Walmart didn't go from mom and pop store to national corporation without an IPO. I'm going by wiki data here, which says they had 18 stores and annual revenue

Walmart didn't go from mom and pop store to national corporation without an IPO. I'm going by wiki data here, which says they had 18 stores and annual revenue of 9 million in 1968. If they had stayed private they were probably clearing a million dollars a year, give or take. To get from there to billions they had to raise outside money, specifically by selling stock and debt to someone else. That is by definition "not owning it anymore" because they're selling (some of) it to raise funding. Like I said, there are no mom and pop billionaires. To get from millionaire to billionaire requires outside money. And yes, that includes tech companies. I know tech founders like to write false hagiographies for themselves after the fact about starting XYZ in a garage, but dig far enough and you usually find it was more like "garage + 25 million from Sequoia Capital," like Google.