~30 years ago (in 2002), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was adopted. In the wake of scandals like Enron and WorldCom, it imposed a bunch of new rules that make being a public company more expensive. At the margin, that would impact the count of public companies.
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/
Sorry if I'm being very dumb, but is there an actual link to the article I can click here or is this just a tweet by a guy saying he wrote an article?
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.
Does this calculation take into account garbage stocks and securities fraud? Perhaps some of the reduction was the result of regulation favorable to the consumer?
Probably from all the consolidation. In the USA there used to be hundreds of companies supplying various industries. Now there's generally 2-5, and they all have the same shareholders.
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."
What influence does Vanguard or Blackrock have in corporate governance? They’re just vehicles for old peoples’ retirement funds. They’re not polling strings in corporate mergers.
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.
> The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.
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.
Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.
So if I invest my meager peasant earnings in Vanguard funds, my holdings are considered equally as important as the Rockefellers?
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.
Most very wealthy individuals (not sure your examples fit this group) do not use Vanguard. They are more likely to use private wealth management. I feel like you actually have no idea what you are talking about?
So your conclusion is that very wealthy individuals do not own and control Vanguard--they have nothing to do with it at all--that it's collectively owned by the rabble--and all is well as we little people have everything in control via our company Vanguard (that we little people collectively own) and together we're heading into a bright shining new tomorrow? Definitely nothing sinister going on here involving big monied interests vacuuming up ownership of the entire economy through relentless consolidation.
I don’t think you know what monopoly means if you think Vanguard and BlackRock are a monopoly. (At least duopoly would be semantically possible, but factually still wrong)
If for example Russia and China together controlled a certain resource, then from the standpoint of the USA, Russia/China have a monopoly on that resource. Doesn't matter if Russia and China are in theory two different countries. They are in fact acting together with the same interest in this circumstance.
Follow ownership up the chain and you will discover the overall point is correct: everything is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
I hate this sort pedantry when this perspective dodges the ultimate lack of competing interests necessary for a market to produce goods and services efficiently. Just because our country has horrifically bad antitrust legislation doesn't mean we need to lower our discourse to that level. People have always used "monopoly" to mean "noncompetitive"; so just take it to mean the latter.
This is disinformation. Blackrock and Vanguard manage the accounts of people who own these. They themselves do not own the shares. It would be like you saying you don’t own your 401k, Fidelity does.
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.
More likely it was the 1979 supreme court case Reiter v. Sonotone Corp which instituted the "consumer welfare standard" which shifted antitrust enforcement from focusing on protecting competition in markets to "protecting consumers" which made it much easier for large mergers to be approved.
Seems to be little incentive for companies to go public, other than fleecing 401k account holders that have to invest in funds managed by the same companies that underwrite IPOs.
~30 years ago (in 2002), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was adopted. In the wake of scandals like Enron and WorldCom, it imposed a bunch of new rules that make being a public company more expensive. At the margin, that would impact the count of public companies.
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/
The x.com post (by the journalist!) does not point to the actual article. I guess that's discouraged on X? Talk about social media being useless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/13/lawyers-c...
https://archive.is/7ATtM
The main thesis is that the liabilities risk/cost from securities class action lawsuits is a tax on public companies.
>I guess that's discouraged on X?
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.
Sorry if I'm being very dumb, but is there an actual link to the article I can click here or is this just a tweet by a guy saying he wrote an article?
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.
Does this calculation take into account garbage stocks and securities fraud? Perhaps some of the reduction was the result of regulation favorable to the consumer?
The number of traditional public companies has been cut in half.
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.
Probably from all the consolidation. In the USA there used to be hundreds of companies supplying various industries. Now there's generally 2-5, and they all have the same shareholders.
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."
What influence does Vanguard or Blackrock have in corporate governance? They’re just vehicles for old peoples’ retirement funds. They’re not polling strings in corporate mergers.
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.
> The big companies are better and IT enables them to scale in ways that were impossible before.
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.
Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.
So if I invest my meager peasant earnings in Vanguard funds, my holdings are considered equally as important as the Rockefellers?
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.
Most very wealthy individuals (not sure your examples fit this group) do not use Vanguard. They are more likely to use private wealth management. I feel like you actually have no idea what you are talking about?
So your conclusion is that very wealthy individuals do not own and control Vanguard--they have nothing to do with it at all--that it's collectively owned by the rabble--and all is well as we little people have everything in control via our company Vanguard (that we little people collectively own) and together we're heading into a bright shining new tomorrow? Definitely nothing sinister going on here involving big monied interests vacuuming up ownership of the entire economy through relentless consolidation.
I don’t think you know what monopoly means if you think Vanguard and BlackRock are a monopoly. (At least duopoly would be semantically possible, but factually still wrong)
If for example Russia and China together controlled a certain resource, then from the standpoint of the USA, Russia/China have a monopoly on that resource. Doesn't matter if Russia and China are in theory two different countries. They are in fact acting together with the same interest in this circumstance.
Follow ownership up the chain and you will discover the overall point is correct: everything is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
I hate this sort pedantry when this perspective dodges the ultimate lack of competing interests necessary for a market to produce goods and services efficiently. Just because our country has horrifically bad antitrust legislation doesn't mean we need to lower our discourse to that level. People have always used "monopoly" to mean "noncompetitive"; so just take it to mean the latter.
Only the first two sentences in your post made any sense.
This is disinformation. Blackrock and Vanguard manage the accounts of people who own these. They themselves do not own the shares. It would be like you saying you don’t own your 401k, Fidelity does.
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.
The tweet and article say exactly what the culprit it and it's lack of IPOs due to fear of shareholder litigation.
Did SPACs meaningfully contribute to this?
More likely it was the 1979 supreme court case Reiter v. Sonotone Corp which instituted the "consumer welfare standard" which shifted antitrust enforcement from focusing on protecting competition in markets to "protecting consumers" which made it much easier for large mergers to be approved.
Actual link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/13/lawyers-c... (https://archive.ph/7ATtM)
Seems to be little incentive for companies to go public, other than fleecing 401k account holders that have to invest in funds managed by the same companies that underwrite IPOs.
So there's no incentive except money.