes something else.
The logic shifts from enabling innovation to avoiding accountability. A materially false statement on a SEC filing is a federal offense. A misleading statement in a private investor presentation typically carries fewer consequences. As companies grow to scale at which they are influencing important parts of our institutions and everyday lives, this discrepancy becomes harder to justify on any principled grounds.
One frequently cited deterrent to going public deserves a direct response. The class-action securities industry, originally intended as a safeguard against fraud, has in many cases evolved into a mechanism that treats ordinary market volatility as a litigation opportunity. Founders and executives are not wrong to view this environment as costly and distracting. But the answer is to reform the excesses of securities litigation, not to allow trillion-dollar enterprises to operate indefinitely outside public markets and public accountability.
The beneficiaries of the privatised wealth-creation system are not simply rich Americans. The investor base for America's largest and most consequential private companies is increasingly global: sovereign wealth funds, overseas universities and endowments, international family offices, and foreign institutional investors. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But it does underscore the central irony: The extraordinary US companies reshaping modern life are more accessible in some ways to international capital than they are to ordinary American citizens.
A straightforward policy response would be to require companies above a defined valuation threshold — US$25 billion is a reasonable starting point — and that have raised capital from a broad base of outside investors to go public within a defined period. Family-controlled and foundation-owned enterprises with concentrated, long-term ownership would be exempt. Such a rule would preserve full flexibility for emerging firms and respect genuine private ownership, while ensuring that once companies reach systemic importance, their continued growth becomes broadly accessible.
Capital markets do more than allocate capital. They distribute opportunity, legitimacy and participation. A healthy capitalist system requires not only that wealth be created but that citizens believe they have a fair chance to share in its creation.
SpaceX and OpenAI are about to become the largest IPOs in American history. They will be spectacular financial events of the decade. The question worth asking is why it took this long. - Bloomberg Opinion
