It's also much easier to raise money for private startups. Back in the day there was a point at which you _had_ to go public in order to finance your business. Now you can have raises like the recent $122 billion OpenAI raise. https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/13/lawyers-c...
The main thesis is that the liabilities risk/cost from securities class action lawsuits is a tax on public companies.
Yes, Elon thinks links in posts should be heavily suppressed by the algorithm because they mean people get redirected from scrolling.
So now everyone buries the link in the replies, that are conveniently hidden unless you log in.
The number of alternative public and semi-public companies went up exponentially (Reg CF/Reg A, crypto ICOs).
After reaching some thresholds a Reg A company can become public and even trade on OTC markets.
Anyway the conventional finance answer to why there are fewer public companies around these days is just that private markets are so much bigger. PE and debt financing (both public and private) are probably responsible for a much bigger share of companies' financing than they used to be.
kdhaskjdhadjk•2h ago
BlackRock
Vanguard
State Street
Northern Trust
etc
"Vanguard and BlackRock are the top two owners of Time Warner, Comcast, Disney and News Corp, four of the six media companies that control more than 90% of the U.S. media landscape.
BlackRock and Vanguard form a secret monopoly that own just about everything else you can think of too. In all, they have ownership in 1,600 American firms, which in 2015 had combined revenues of $9.1 trillion. When you add in the third-largest global owner, State Street, their combined ownership encompasses nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.
Vanguard is the largest shareholder of BlackRock. Vanguard itself, on the other hand, has a unique structure that makes its ownership more difficult to discern, but many of the oldest, richest families in the world can be linked to Vanguard funds."
squeedles•1h ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•1h ago
And it was the solving of this alignment problem that attracted all the Rockefellers, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, etc to Vanguard? So they're not insiders, just big customers with no relationship to the firm itself.
zeroonetwothree•1h ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•1h ago
zeroonetwothree•1h ago
kdhaskjdhadjk•1h ago
Follow ownership up the chain and you will discover the overall point is correct: everything is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
throwaway27448•1h ago
rayiner•1h ago
Consolidation over the last 30 years is the fault of folks here on HN. Information technology moves the equilibrium point between economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. It enables huge companies to operate efficiently. That enables them to leverage their scale to deliver better services and cheaper prices.
Consider Amazon. Everyone loves to hate on Amazon, but they’re doing it while adding stuff to the delivery they already have coming tomorrow. Why can Amazon ship me stuff overnight, whereas it used to take a week back in the 1990s? It’s not the internet per se. You could call in or fax orders back in the day—it still took a week. And delivery is being done using the same planes and trucks we have been using for decades. Amazon happened because technology enabled it to completely restructure the entire warehousing and delivery vertical, rendering a huge swath of the economy obsolete.
That’s happening all over the place. Most of these mom and pop businesses suck. They have shitty service, high prices, limited selection, etc. The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.
_doctor_love•54m ago
It makes sense. Ideally the big companies are able to merge into a kind of super-conglomerate (heavily vertically and horizontally integrated) so that economies of scale can really come into effect and provide value for the consumer.
Likely this is the trajectory that we are on anyway given that US regulatory posture seems to be okay with it. The only sad part is that as companies get larger, they tend to have more and more boring names. So a heavily integrated large multinational will eventually end up having a name like Omni Consumer Products because they are doing so many different things at the same time.
triceratops•1h ago
tootie•1h ago
HEmanZ•1h ago
There are still control concerns, if blackrock and vanguard started throwing around weight more they’d have a lot of power as investor aggregators. They do “control the vote”, in theory, on a lot of the economy through their aggregation. AFAIK they don’t use this much because it’s not practical for their funds. But framing them as real owners is the kind of boogeyman crap.