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Ed Elson, a 26-year-old research analyst and co-host of the Prof G Markets podcast, has heard plenty of stories about generations before him getting rich on stocks.

His own co-host, New York University business school professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway, who’s 60, invested $800,000 in both Apple and Amazon back in 2009. Today, those investments total $40 million, a cornerstone of his $150 million net worth.

Elson wants the same opportunity to invest in the tech companies defining his generation. He sees those chances in OpenAI and SpaceX, standout innovators that have soared to valuations of $300 billion or more.

The problem? Both companies are private.

OpenAI and SpaceX top a growing class of companies making it big without the public markets. Rather than expose themselves to public market scrutiny and quarterly earnings pressures, these companies are raising round after round of fresh funds from venture capital firms. Over the last 10 years, global startup funding has more than tripled, with VC investments projected to hit $400 billion this year, according to data from PitchBook.

“The people who have access to the highest quality companies that are creating the most amount of value, i.e., OpenAI and SpaceX, are the people in VC who are already rich,” Elson said. “That’s a big problem for our generation.”

Seduced by fabulous success stories like Galloway’s, and empowered by the proliferation of digital trading platforms plus the investing advice on platforms like TikTok, Zoomers have become a generation of investors. The average Gen Z investor starts trading at 19 years old, compared to baby boomers’ typical kickoff at 35 years old.

It almost feels like a private members-only club. If you’re already rich, you can invest in this stuff. And if you’re not, sucks to suck. You’re locked out of the club. Vivian Tu, Your Rich BFF

But there’s also a gnawing sense that Gen Z missed out on the boom times. And they’re not entirely wrong.

The public markets now offer fewer stocks to choose from and higher price tags. Companies are waiting 14 years on average to go public, Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida’s Warrington School of Business, has found. More private companies are valued in the tens and even hundreds of billions, a feat usually reserved for public companies.

In 2025, an IPO is less a promise of what’s to come for a company and more a signal that you’ve already missed out on its biggest gains. That shift has more investors setting their sights on secondary markets, where stock purchases of private companies are limited to traders accredited by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. And whereas the public markets are open to anyone with a brokerage account, just 13% of Americans qualify for that accreditation.

“It almost feels like a private members-only club,” says Vivian Tu, the 31-year-old personal finance educator behind ‘Your Rich BFF.’ “If you’re already rich, you can invest in this stuff, and if you’re not, sucks to suck. You’re locked out of the club.”

Those rules aren’t sitting well with Gen Z investors.

Warren Buffett famously advised traders to invest in what they know. That’s what Galloway did back in 2009 when he bought shares in Apple. The iPhone was still relatively new, but it was clear the technology was a game changer. He could get in relatively early and profit from the stock’s exponential rise as Apple built on the momentum of its spectacular innovation.

These days, some of the most exciting tech companies innovate without needing to IPO. Elson points to OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022, which drew 1 million users in 5 days. “If we were living in the 1980s, there’s a very, very high likelihood that OpenAI would’ve been public at that point,” Elson says. Investors would have said: “Oh my God, this is an incredible tool. I want to buy some stock.”

But most investors were frozen out. In March, OpenAI was valued at $300 billion — a 900% spike in two years. The major beneficiaries included Microsoft, VC megafirm Sequoia Capital, and tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

Scott Galloway co-hosts a podcast with Ed Elson. Galloway made a fortune on the stock market, while Elson worries that Gen Z investors have fewer opportunities to do that. Travis P. Ball/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images

The critique that the public markets don’t create enough value for mom and pop investors is virtually as old as public markets themselves. But the markets hit an inflection point in 2021 when a record 1,035 IPOs, raising a staggering $286 billion, were followed by an abrupt collapse. Investors, desperate for liquidity, began turning more to secondary markets to sell portions of their stakes. If companies can raise plenty of capital while keeping their investors happy, that has increasingly allowed them to put off their IPOs indefinitely.

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“It’s pretty simple: Why go public if you have access to all the benefits while staying private?” says Deedy Das, a principal at Menlo Ventures. Das sums up the thinking of top-dollar startups this way: “I have all this administrative burden off my shoulders; I don’t have to have that predictable revenue; I can take riskier bets; I don’t have to explain to retail investors what my vision is. I can just run my business.”

