This feels rich. Compare:
Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.
PayPal: $41.51B right now.
The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.
The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).
The path to declaring yourself accredited is uniquely easy. Just say it. The whole space is deeply unregulated and unaudited. What makes it insane is that those middleman are making a small fortune exploiting this loophole protecting large companies from being forced to go public. The number is 2000 private investors. Rest assured, more than 2000 individuals have money in Stripe today. It's a total scam.
How exactly?
The easiest way? Angelist.
I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.
Fair point, though a lot has changed from 15 years ago. A lot of what you mentioned is sort of the new baseline most payment gateways ship with, and working on code you haven't touched in a while is certainly a lot easier nowadays with agents too. All that said, if you're satisfied with the price and the product I am not here to convince you to swap.
Yea it wasn’t meant as a counter argument either.
To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.
You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.
Sure, though not every small project needs to worry about that. Perhaps the payment workflow is a tight loop that has KYC through physical memberships (ID + Photo), say a gym membership for example, and the entire system is private just needs a gateway to do transactions.
Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
Is this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target.
(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine.
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
1.6 percent of global GDP blows my mind.
Well, it's not exactly a fair comparison, since they're comparing a volume number with GDP, which is total value produced in a year. Volume numbers are usually much bigger than production numbers, since money moves around a lot.
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
For comparison, Visa's stated FY 2025 (ended Sep 30, 2025) payments volume was $14.2T.
rough math, but:
$14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
I was curious, and the American Clearing House has a TPV of $93 trillion, which means ACH is 78%?? That seems too high.
Oh - not all bank transfers count in GDP. I often move money from one account to another.
Note that Visa has the same issue: withdrawing money from an ATM shouldn’t count towards GDP! Neither does Vemo-ing a friend to settle up a split restaurant bill (my Venmo is attached to my debit card).
At least it’s not 24.9%
Americans and credit have an unhealthy relationship.
Why will a number blow your mind? Have you thought about how Universe exists from nothing?
I find it inspiring. I relate to the Collison brothers. They're a couple of hackers from Ireland. It blows my mind that a couple young guys like that can build something and in 20 years capture 2% of the entire world's economic activity.
Congratulations.
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
stripe has a bigger software revenue mix -- Atlas, Treasury, Radar, Connect -- that commands higher multiples than pure payment processing. adyen is cleaner as a business but it's basically a payments rail. stripe's embedded finance products are what analysts are really pricing in. whether that thesis holds post-IPO is another question.
Not all revenue is equal. Payments is interesting because the processor’s growth is directly tied to the growth of its customers. Stripe captures the vast majority of high growth SF startups. Stripe has better customers.
It is not 5x bigger, it is 5x more valuable. Obviously Stripes 2x higher revenue is part of that equation, but not all of it.
Also Adyen's processing volume grew just 8% (to $1.6T usd) in 2025, while Stripe's grew 34% (to $1.9T usd).
Stripe's bigger _and_ growing faster.
yeah, my bad, wanted to say more valuable
According to wikipedia, Stripe had a revenue of 5.1B in 2024.
Revenue is not profit. All we know about Stripe is that it's "robustly profitable": https://assets.stripeassets.com/fzn2n1nzq965/3LlGw839Q6kUwxZ...
Adyen reported 500 million EUR in pure profit: https://investors.adyen.com/financials/h2-2025-4r9rc
Braintree had $1.53 trillion TPV in 2023[0], and it's just a subsidiary of Paypal which has tanked to $40 billion market cap despite revenue and profit that are probably lightyears ahead of Stripe.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
Paypal TPV YoY growth for 2025 was 7%[1].
Stripe cites 34% growth for the same period and metric.
[1]: https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q...
Thats not bad for a mature business like paypal
I’m not the most well versed but isn’t that still insane to be 4x valuation of PayPal? Maybe it’s more PayPal valuation being crap vs Stripe being too high. Adyen is close to PayPal with a PE of 30 (vs PayPal’s sub-10) and Adyen like PayPal is close to being back to its IPO level.
