In my view, nothing materially changes. If 23andMe is a turd then an IPO through Goldman or JPMorgan isn't going to really change that, and neither will an SPAC.
Although it's a little bit "gambling" because you don't know what the SPAC acquisition will be ahead of time, I think the SPAC vehicle is great for retail investors. If you take IPOE and SoFi for example, you could have bought Social Capital Hedosophia's IPOE SPAC at $13/share or something and watched it grow once the shares were slated to be turned into SoFi shares. But in the traditional IPO process, well, you get to buy the SoFi shares at the IPO price. If you have a high net worth, that's probably fine. But if you're a retail investor - well, look at AirBnB's IPO price at $68/share and what you could actually get it at on IPO which was closer to $140 or something.
In other words, you get a little bit of exposure to the game, and of course a little bit of exposure to the risk as well which is "I don't know who they will merge with".
I think SPACs are certainly a more risky way to put your money to work, but they're fine.
Companies that don't make money, have never made money, and to my eyes have absolutely no path to profitability IPO too - the banks just like to collect fees to get you to the public market. Does it really matter if they do it through an SPAC? I don't think it does.
Your point about the business plan is interesting... it depends on the perceptions that investors have that the company can achieve a business plan, but it's not necessarily accurate right? Uber was going to do all this autonomous taxi stuff, and had it outlined in their business plan. WeWork was punished for having a crappy business plan before it filed, Uber has a crappy one (or at least one that turned out to be crappy in my opinion) and went public anyway. The disclosures certainly didn't help much - they aren't a guarantee. Things like Adam Neumann leasing his own properties to WeWork came out before any of these disclosures. If WeWork went the SPAC route (and it actually looks like it will at a $10bn or so valuation), it's not like you really hide all that stuff any more than you hide it in the normal IPO process.
If you don't like that Social Capital Hedosophia is taking SoFi public via IPOE SPAC, you can dump your shares. It's not like you have to hold the shares. It's a speculative position to take. Hell, at least you can actually dump the shares before the listing even happens - for IPOs there can be lockup periods where you wind up losing money because the IPO was way overpriced. Banks get their fees either way (which is fine).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company#Top_reache...
It was apocryphal during that bubble; it’s real now. I do not find that to be a good thing...
I know porn when I see it, and this is a flashing neon sign that reads "get in on our definitely not fraudulent spacs here to absolutely not lose money to the institutional investors juicing a most assuredly not failing business"
It's currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.
Back in markets, we would of called it 'regulatory arbitrage.'
Most SPAC acquisitions involve high-risk companies, for recent examples: Lucid (10 years on and still no actual product for sale), Nikola (fraud), 23andMe (its financials are reportedly not in great shape), Opendoor (huge portfolio of risky real properties), EVgo (history of massive losses), Clover Health (accusations of fraud, under DOJ investigation).
SoFi is the only company I can think of that is going the SPAC route that was potentially in the shape to IPO (their potential IPO was tenatively valued at $17 billion at the start of 2020, but the SPAC acquired them for around 8.65 billion). They apparently chose not to IPO because they wanted "deal certainty." However, leaving that much money on the table is a huge red flag for a financial company; it suggests that 2020 was a bad year for them and that they wanted to avoid disclosure, or that their financials are not in great shape.
Company wants to go public with higher guarantee of price, they go with SPAC. Investor wants higher return, they invest in SPAC, but there is no higher return without higher risk.
Now whether the existing IPO requirements could/should be streamlined is another question.