With so much pent-up demand, it’s been extraordinarily expensive for retail investors to get in when a hot company finally goes public.

Take Figma, the design software maker, and its recent red-hot IPO.

When it debuted in July, Figma’s stock opened at $85 a share, more than double its $33-a-share IPO price. Since the overwhelming majority of IPO shares were allocated to institutional investors and not retail investors — which is typical for public listings — most retail investors paid a significant premium. At the end of the day, the frenzy had sent Figma’s valuation soaring to more than 60 times its revenue in the biggest first-day jump for a multibillion-dollar tech company in decades. By the first week of August, however, Figma had shed billions of dollars in market value as the stock came back down to earth, leaving many of those same retail investors holding the bag.

As of August 11, Figma’s stock was valued less than its opening day price, meaning any retail investor who backed the company on its first day of trading has since lost money. Institutions that bought in at the IPO price, on the other hand, are holding stock that’s still worth more than double what they paid for it.

Of course, there are still plenty of public companies creating massive wealth for shareholders. Palantir’s stock has surged over 1,800% since it began trading in 2020. Circle’s shares have jumped 140% above their opening price in the crypto company’s June IPO, though the stock has fluctuated wildly in that period. The public markets are still broadly considered the best place for companies to get returns to their employees and investors, since their liquid nature allows shareholders to cash out anytime.

But the biggest stock gains will always be reserved for the savvy investor who spots a big opportunity early. And increasingly, these opportunities are not in the public markets. Lots of investors — including Zoomers like Elson — want in on the action happening on secondary markets.

“Because of this dynamic where great companies have no incentive to go public, giving access to retail is heavily in our generation’s financial interest,” Elson said.

While this might present bigger opportunities, it also carries significant risks.

It’s galling to retail investors that there’s so much private company stock floating around — but they can’t get to it.

Getting your hands on private stocks generally means buying them from early investors that hold large chunks of equity or from early employees, who got stock as part of their compensation agreements. These so-called secondary sales generally must be approved by, if not facilitated by, the startup itself. And not a lot of companies, OpenAI included, are inclined to allow their employees or investors to sell shares on secondary platforms.

In an attempt to democratize access to private company equity, platforms like EquityZen, Forge Global and Hiive, which broker secondary investments into pre-IPO companies, are picking up steam. UBS projects the secondary market will hit a record-breaking $180 billion this year, up from $156 billion in secondary transactions in 2024.

EquityZen, which launched in 2013, says its user base has doubled in the past year; more than 770,000 individual investors and institutions are now registered on the marketplace. The company says it has brokered secondary sales for companies like Circle and Omada Health before their IPOs, as well as other startups that still haven’t gone public, like Impossible Foods. The company wouldn’t comment on whether it’s facilitated any deals with OpenAI or SpaceX.

These deals tend to be costlier than regular trading. Most secondary market platforms charge fees, often 5% of the sale, and require investors to put up anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 or more to participate.

The bigger catch is that not just anyone can access these platforms. On most major secondary platforms, investors must meet the SEC’s stringent bar for accreditation: a net worth of over $1 million, excluding their primary residence, or a salary of at least $200,000 for the past two years and the expectation of earning that same income again.

The SEC says the rule was set up to protect retail investors, who tend to underperform the broader market with their stock picks. These investors are generally advised to back index funds over individual stocks to minimize the chance of catastrophic losses. The private markets are even more risky since, without disclosure requirements, private deals can obscure key details about a startup’s operations and pricing.

“One of the biggest opportunities and also a big tragedy is that private markets are where the bulk of the interesting appreciation and exposure is nowadays. We’re obviously working to solve that.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev

But the requirement has been criticized by some as paternalistic, particularly amid surging activity on the private markets. After all, Americans can engage in plenty of high-risk activities with their money, from gambling to cryptocurrency investing to prediction market betting, with little to no regulation.

“In a world in which anyone can invest in any meme coin they want, how reasonable is it that you’re not allowed to invest in startups?” said Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, a software platform that helps private companies manage their cap tables.

