What PG also conveniently failed to mention was how the money shuffle results in a few people getting very wealthy (less specifically because they had a good id

What PG also conveniently failed to mention was how the money shuffle results in a few people getting very wealthy (less specifically because they had a good idea and executed it well). Money Flow: Public Investors, Mutual Funds V Investor Round X V Investor Round ... V Investor Round A V Founders/Seed Investors Each level of this Ponzi pays for the previous level, plus a healthy spillover. So when the IPO happens, everyone prior in the chain wins big. Before the IPO, each funding round pays the previous investors up the chain to the founders/seeders (unless you made a foolish arrangement with one of the VC rounds). The magic here is that all of this can be done without the company ever making a profit. That's where things have really changed. In the past, you had no hope of an IPO unless your company had a track record of reasonable profitability. Uber is the best example of how the general investing public got fleeced in order to pay each level of investors which basically fleeced the next. It was all a money shuffle. It's a great system to take money from questionable regimes and pour them into this shuffle (Softbank).