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/

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.

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.

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.

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."