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In June, the US House of Representatives passed the Equal Opportunity for All Investors Act, which would allow investors who passed a financial literacy test to qualify for accreditation, paving the way for them to make private market bets. The Senate isn’t yet scheduled to review the bill, however, and President Donald Trump has not said if he would support it.

In a burgeoning market with minimal oversight, the stakes are high. Linqto, once a prominent marketplace for pre-IPO shares, declared bankruptcy in July. The SEC is currently investigating claims that the platform sold securities to non-accredited investors and charged its users excessive margins. The company told BI it had also discovered “serious defects” in the business “that raise questions about what customers actually own.”

It’s unclear whether the thousands of investors who locked their cash away in Linqto will ever see that money again. Linqto said it’s working with an unsecured creditors committee in its bankruptcy proceedings to develop a plan to reorganize the company and “maximize value for customers.”

As for getting a piece of OpenAI or SpaceX, a few financial firms are creating workarounds. In one example, exchange-traded funds like the ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF can buy stakes in top private companies, and retail traders can buy those ETFs on the public markets. In December, the fund announced that SpaceX had become its top holding. But without regular public disclosures of SpaceX’s finances, investors can only guess at the company’s real-time value.

In Europe, where SEC regulations don’t apply, the stock trading app Robinhood has sold blockchain “tokens” of OpenAI and SpaceX stock. The tokens attempt to mirror the price of stocks without actually giving retail traders any stake in the company. Last month, OpenAI posted a statement on X saying the company had not partnered with Robinhood and that the tokens “are not OpenAI equity.”

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explained the app’s approach in an interview with Bloomberg last month. “One of the biggest opportunities and also a big tragedy is that private markets are where the bulk of the interesting appreciation and exposure is nowadays,” he said. “It’s a shame that it’s so difficult to get exposure in the US. We’re obviously working to solve that.”

Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at the IPO-focused firm Renaissance Capital, says it’s perfectly understandable that the market’s slowdown may be frustrating to new investors. Back in 2021, new subscribers to the firm’s newsletter asked one question more than any other: How can I invest in pre-IPO companies?

“There’s this sense that, at the IPO, it’s already too late. They want to get in on the ground floor,” Kennedy said. But the firm advises investors to “be careful what you wish for.”

“Yes, you’re not going to get that $20-million-in-annual-sales, fast-growing tech company that could be a behemoth,” Kennedy said. “But you’re also not going to get those less established companies without a solid track record. There’s more margin of safety with a company that has $100 million or more in revenue.”

Can I burn the money for the sake of learning something rather than anticipating any specific return? For early investors like myself, I think that’s a really healthy way to go about it. Juliette Richert, The Artemis Fund

Barry Ritholtz, the founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management, echoed that sentiment. “A private company like OpenAI comes along, and suddenly people are salivating and getting FOMO and saying, I could pick the next one,” Ritholtz said. “History tells us, the odds are you cannot.”

Many young investors see those risks as worth taking — if not for the potential financial upside, then for the crash course in market literacy.

Juliette Richert, a senior associate at The Artemis Fund, has made three angel investments since joining the fund three years ago. Richert, who’s now 26, says she hasn’t seen any returns yet. Even if she never does, she thinks those bets were valuable opportunities for her early investment learnings.

“Can I burn the money for the sake of learning something rather than anticipating any specific return?” she said. “For early investors like myself, I think that’s a really healthy way to go about it.”

It’s the Gen Z way. Rather than follow well-trodden paths of previous generations, Gen Z investors are determined to pounce on opportunities where they find them and seize their financial destinies.

“There’s this desire for control and autonomy, the ‘American dynamism’ mindset: make your own way, versus depending on the system,” Richert said.

Throw in prediction markets, fractional real estate, and collectibles from sports cards to sneakers, and it’s clear that Gen Z isn’t just investing differently — they’re redefining what “investing” even means.

“Young people are smart,” Galloway said in conversation with Elson on a recent episode of their podcast. “They said, you know what, fuck this. I can’t buy a home. Stocks are crazy expensive. So what am I going to do? I’m going to create my own asset classes. And I’m going to create my own volatility.”

Rebecca Torrence is a correspondent at Business Insider covering startups and venture capital, with a focus on healthcare and late-stage equity capital markets.