This is nonsense. The stock market had been propped up by FAANG. But with AI we have a few trillion dollars of value being created by new entrants (e.g. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic) and legacy companies newly stepping on FAANG (e.g. Oracle, Perplexity).
It may all be a fever dream. But like the dark fiber of the 90s, it should—worst case—leave behind a lot of energy and datacentre infrastructure. (If Washington would get out of the way.)
Yeah OK, cool I guess
Right now using the valuation technique that tge value of a company is the net present value of all future returns * some multiple, we don’t know if any of them will ever be valuable.
This metric has nothing to do with whether a company is public or private.
Nobody ever knows what a company is worth other than the people buying and selling it in an M&A transaction at that precise moment. Public markets just have more transactions than private markets—the mechanism of price discovery is similar, if not the same.
> if all of the private companies “worth billions” went under, only VCs would be harmed
I’d be shocked if it didn’t take out the banking system.
You’re describing the annihilation of trillions of dollars of pension, endowment and retirement wealth; to say nothing of the effects on municipal, state and federal payroll finances; to say nothing of the asset-backed loans tied to these assets and purchases they make from public companies and their employees’ spending.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/private-equity-wants-a-large...
The article claims pensions, on the other hand, as one of the leading investors in private equity.
The term retirement plan is radically different from pensions.
By way of example, your local teachers union pension is probably massively invested to private equity. Your tech worker 401k is not.