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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

I thought once companies got to a certain size they were forced to go public? Or is that in Canada only?

In the US once a certain number of people hold stock you have additional financial disclosure laws. But if it's owned by a single owner / family, you're never forced to go public regardless of revenue. That wouldn't make any sense, since you'd basically be forcing the owners to sell their shares whether they wanted to or not.

It's not an unwarranted assumption given all the other things our government forces us to do with our money.

I think in California you have to go public over certain number of employees. Facebook had problems with that.

No. Same issue. They had over the legally allowed number of shareholders

That was also based on the number of shareholders, not the number of employees. Facebook began issuing RSUs, which don't count towards the limit, to employees when they started approaching the 500 shareholder limit, but I believe trading on SecondMarket pushed them over 500.

Also I think Facebook was originally a partnership and then converted into a DE c-corp. I don't think they were ever a CA company.

I took the comment as meaning "go public", somewhat confusingly, in a colloquial sense of "not be stealth" or "go public with their numbers" rather than "becoming a publicly owned, stock-market-traded company". The latter is indeed not the case in Canada; you can have a large privately owned company. But above a certain threshold you have to at last disclose annual revenue figures.

Sorry, yes, I meant become publicly trade-able. I assume this is done to force companies over a certain size to open their books? Maybe I've misunderstood how it works in Ontario/Canada as well, considering the other comments mentioning the number of shareholders.

No, in Canada you never need to open your books at any size.

Not at all. What you're referring to has to do with exceeding a certain number of shareholders. In fact many Fortune 500 companies are privately held. Koch, SC Johnson, etc[1], not to mention the myriad large companies that are taken private by private equity firms.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/

Cargill had over $130B in revenue last year. Their exact profits are unknown (obviously) but probably around $4B a year.

Not bad for a family-owned business.

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