Who is on this subjectordered by the date of their first quote here
1 of 4 lane rests on fewer than 5 quotes and is marked thin. Offsets are days from the middle first-quote date, 23 Jun 2020 — a date, and nothing else. It is not a claim about who reached a view first.
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Bill Gurley
12
1 Oct 2010 – 13 Jul 2026
-3553 d
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Brad Gerstner
5
23 Jun 2020 – 28 Aug 2025
+0 d
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Marc Rowan
14
1 May 2023 – 16 Apr 2026
+1042 d
- Paul Atkins 2 thin
The chronologysourced and dated, oldest first
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicts staying private will eventually cost more than going public for some companies.
“Well, at some point, I think they're gonna be spending more dollars avoiding public than being public. It's just going be more of a hassle.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley claims late-stage private market investments have less information than pink sheet stocks and may be historically uninformed.
“I mean, you you could have more financial information on a thinly traded pink sheet Canadian public company than you have.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues late-stage private investments may be the least informed in history and shouldn't be equated to public valuations.
“These these might be these might be the least informed investment actions in in our history. And so I don't know that you can pay too much attention to the price because they're very uninformed.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues staying private forever is unhealthy and going public is advantageous for companies.
“But I don't think it's healthy for companies to stay private forever. I think it's super advantageous to companies to pass through and become public.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley criticizes SoftBank's strategy of deploying hundreds of millions, which forces companies into massive losses.
“I've I've been quoted publicly, like, they've, you know, played a strategy where you hand hundreds of millions of dollars to a company and say, here, go win in the market with this.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues it is easier to survive downturns as a public company than as a late-stage private company.
“And so oddly, it's easier as a public company than a late stage private company to go through these types of periods.”
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Brad Gerstner
Gerstner argues large investors must be in private markets to capture value; notes inability to sell as advantage.
“If you want if you're Fidelity, if you're TRO, if you're one of these companies that wants to participate in all of that value creation, you can't not be in the private markets.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan reframes public versus private markets as fundamentally about liquidity rather than risk.
“We now know public can be risky as well. We now have found out that private can be both safe and risky. What we're talking about is differing degrees of liquidity.”
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“2022 was a good opportunity for us to realize that public can be both safe and risky, and private can be both safe and risky. The only difference is a degree of liquidity.”
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Brad Gerstner
Gerstner predicts private market valuations will normalize to match public market declines of 50%, not just 5-10%.
“There was some you know, there's a report out this week that lots of people comment on Twitter where public markets were down 50% and private marks were down, I don't know, five to 10%.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan argues retirement systems know their liquidity needs for ten years and should get paid for illiquidity.
“Liquidity liquidity is a risk to everyone but in differing degrees. So if you are a retirement plan or a retirement system, you know your liquidity requirements for the next ten years.”
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Brad Gerstner
Gerstner identifies deep private capital from sovereign wealth funds as structural change preventing companies from going public unlike past decades.
“And if you look at the private market alternatives for them for capital, we didn't have sovereign wealth funds that were writing multi billion dollar checks at that point in time.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan states public companies halved to 4,000 while 80% of large companies are now private.
“We now have 4,000 public companies. People think most of the action is in public markets. 80% of companies over 100,000,000 of revenue and 80% of employment is in private companies.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan claims Apollo's private markets plus guaranteed income offering is 60% better, not just 5-10% better.
“the outcome that we can offer with access to private markets and guaranteed income is not 5% better or 10% better, it's 60% better.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says private companies with weak metrics aren't better off than public ones; staying private is self-deception.
“If you're private at a 100,000,000 revenue with a 10% growth rate, it's not like you're better off. Like like, you're just fooling yourself.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley states over a thousand private unicorns have average growth rates below 10 percent.
“There's over a thousand private unicorns. Some people estimate that the average growth rate, which we should talk about because it ties into unit economics and pragmatism, is below 10%.”
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Brad Gerstner
Gerstner says OpenAI's $10B raise at $150B valuation is essentially public but excludes retail investors.
“You know, it's just nomenclature to not call that public. The problem with it is, the only people who get access to that are accredited investors, and retail investors are completely cut out.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan challenges the perception that public markets are safe and private markets risky.
“We have a perception that what's public is safe and what's private is risky. But what if we're wrong?”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan contrasts the private markets landscape forty years ago with today's more diversified options.
“Forty years ago, private was three products, Private equity, venture capital, and hedge funds. All can be good investments, but all have risk. And public were 8,000 public companies, diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley states there are approximately a thousand private companies valued over a billion dollars pre-LLM.
“There's somewhere around a thousand. So these are a thousand private companies that have raised money over a billion dollars.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley identifies approximately 1,000 private companies valued over $1 billion pre-LLM era.
“So these are a thousand private companies that have raised money over a billion dollars. And Chad GBD told me it was $12.50. NBCA says 900. Let's just say it's near a thousand.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley estimates zombie unicorns have collectively raised $300 billion in capital.
“Yeah. Seems like they've raised somewhere between 2 and 300,000,000 each. And so you roll all that up, it's 300,000,000,000.”
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Brad Gerstner
Gerstner says OpenAI and Anthropic deals are bigger than any tech IPO in five years.
“I was just looking at these. I think these are bigger private IPOs than any public IPO done in the last five years in the tech market.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan says private market capital enables companies to invest long-term without quarterly pressure or accessing public markets.
“I think what we're seeing is the availability of capital in private markets is allowing companies to do a series of things, to invest for the long term, not to be driven by quarterly earnings, and to obtain massive amounts of debt and equity to finance their business plan without accessing public markets.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan notes the trend extends beyond AI to defense and other future sectors remaining private.
“And it is not just AI companies. The defense companies of the future, they're also still private in many instances.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan predicts large manufacturing and consumer companies will remain private in the future.
“It will not surprise me to have large manufacturing consumer companies that are private in the future.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan predicts a private company index will exist alongside the S&P 500.
“It will not surprise me that we end up with an S and P 500 index and an index of companies that are private.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan predicts individual investors will match institutional scale in alternative investments.
“I predict that individuals will be at least as big as institutions in their alternative bucket.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan notes the major alternative asset managers grew from $40 billion combined in 2008 to nearly $1 trillion.
“I mean, we were the whole, the entirety of the companies that you see that are public today, everyone was 40,000,000,000 in 2008. We're now close to a trillion Blackstone more KKR, a little less.”
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Marc Rowan
Rowan notes major innovation companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Stripe all remain private despite US capital market strength.
“But I'll go through the companies who are creating massive change. SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Cursor, Cognition, Andoril. What do all of them have in common?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains private cap tables are structured to only go up, unlike public stocks.
“private one last thing. Yeah. Sorry. Private cap tables are not structured very well to go down.”
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Paul Atkins
Atkins says market access should not be limited to wealthy insiders.
“Exposure to the full dynamism of our markets – both public and private – should not be reserved for wealthy insiders.”
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Paul Atkins
Atkins proposes facilitating retail investor participation in private markets with safeguards.
“Our agenda includes a proposal to better facilitate retail investor participation in private markets while preserving their protection with appropriate safeguards.”
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Where they overlapsame programme, same subject
- Invest Like the Best also carries Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on this subject, at different times.