Rett Wallace

What SpaceX tells us about drift in the definition of a "public" company At Triton our thesis has been that public offerings are going away. And the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI deals are exceptions that prove the rule. If a company isn't as big as a nation state or a federal cabinet department it's challenged in accessing the regulated "public" market. A "public" company is increasingly part of the public-sector bureaucracy. But it wasn't like this even very recently. When Triton covered tech IPOs up to the Covid crash, the sum total of proceeds from all the deals we covered over years didn't add up to a SpaceX. A normal year for tech new issuance was around $7b over 10-20 deals. Companies like ZScaler and PagerDuty and Zoom and Dropbox and DocSend and Atlassian and and and went public in the normal course. No longer. From a '33 Act perspective, "going public" meant putting a disclosure wrapper around shares so individual investors could buy them safely. That worked for 80-90 years and was a great way for founders and early investors to build capital and get liquidity, and for a broad base of investors to have a broad base of stocks to pick. Now going public means having the scale and heft to withstand: - The plaintiff's bar in all its forms - Activist investors - Short sellers - Congressional show trials - 27 flavors of "compliance" burden - Activist regulators on four continents - Diminished research coverage - Indexed passive markets Going "public" once meant listing shares that individual members of the public - however small and obscure - could buy. Now going "public" seems to mean entering a company into a dense, complex wrapper of common public control. "Public" used to refer to individual humans, and now refers to the state.

@p_m_robinson conducting a most civilized dinner-party style job interview with KWarsh.gov, surfacing this masterpiece of self-deprecation: "Most of us in economics that are better than average... if we were better at our craft, if we were smarter, we'd be physicists and mathematicians. Most of us that are in this business, we started in one of those fields. Then we came to economics because frankly it was easier. And so we don't have a perfected understanding of how the economy works. If we did we could could create the machine, we could create the formula." teapawt.org/HooverInst/status/1942…

If most states have “effective” price-gouging laws then: - why is there a price-gouging problem at all? - how is a Federal solution better? Arguing a precedent is weird if it demonstrates that the proposed solution is ineffective @JoeSquawk @SenWarren