In the last 30 years, the number of public companies has been cut in half

kdhaskjdhadjk

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."

crsv

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?

linuxftw

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.

xnx

Did SPACs meaningfully contribute to this?

ChrisArchitect

Actual link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/13/lawyers-c... ( https://archive.ph/7ATtM )

NordSteve

~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/

keoneflick

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.

nivertech

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.

NoboruWataya

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.