PayPal seems crazy when it has acquired businesses like Honey (probably hasn’t helped) and Braintree/Venmo since then. Pretty funny PayPal was spun off as the better growth stock but eBay has tripled since then and their market caps are the same now.
I don't know you have paypal and stripe in the same sentence. Paypal is not a great service at all.
This multiple is indirectly a bet on AI growth , because Stripe is the payment processor for the vast majority of AI startups.
It's insane that they aren't public yet. Their investors must be pressuring them like crazy to IPO.
Stripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
I hope they never go public (also as an ex-Stripe!)
I can't really see a net-positive benefit to having public shareholders and reporting requirements. Do we think Stripe's leadership needs feedback from random investment advisors or analysts? Do employees need the distraction of daily-updating stock prices? Would quarterly reporting incentivize better decision making?
In my opinion: ehhhhhhhhhhhh
I see the benefit, but if you're joining Stripe you know the trade-off of RSUs in a company that doesn't provide daily liquidity. They provide it on a regular basis, so you're not locked in forever (a la my 2014 Gusto shares).
I'm sure they already have more than the 500 non-accredited or 2000 accredited shareholder total that would trigger most of those reporting requirements anyways. So Stripe already has most of the drawbacks of being a public company without the benefits.
The reporting isn’t the drawbacks of being public, it’s the investors.
They get to _choose_ who they let in if they are private (by definition).
They don’t need the public’s money and don’t want the headache of dealing with the public. I’d completely agree if I were them.
Disclaimer: ex-stripe who is still an investor.
The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.
Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
I get the feeling that the founders will not bend and invest for long term and not quarterly, as a non ex-stripe at least judging by their patience to IPO
Also ex-Stripe. This suggests an opportunity to build an exchange that addresses these problems. Could one build an exchange with deliberate "turn-based" liquidity to avoid the problem of daily stock price distraction, for example? (This is hard because there will always be secondary markets, but presumably this is already the case.)
Do very many companies provide daily liquidity? Most of my time getting RSUs have had trading windows, once a quarter if you're lucky.
When I was an employee of a subsidiary of Infospace, my RSUs were always worthless (honestly, I don't remember if any vested while I was there), at Yahoo, we could generally trade, although one shouldn't trade immediately after earnings, but I don't remember if this was enforced at the affiliated brokerage. At Facebook, I think it was typically a three week window every quarter.
Of course, if you quit, the windows are no longer in force, although if you have material non-public information, you're still not allowed to trade. Maybe there'a a share price where you'd rather quit and sell than hold on until the window opens.
The latest self funded tenders have been pretty tiny. I wouldn’t term it as “liquidity” as much as a symbolic gesture.
AFAIK none of the recent tenders have been self-funded. They’ve matched external investors who want shares with employees.
Also, not sure what you mean by "tiny". It's been billions of dollars.
Above certain amount of shareholders, the rules for the public companies start applying, so you get all of the disadvantages of being a public company (like SEC filings, etc.) without the advantages (like ability to raise money.) IIRC this is what forced $MSFT to do IPO in 1986.
Going public is the fastest way to turn a solid, functioning business into a hideous, infinite-growth chasing ghoul that everyone hates. Don't do it.
Instead they are mostly owned by VC's, who will more directly pressure them to do that than the general public owners will.
The important part is that the Collison's control Stripe now. When that changes things may go down hill. It won't matter if it is public or not.
As opposed to VC owners, who are famously satisfied with slow growth. Right?
I'm glad. I don't think every company needs to be on the stock market, and companies that are profitable like Stripe is, absolutely do not need to be on the stock market. Why? So people can buy and sell their stock on a whim?
Are there caps on how much you could sell during the tender offer? I had one come through my email ~3 years ago for a company I previously worked for. IIRC it allowed you to sell up to 10% of your stock.
