SpaceX had the largest IPO in history, ending its first trading day on Nasdaq valued at roughly $2tn. However, most of the news coverage focused on the debut itself.
The more instructive story is everything that came before it. By the time public investors could buy their first share, more than two decades of value creation had already happened in private hands. The public market did not create that value, it arrived to price it.We’ve been making this argument at Republic Europe for some time.Private markets now account for nearly 9% of global equities, up from around 2% a decade ago. Companies are staying private for longer, raising more of their growth capital privately and treating a listing as the destination rather than the starting line.
For individual investors, this raises an uncomfortable question. If most of the growth is happening before the IPO, what does access look like for anyone who is not an institution?That question is shaping our strategy, and is why we’re expanding the team's focus to late-stage secondary offerings. Our current WHOOP campaign shows what this looks like in practice.WHOOP sits at the intersection of AI, predictive health and elite human performance. Its subscription-only hardware model produces the kind of recurring revenue and brand loyalty that private market investors prize.
