David Solomon

But at the end of the day, given the way markets work and indexation and passive funds and ETFs,

A $5 billion market cap company with an $800 million IPO, the discount associated with getting that going has been less attractive to investors.

And part of the reason is public capital, private capital has been available without a discount.

But that, by the way, that could be a cyclical thing.

In other words, we could see periods of time where private capital have a bigger discount, the public market will be more efficient, and then you'll see more of those companies come to the public market.

But I think fundamentally, we're going to operate with fewer public companies and the companies are going to be bigger.

I mean, that's just that's the way the market structures evolve.

Sure.

In fact, somebody said to me recently, this is unprecedented.

They were talking about 10 companies having 30-some percent of the S&P waiting on a market cap base.

And I was like, no, it's not unprecedented.

How about the 1920s?

How about the 1960s?

How about the late 1990s to 2000?

I made the comment yesterday at the Economic Club because I was asked about the way the stock market's running.

And if you actually look at the whole segment, I said a lot more than that.

And I actually said before I said it, I said, look, I'm going to say something and I know it's going to create a lot of headlines.

But I do think it should be said because I do think I'm seeing some of that behavior that I've seen before.

And people are worried about missing out on this technology boom, whether it's compute, whether it's storage, whether it's chips, et cetera.

And so people are crowding in.