> As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
This is an incredibly odd sentiment, imo. What’s the desire to see them go public unless you personally are profiting from it? Going public would quickly set Stripe on a pathway to potential enshittification and at minimum starting to squeeze the consumers and businesses it provides services to more.
If they are ex-Stripe they are likely holding shares, and so yes they would personally profit from going public.
The tender offer announced in the article is open to former employees as well, so they personally profit regardless of Stripe being public (unless the claim is that by being public the valuation would be materially higher than the stated valuation for this offer).
There may be a conflict of interest with ex-Stripe folks wanting to see a move towards x or y.
An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors - those that want out - to liquidate out in a big way by dumping to a very large mass of investors. There is no other means to do that without signaling a gigantic loss of confidence.
Raising money as a private entity is trivial these days if you're in the league that Stripe is. See: the comical AI private funding levels.
> An IPO today is mainly a way for major investors
Major investors and insiders. Stay the hell away from IPOs if you're not an institution getting access to shares at a reasonable price.
It’s sad.
Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this.
Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
IPOs also kill a lot of companies. Now you have a new list of investors you are obligated to attend to, and what those investors what is not always to make your company more successful, if it can make more money now.
The reverse is much more true. When private equity takes a public company private, there's a 50% chance they'll kill the company.
Also, private companies fail at a much higher rate than public ones do.
I don't think PE buyouts are the right comparison here; we're talking about companies that never go public versus the ones that do.
And, of course private companies fail at a much higher rate. The set of private companies includes every company that doesn't succeed to the point where it has the realistic choice to go public. Again: wrong comparison.
A general IPO is also not the right comparison. The events that kill companies are changes in control whether they happen from going public or going private. If Stripe IPO's, the Collison's will stay firmly in control, and approximately nothing will change at Stripe.
I'm not coming down on either side of the public/private thing, just saying that take-privates and failed small private companies aren't meaningful comparisons to make.
Not just the IPO. Being public at all subjects you to the perverse and destructive incentive of needing to maximize shareholder value. Just because some private companies take VC funding (and subject themselves to analogous forces) doesn't mean that's required or expected.
Needing to maximize shareholder value is a myth. There is no law that requires you to do that - people like to use the idea as an excuse to do scummy business.
Sure, it's a dubious legal requirement at best. But you try telling people that on an earnings call and watch your valuation plummet because you took a long position and the market wanted a next quarter position. And even if you don't care about selling your stock personally, it does impact your ability to raise funds.
Short term investors don’t matter. They are going to pull out and move to the next thing.
Depends. In Michigan it is binding precedent, see Dodge v. Ford (1919).
Delaware corporations must act in the interests of shareholders.
That's an incredibly vague standard and courts have repeatedly declined to get involved in second guessing management decisions. Aside from outright fraud or negligence executives can claim almost any business related decision is in the interest of shareholders because they have a reasonable expectation that the future benefits outweigh the costs. Judges aren't going to be delving into financial projections and expense reports to override the leaders of a business.
A widget company could sponsor a soccer team or whatever and say the costs are worth it. Or that same company could not do that and say it's not worth it. Two opposite decisions that both would count as acting in the interest of shareholders.
> That's an incredibly vague standard and courts have repeatedly declined to get involved
Which courts? Corporate law is state-level. Delaware generally has some affordances for long-term strategic decisions.
This case was specifically about dividends and long term shareholder value, not quarterly results.
So keep the profits only for the rich then? I rather see more IPOs for the rest of us.
High risk high reward - I think if I ponied up capital, I'd rather not feel obliged to 'share the success' unless it were part of a needed capital raising.
Private companies have the right to be private until if or when they decide not to be private.
Navigating the risk and growth allows them to navigate their growth and rewards while maybe in the drivers seat a bit more.
No one said they don’t have the right.
But for the good of all of society, it would be better if they did.
