The Decreasing Number of Public Companies

November 13, 2024

The number of publicly traded companies in the US has decreased dramatically over the past three decades.

In 1996, there were over 8,090 publicly traded companies in the US and today there are just 4,700. This has ramifications for investors, as well as financial markets more broadly. In his 2023 annual letter to shareholders, Jamie Dimon, CEO and Chairman of JP Morgan, called attention to what he considered the troubling trend of the “diminishing role of publicly traded companies in the American financial system.” Meanwhile, rather than pursuing the path of going public, some of the world’s largest and most valuable companies are remaining private, including ByteDance, OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX.

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