Friends,
This week on The Spillover, Rebecca and I discuss the SpaceX IPO, highlighting the question of what it means for financial-market structure. Ever since writing The Power Law (2022), I have been critical of tech companies' reluctance to go public, and in this episode I get to air some of my reasons. By staying private, decacorns escape the checks and balances of robust corporate governance; they deprive regular investors of the chance to own growth stocks without paying big fees to financial intermediaries. Rebecca, for her part, punctures a couple of pervasive myths: that the flood of new equity issuance from SpaceX, Anthropic, and possibly OpenAI will weigh heavily on stock-market valuations; and that the inclusion of SpaceX in the Nasdaq 100 index will foist unwanted Musk shares on the investing public. As a director of Vanguard, Rebecca knows whereof she speaks. Please give it a listen. You can find it here.
Sebastian |
Sebastian Mallaby
Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow in International Economics
Council on Foreign Relations |