I see it differently, and not in a particularly popular manner. Public companies allow those that are already pretty well off to rocket past those who can't afford shares, therefore adding to the disparity. I despise sudden or inherited wealth though so I'm not the best barometer for how things should work when it comes to this. I can't count how many times I've been made almost physically ill hearing about the next meme stock that made some nobody a millionaire overnight.
IPOs really only benefit already wealthy people as well. It's not like poor people can dump tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock.
Working class people have 401ks and pension plans
We usually hear about the success stories, but public markets have killed wayyyy more companies than they have helped. Unless they really need the money it's always in a company's own best interests to stay private for as long as possible.
Why ask for IPO to dillute the effective investor pool if you are already making a ton of money consistently?
To give liquidity to investors.
The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though. It's fairly safe to assume that as there isn't an IPO yet the investors want to hold rather than cash in returns. They probably believe there's more growth potential, and that the board are the right people to deliver it.
If you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.
Perhaps infrastructure has a different kind of long term upside.
Even for good investments, investors will want to sell at some point rather than owning an investment forever, if only to diversify.
Sure, at some point. Maybe that isn't now though.
> The cost of that liquidity is missing out on realizing future growth though.
Why would it be? I don't believe an IPO has to be dilutive, it can be done with already issued shares. I grant you that's not usually how they're done though.
Maybe certain types of growth aren't the goal for Stripe at present.
Don’t they already get to participate in secondary markets to liquidate?
They can, but it's orders of magnitudes less liquid than the public stock market.
Liquidity!= ability to liquidate or not, BTW, it's more of a continuous spectrum.
I see, thanks for the clarification.
The markets are skeptical at the moment. A bunch of tech IPOs in the last few years have tanked 70+% since the IPO and that can be devastating to a company.
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
I hope they hold off - going public tends to kill innovation and replace it with bureaucracy
Almost as if there's a lot to innovate in a "dumb pipe" a payment processor naturally is.
At scale, payment processors are amongst the most difficult things you could do because every two bit crook out there is going to try to scam you somehow.
Can probably build it in a weekend.
You let me know when VISA lets you colocate into their rack for processing payments with your built in a weekend vibe coded project.
I guess I should've added "/s" :P
dewey was joking.
Management reading a thread like this need the /s.
in 2 hours with claude code
The thing is they have "tooling" to help create their own customers:
They also have a tax product, and a few other things that are in the orbit around payment processing.
Their product offerings are a bit more than just the "dumb pipe" portion of the transaction.
Everything's public appearance until S1 is filed
How do you ruin a good company? Simple. Go public
I wonder if there will be a class of VC that intends to provide LPs with income in addition to capital appreciation. If it doesn't make sense to go public, then focus on cash flow and kick of steady income to investors.
The cynic in me thinks they don't want to crash their valuation.
Will they ever have to go public? I imagine there's a way they can buy everything back.
Investors can pressure you when you are worth single digit or low double digit billions. At $100B+ you are calling the shots, and if investors aren't happy they can sell their shares in the next tender offer.
why do you figure? in some sectors, IPOs were literally 10x larger in 2023 than 2016, but i am not sure specifically about fintech. ask pitchbook. that increases IRR by a whole +1.4, just by waiting.
Companies that keep delaying going public generally do so to keep hidden unfavorable data.
Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
You don’t have to go public at all. If you’re profitable and your investors don’t want an exit, then you can stay private in perpetuity. Epic is a great example of that.
Might be too late already, seeing how we are well past "peak SaaS" (and frankly Stripe have slowed down and lost a lot of the glitter in years past).
> Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
If a maintainer has chosen to open source and use a permissive license (key word chosen, this isn't a default), they are explicitly saying via their license that they are not charging for the use of the code. What's the issue here?
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Everyone involved is making informed choices.
Well when you're giving away your product for free... maybe open-source maintainers who want payment for their "free" products should consider going to business school?
