jezStripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter
Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom), as soon as Stripe goes public you're getting dumped on.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
You need an annual income of $200K to become an accredited investor. If you don't have that, you anyways shouldn't be participating in risky private markets.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
Why don't we extend this to the risky public manipulated stock market?
Because the odds of you losing all your money on private tech company shares are nearly 100%, and the odds of you losing all your money in SPDR or VFINX are nearly 0%.
Still seems silly when meme stocks exist and the establishment (like entire media and news apparatus) can and do collude to mess with things (like “Black Monday” ~2021 when all the media and news lied and said wall street bets and meme stonk people had moved on to silver) and within days all the meme stock gains across over a dozen companies were entirely wiped out.
Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one gets investigated or in trouble. Nothing is done. If they cared about the average person something would be done.
When people investigate meme stocks the people complaining that they can't get on Stripe's cap table take the side of the meme stocks!
Why do you think that is?
Because they watched a small group of people win a roulette straight bet when the ball landed on 32 and now think federal action is needed to allow everybody to bet straight 32 on everything.
There is no other way for that group of retail investors to build wealth other than go into these highly and extremely risky assets that you and I hate and do not recommend. (even more risky than secondary markets)
Sure, they can invest in public companies but if lots of these high growth companies stay private, the gains will not be shared towards retail especially for their pensions.
> This is obviously not true. Most wealthy people do not build their wealth by gambling on meme stocks and tech companies. That's an extraordinarily Twitter-blinkered thing to believe.
I never said wealthy, I said "retail investors", and most retail investors are not wealthy. Maybe you've been reading off Twitter and got that mixed up.
Your words not mine, but I'll just say the wealthy have more options than retail.
Shame, because I know some smart people who want to invest in the same companies as me and cannot and have to wait until it goes public for a that chance (if that ever comes)
Now with most growth companies staying private these people won't get a stake in the future and obviously you're fine with that.
I wonder if you would think it would be fine (if not great) if Google, Apple and other companies would just stay private in another universe.