Behind The Velvet Rope Series | 01

Why Wealth Is Being Created Before Companies Go Public

Written by Blaise Stevens

MBA, CFP®, AIFA®, CLU®, ChFC®

There used to be a specific, bell-ringing moment when regular investors got their shot at the future.

It was called an IPO.

A company would spend years building something extraordinary, then throw open the doors to the public market. If you were paying attention and had the conviction to act, you could buy a piece of it. That is how Microsoft’s early investors turned $1,000 into millions. That is how Amazon’s patient shareholders rode a bookstore into a global empire worth trillions. That is how getting in at the right moment could change your financial life.

That moment still exists. The problem, for most investors, is that it increasingly comes too late.
The biggest, most transformative companies of our era are growing in private markets, behind a velvet rope that most retail investors have never had a way to access. By the time they ring the opening bell at the NYSE or Nasdaq, much of the extraordinary wealth creation is already behind them.

This is not a small or temporary shift. It is a structural change to how capitalism distributes its rewards, and understanding it is one of the most important things a serious investor can do right now.

Then: The IPO as Starting Line

To understand how the world has changed, it helps to revisit how it used to work.
1987 | Microsoft
When Microsoft went public in 1986, it raised $61 million and carried a market value of approximately $777 million. Bill Gates reportedly thought even that was too high. He pushed for a lower offering price. Today, Microsoft is worth roughly $3 trillion. Every dollar invested at the IPO has multiplied thousands of times over, and the vast majority of that journey happened in full public view, available to any investor with a brokerage account.
Source: Goldman Sachs historical records on the Microsoft IPO, 1986; Microsoft market capitalization as of March 2026.
1997 | Amazon
Amazon went public in 1997 at a market value of just $438 million. Its IPO filing described the company as the leading online retailer of books. Today Amazon is worth over $2.3 trillion and runs the backbone of the global internet. Again, nearly all of that value creation unfolded after the IPO, on the public market, where ordinary investors could participate.
Source: Yahoo Finance historical market capitalization data; Amazon IPO prospectus, 1997.
2012 | Meta
Meta, then Facebook, was already a more mature business when it went public in 2012 at an $83 billion valuation. Public investors still had the opportunity to participate in roughly a 20x gain from that point to today. The IPO was not the finish line. It was a checkpoint in a long race, and the race continued for years on the public market.
Source: Meta Platforms market capitalization history via MacroTrends; IPO valuation widely reported, May 2012.
The pattern was consistent for decades: companies went public early, often small, and grew into their value in full public view.

Now: The Velvet Rope Is Up

The generation of companies being built today looks nothing like that picture.
Anthropic’s valuation grew from $61.5 billion to $380 billion in under 12 months. All of it happened in private markets.
Source: CNBC, February 2026; Forge Global, December 2025; EBC Financial Group, January 2026.
Anthropic
Anthropic, founded in 2021, has raised over $23 billion since its founding and carries a current valuation exceeding $380 billion. Its run-rate revenue crossed $5 billion by August 2025 and was tracking toward $9 billion by year-end. That entire arc of wealth creation, hundreds of billions of dollars, happened entirely in private markets and was unavailable to most investors.
Source: Forge Global Anthropic IPO insights, December 2025; CNBC funding round reporting, February 2026.
SpaceX
SpaceX was founded in 2002. Its Starlink satellite internet business generated an estimated $8.2 billion in revenue in 2024. The company was valued at approximately $127 billion in early 2024. By December 2025, secondary market transactions implied a valuation near $800 billion, and the company is now targeting a 2026 IPO at up to $1.5 trillion. That is more than $1 trillion in private wealth creation in less than two years.
Source: Payload Space revenue estimates; Bloomberg, December 2025; Forge Global, February 2026; The Motley Fool, December 2025.
Stripe
Stripe, the payments infrastructure company, processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume in 2024, with 38% year-over-year growth. It generated an estimated $5.1 billion in net revenue. It has been profitable since 2023. Its private valuation sits above $100 billion. And it has no current plans to go public.
Source: Sacra research, 2024 annual estimates; Stripe confirmed profitability in 2024; PYMNTS.com, September 2025.
These are not speculative startups. They are the defining companies of our era, generating real revenue, real profits, and real economic value at enormous scale. And most investors have had essentially no way to own a piece of them.
What Smart Investors Are Saying…
This shift has not gone unnoticed by the people who have spent careers thinking about where money flows and who benefits.

Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital and one of the most closely followed technology investors in the world, has pointed out that more than half of all Americans do not have investment accounts of any kind. They have no financial upside, as he puts it, in the great engine of American innovation and compounding. The wealth gap that results is not just an economic problem, he argues. It is a political one. When the benefits of the most transformative technology companies in history flow exclusively to institutional investors and the already-wealthy, the legitimacy of capitalism itself comes into question.

Source: Brad Gerstner, CNBC Delivering Alpha summit, September 2023; Hoover Institution podcast, November 2024.
Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital and co-host of the influential All-In podcast, has raised a related concern. In his 2024 annual letter, he observed that Stripe’s decision to stay private and use secondary transactions for liquidity signaled a broader trend: the most promising companies increasingly prefer to delay or avoid IPOs entirely. His worry is that if the best companies are systematically privatized, they can only be owned by wealthy individuals and institutional investors, not by the public whose retirement savings and financial futures depend on broad market participation.
Source: Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital 2024 Annual Letter, published June 2025.
Why This Is Happening…
The most common explanation is that founders are being greedy, hoarding returns for venture capitalists and wealthy insiders. There is a grain of truth in that, but the fuller picture is more structural.

Private capital has become genuinely abundant. For much of modern business history, companies went public primarily because they needed money, and the public markets were where large amounts of capital lived. That is no longer the case. The number of private companies valued above $1 billion has grown to over 1,200. Sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments, and family offices have poured trillions into private vehicles.

Source: CB Insights unicorn data via CNBC, October 2025
The median age of a company at its IPO has risen from 6.9 years a decade ago to 10.7 years today. When a company can raise $10 billion from a single private source without quarterly earnings calls, activist shareholders, or SEC oversight, the incentive to go public diminishes substantially.
Source: Morningstar data via Morgan Stanley IPO Outlook, 2025.
The regulatory burden of being public is real and growing. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance alone adds millions in annual costs. Every strategic decision gets scrutinized by analysts and short sellers whose time horizons may be measured in weeks. For a company trying to build a colony on Mars or develop transformative artificial intelligence, the 90-day quarterly reporting cycle is a constraint, not a feature.

Antitrust enforcement has effectively closed the acquisition exit. For decades, a company that did not want to go public had a reliable alternative: get acquired. Tech giants were voracious buyers. That door has largely closed. Regulators have become significantly more aggressive about blocking large technology acquisitions, which means companies stay private longer and grow much larger before any liquidity event occurs.

Secondary markets have matured as a liquidity tool. Early investors and employees no longer need an IPO to get liquidity. SpaceX runs regular tender offers, internal mini-transactions that let shareholders sell at market-clearing prices, without requiring a public listing. When the primary argument for going public was that investors need liquidity, and that problem is already being solved, the urgency disappears.

What This Means for Your Portfolio
A portfolio composed entirely of publicly traded stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs will eventually own many of these companies. Your S&P 500 index fund will own SpaceX after it goes public, perhaps at a $1.5 trillion valuation, after more than two decades of private wealth creation. Your tech fund will own Stripe someday, after a company that has been building for over a decade has already delivered its most extraordinary growth to private shareholders.

This matters because the most consequential value creation of our generation is occurring before, not after, the companies responsible for it reach public markets. The investors benefiting from that value creation are institutions, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, and a relatively small number of accredited individual investors with the access, knowledge, and relationships to participate.

The gap between what public market investors own and what is actually being built in the economy has never been wider. For investors with a long time horizon, appropriate risk tolerance, and accredited investor status, addressing that gap is increasingly central to serious portfolio construction.

Curious whether private market exposure belongs in your financial plan?

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