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
We have a bunch of socially minded people providing free value in the form of open source that enjoy the gift they are giving to others. When they become aware that their charity disproportionately benefits selfish people who have opposite inclinations - who employ people to search for exploits, without fixing them, to suck up as much wealth as possible - I'm not surprised they would want to take a step back and ask for a share of that.
And that's totally fine under the same market mechanics you're recommending. If you want maintainers to stop complaining and filing potential petitions asking for funding via taxes etc, just pay them.
Not sure what that letter said but open source^ isn’t good and I’m what people would incorrectly stereotype as someone who would love open source as a Marxist [sympathizer].
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
Sounds like an IPO in 6-18 months.
Ludicrous valuation
It would help a lot if you elaborated why it's a 'ludicrous' valuation rather than asserting that it simply is. What method are you using to value the enterprise and why does your expected result not match the actual result?
Weak. They should pivot to AI.
Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom), as soon as Stripe goes public you're getting dumped on.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
Something like 20% of American households meet the accredited standard. It isn't some ultra-elite bar.
Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
Not to mention: Stripe doesn't want your money, whether or not you're accredited.
"Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom)"
Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
No they didn't. They were picky at the seed stage. They were picky in their first priced round. They were picky in every subsequent round. There was never a point where they wanted your money. The most promising companies fight off investors when word gets around they're raising.
There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in.
You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
Even worse. This means that no wealth will be created for people who actually want to invest.
With Stripe's non IPO example, many will follow and will stay private.
So more gatekeeping.
Again: you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you). It has nothing at all to do with accreditation though. You're pining for access to companies that wouldn't take your money even if you were a well-known institutional investor. They get to pick which VC/PE firms they work with, and they know it, and it is their job to pick the ones that best serve the interests of their firms.
I mean this respectfully, but: you do not sound, in this thread, like someone whose registration on Stripe's cap tables would be a service to Stripe. To society? Maybe? Who knows. But that's not how Stripe makes decisions.
I also think you drastically overestimate how much broad wealth creation would follow from letting retail investors into private tech companies. You're debating entirely based on a survivor artifact and ignoring the fact that most tech companies --- even most of the highly-capitalized ones --- return $0 to investors.
If you don't meet the financial requirement ($200K annual income or $1M net worth), you can also qualify as an accredited investor by passing the Series 65 exam and filing a form with the SEC.
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
So someone who inherits $100 million (11 year old or not) doesn't have take the exam, but someone who knows about the industry inside out has take an exam to participate?
Seems "fair" to be honest.
I have a few friends that that have told me about certain companies they would like to invest in and they are knowledgeable about but they cannot access them but I can and not give them any shares.
We don't care if people with $100MM make a bad bet on a tech company.
You need an annual income of $200K to become an accredited investor. If you don't have that, you anyways shouldn't be participating in risky private markets.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
Why don't we extend this to the risky public manipulated stock market?
Because that is what the SEC was created for, and (in theory) it is their job to protect regular invesors from market risks. Now how effectively that works is a different conversation, but at the very least you have reporting requirements, earnings releases, material disclosures, insider trading laws, SIPC insurance, circuit breakers etc. It is very unlikely that you are going to lose all your money in a stable blue chip company or broad index fund, but a regular joe trying to invest in a hot "private investing opportunity" is absolutely going to be taken for a ride.
Because the odds of you losing all your money on private tech company shares are nearly 100%, and the odds of you losing all your money in SPDR or VFINX are nearly 0%.
Still seems silly when meme stocks exist and the establishment (like entire media and news apparatus) can and do collude to mess with things (like “Black Monday” ~2021 when all the media and news lied and said wall street bets and meme stonk people had moved on to silver) and within days all the meme stock gains across over a dozen companies were entirely wiped out.
Not saying meme stocks should be a thing but no one gets investigated or in trouble. Nothing is done. If they cared about the average person something would be done.