Everyone agrees the IPO is broken. Founders don't want them. VCs prefer staying private longer. Public markets reward quarterly earnings over moonshots. The consensus is so solid it feels like fact: going public used to matter; now it's a last resort.
This consensus is also exactly wrong in the ways that matter most.
The real story isn't that IPOs are dying. It's that we've stopped asking what their disappearance actually breaks in how capital gets allocated in this country. And that's a far more uncomfortable question than "are IPOs still relevant?"
Let me be direct: the current private capital model works brilliantly if you're already rich or connected to people who are. It's a closed loop. Institutional investors, mega-funds, and the startup ecosystem's inner circle can access early-stage returns. Regular people cannot. The public market was never perfect, but it was theoretically open. Anyone with a brokerage account could own a piece of the future.
When IPOs were regular events, even flawed ones, they functioned as a pressure valve. A founder couldn't just stay private forever, extracting value for a tight circle of preferred investors while locking out everyone else. Eventually, you had to go public and submit to broader scrutiny. You had to open your cap table to the masses.
Now? A company can raise at $50 billion in private rounds, make more money than most public companies, and never face the requirement of public disclosure or democratic access to ownership. We've optimized the IPO completely out of the system, and we've replaced it with what? Secondary markets where the same insiders trade stakes at higher valuations? Venture debt that extends the private phase indefinitely? It's elegantly arranged for people already at the table.
The obvious consensus says this is fine. Companies stay flexible longer. Founders retain more control. No short-term pressure. These are real benefits, and I'm not pretending they're not.
But the better question is what this breaks. What happens when the primary wealth-creation vehicle in the economy stops being available to ordinary people? When your neighbor can't buy into the next generational company at its IPO because it never goes public? When venture returns compound behind closed doors for a narrowing set of players while everyone else gets told they're "democratizing finance" through a fractional share app?
We're not having this conversation because the IPO-is-dead narrative is too comfortable for everyone involved. It tells founders they've won. It tells VCs they've created a better system. It tells the public markets they're irrelevant anyway, so why fight?
What it doesn't tell you is that we're redesigning which Americans get access to wealth creation, and we're doing it by consensus rather than intention.
The robotaxi approvals, the AI startup valuations, the billion-dollar funding rounds: all of these are built on the assumption that private capital will keep flowing and that going public is optional. Maybe that's true for the next decade. But IPOs didn't disappear because they were bad. They disappeared because private capital got so abundant that the incentive to go public evaporated.
When that capital cycle slows, which it will, we'll have a problem. We'll have built an entire generation of massive companies that exist outside public markets, outside ordinary ownership, outside the reach of regular investors. And we won't have a natural on-ramp back to public participation because we spent ten years dismantling it.
The IPO isn't broken. We just broke what it represented: the idea that markets could be genuinely open. And we did it so quietly that no one bothered to notice we were doing it.