The Failure of SPACs

They perfectly succeeded at their purpose, no? Dump terrible companies on public investors under $GME-era hype without the usual disclosures required for public listing. They nailed it!

Sure a few sponsors got burned here and there, but the gamble was obviously the whole point.

The purpose of an SPAC is solely to circumvent to regulations governing IPOs.

Specifically those rules and regulations preventing repeated fraud on investors.

The SPACs failure is by design, if an SPAC could succeed, they would IPO as they could raise more money because they'd have backing of real audits and reports.

I think the first time I actually heard a SPAC be mentioned was when the MariaDB situation happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451

It was quite unfortunate to hear, because having a company related to the RDBMS project seemed like a nice thing and it lent credibility to MariaDB appearing like a stable and viable supported alternative to MySQL.

I mean, PostgreSQL exists, sure, but it's always nice to have to have other options and alternatives (modern MySQL/MariaDB are both passable for many use cases).

Hidden ownership can lead to a significant lack of transparency. Potential investors and partners may be wary of getting involved with a SPAC when they can't ascertain who the real decision-makers or beneficiaries are. This wariness can affect fundraising efforts and the SPAC's overall credibility.