This was one of the promises of SPACs. The idea was that large companies were IPO'ing too late (ahem... Stripe) and that there was no way for the general public

This was one of the promises of SPACs. The idea was that large companies were IPO'ing too late (ahem... Stripe) and that there was no way for the general public to take part in the same kind of upside they could with previous IPOs like Google and Facebook. But there really wasn't any reason why a successful, high-upside, company would choose to stay private but decide to go public because of SPACs. So you ended up with what seems to be 2 tracks of companies going SPAC: 1) companies that were not really high-upside and mostly had poor business models looking for exit liquidity during the retail boom -- Metromile, Opendoor, etc. and 2) high-risk, early-stage capital intensive companies that probably weren't going to do as well in private fundraising -- all the EV companies, health care companies, etc. The fact that the insiders made out on all these deals further support the charge that these things were largely a grift on retail investors during a vulnerable time for retail investors. There is still a lot of time for the dust to settle on these and see what the long-term batting average for these things are. I'd be interested to see how SPAC returns compare to returns on Series A, B, C, D rounds of the same vintage to see if this actually did bring comparable opportunity to the public or not. A lot of those rounds done in 2020-2022 are probably deeper underwater as well.