The decline of the public company

Elon Musk's stated intention to de-list Tesla is just the latest sign of the rise and rise of private markets. Marina Gerner reports.

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Amazon came to market early, allowing investors to profit from its growth
(Image credit: Credit: Geoffrey Robinson / Alamy Stock Photo)

When Elon Musk revealed his intention to take Tesla private, he tweeted that it would be "way smoother and less disruptive" if the company were no longer on the stockmarket. Share-price swings can be a distraction for Tesla's staff, who own shares in the firm. What's more, being listed puts "enormous pressure on Tesla to make decisions that may be right for a given quarter, but not necessarily for the long term". Musk's decision is bad news for ordinary investors. It highlights the "long, slow decline in the importance of public equity markets", says Fidelity's Tom Stevenson in The Daily Telegraph and the flipside: what the consultancy McKinsey calls "the rise and rise of private markets".

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Marina Gerner is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has written for the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist, The Guardian and Standpoint magazine in the UK; the New York Observer in the US; and die Bild and Frankfurter Rundschau in Germany.

Marina is also an adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business at their London campus, and has a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Her first book, The Vagina Business, deals with the potential of “femtech” to transform women’s lives, and will be published by Icon Books in September 2024.

Marina is trilingual and lives in London.