00:00So it looks like this year is going to be a year of mega IPOs. We had the private confidential
00:05filing from Anthropic. We'll probably get a couple others, et cetera. Private capital markets have
00:10gotten so liquid that some of these very successful companies, they could, in theory,
00:14maybe never go public if they didn't want to. These companies are going to be coming at some
00:17of the biggest market cap companies in the index, and the public investor will not have caught any
00:22of the ride from the 500th biggest and the S&P 500 to the 20th, et cetera. Does this break
00:27capitalism? Is this bad for the U.S.? Well, I'm going to give you a conclusion first,
00:31and then we can try to dig in a little bit to the details, which I know you guys love
00:35to do.
00:35But I just start. I don't think this is going to break capitalism. And I think it's good for the
00:40U.S. There goes your headline. I think it's good for the U.S. to have the biggest, most important
00:44companies in the world. When you talk about what's happening, there are a lot of complex
00:51things happening about why we have fewer public companies today than we had 25 years ago.
00:57Yeah. You know, this is a long-term journey around policy decisions and market structure
01:01over a very long period of time. The reason that companies like Microsoft went public when they
01:07did it the size that they did was there was no capital available to them other than going into
01:10the public market. Right, right. But it's not fair to say that investors got to participate,
01:15you know, in everything because it's not like there's more access for investors today.
01:19Well, no one talks about the 900 companies that went to zero that went public in the same year
01:23as Microsoft. And by the way, that's another thing. Most companies don't survive. It's just
01:27not that simple. I do think we've created a regulatory structure and a market structure
01:32that really makes it unattractive to go public until you have to. The reason these companies are
01:37going public now is because they have to. They have capital needs that are so voracious that it is
01:43not prudent for them to try to do 100 percent of it in the private market and not have a
01:47public
01:48currency. It's just not prudent. And that's why I think you're going to see a bunch of these
01:52companies go public because they actually need the capital.
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