FIELD NOTES
FINANCE
Leveling Out The SPAC explosion of 2020 has reached equilibrium, but the alternative path to going public isn’t going away.
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i remember learning to write checks in the third grade, perfecting my cursive signature and working through the number of cents that should go over the 00s. The first thing the teacher said? “Never leave the subject line blank.” But in the past two years, thousands of institutional investors have done just that, jumping into the booming special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) market, putting their money behind an operations team hoping to merge with a private company looking to go public (see sidebar). SPACs peppered financial headlines throughout the past year, providing an alternative to the initial public offering in a volatile market. The number of companies going public via this route in 2020 increased 462 percent over 2019. Tesla competitor Lucid Energy and space company Momentus chose to go public via SPACs in 2020, garnering national attention. Soon, celebrities and athletes, including tennis star Serena Williams, Martha Stewart, and singer Ciara, launched their own SPACs. Dallas’ Pearl Energy founder Billy Quinn has created two SPACs
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P H OTO G R A P H Y BY Y A R O S L A V D A N Y L C H E N K O
story by KELSEY J. VANDERSCHOOT
DCEOMAGAZINE.COM
9/23/21 3:05 PM
