Comment by glitch13
1 hour ago
"Going public" means something completely different now, especially for these companies in the news (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc).
Going public used to mean selling a portion of your company for the capital required to grow. Ideally John Q. Public buys stock, the company grows, and they can sell the stock for more money.
These companies already have the capital required to grow from private investment, and already grew; they're behemoths. The act of "going public" are those private investors using the public market to cash out their investment. The exponential growth the public buyers are expecting to see has most likely already happened.
I recall thinking the same thing when Apple and Microsoft hit $1tn. Here we are less than a decade later and they’re up 3-400%.
Microsoft and Apple had decades of profitable years before hitting a billion. These are trillion dollar IPOs without profits, selling a service well below its actual cost.