SEC Chair Paul Atkins: Make IPOs Great Again 7/2/25
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This is SquawkPod, and I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. On today's episode, a special extended interview with SEC Chair Paul Atkins. I would argue here over the last several years, the SEC has been standing athwart efforts to innovate in the marketplace because things have been unclear. We've had regulation through enforcement. That day is over. The chair's approach to innovation, including expanding access to the private market,

Tokenization is an innovation.

And we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation in the marketplace. Rethinking what it means to be an accredited investor and the future of crypto, SPACs and IPOs. We have a really good program, I think, now addressing the crypto markets. With respect to the IPO market, you will start seeing our proposals coming out. So you can't build room overnight.

Plus, a deal for Paramount and President Trump, an update from Capitol Hill on the president's mega bill, and the huge compensation Meta is supposedly offering OpenAI employees to jump ship. Melissa Lee is on set with us to chat through it all. If they go to Meta because of the highest paycheck, they could easily leave Meta for another high paycheck.

It's July 2nd, 2025, and SquawkPod begins right now. Stand, Andrew, by in three, two, one. Cue, Andrew. Good morning. Welcome to SquawkBox right here on CNBC. We're live at the Nasdaq Market site in Times Square. I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin, along with Melissa Lee, who's hanging out with us. Joe and Becky are off today.

And we got a lot going on between what is happening in Washington. Holiday shortened, but not... We got a settlement with Paramount happening that could mean we have the deal finally. And the president's big tax and spending bill now on its way back to the House of Representatives this after passing the Senate by the slimmest of margins. Emily Wilkins is in Washington, D.C. this morning, staying up like all day, all night. Never stops for you.

Well, maybe it will stop today, Andrew. I mean, we're going to see here. But if it's going to pass the House today, then Speaker Mike Johnson, he's going to have to change a couple no's to yes's before starting on this vote for the mega bill. Remember, in the House, if you have full attendance, Johnson can only lose three Republicans and still get the bill passed.

But right now, there are roughly about a dozen members that are either planning to vote no or have some really serious concerns with this bill. Now, some of these members, they're Republicans from more centrist districts who worry they could lose reelection next year over Medicaid and snap cuts.

Others are, of course, your fiscal hawks. They've been frustrated for a while with this bill that adds more than $3.4 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. That's a number updated just last night by the Congressional Budget Office.

Some members are annoyed that some of the clean energy tax credits are still in the measure. The Senate measure remembers does allow wind and solar programs to get some tax credits if they start construction in the next year. I chatted a bit with Congressman Tim Burchett. He told me he

he's in the "I'm not sure" column and needs more time, but he thinks that it's not just him. He thinks more time in general is needed to hash out disagreements with the bill, and he's skeptical that Republicans are even going to be able to agree to a procedural rule vote.

There's probably about a dozen that will probably vote against the rule. And if the rule goes down, it doesn't necessarily kill the bill. That could allow some time to work on the bill and maybe some calmer heads will prevail.

Johnson told reporters last night that while the Senate made some changes that his conference doesn't agree with, he will work to answer all concerns and get the bill, specifically the bill the Senate passed, delivered before July 4th to Trump's desk. And of course, guys will be keeping a very close eye on all of the back and forth negotiations that are going to have to happen today on Capitol Hill for Johnson to get this thing passed. This may sound like the silliest of questions.

Is everybody in Washington right now? Or have any of these people actually left town?

So the Senate has left town. The House is either in town or they are trying to get to town because we had a giant thunderstorm last night here and a bunch of flights were canceled. But the goal was for all the House members to be back today. And that is the plan. But of course, if the House changes this bill in any way, shape or form, it will need to go back to the Senate. And the Senate has just left town. So there's definitely, if any changes happen, there's not going to be a way to get this done before July 4th.

So all this talk, Emily, about negotiations and working things out, that would basically set back the timeline. It would, Melissa. And I think, of course, you know, when you talk about these negotiations, sometimes the ask for members or sometimes the things that leadership can sort of give to get members to yes, isn't necessarily a change in the bill text in the Trump mega bill. So we'll see if there is a way to go forward with that.

Of course, the other thing we're keeping an eye on here is the White House, is Trump himself. Of course, we've seen with a lot of these major votes that he has been the one to come in at the last moment, really twist some arms and get members to support. And so that's another thing we're keeping an eye out for today is exactly what role Trump and the White House are going to play in getting this thing over the finish line. OK, Emily, we're going to keep our eyes on this, of course, and I'm sure we'll be talking to you a lot more about it.

Media giant Paramount settling a lawsuit filed by President Trump regarding a 60 Minutes interview last year with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump was seeking $20 billion in damages related to the interview, which he claimed was deceptively edited in order to favor Harris in last November's election. The case entered mediation in April. Paramount saying it will put $16 million toward Trump's future presidential library minus lawyer fees. It said none of the money would be given to Trump directly or indirectly.

The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret. It comes as paramount as trying to get the government's approval for a more than $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. So that's going to likely move things forward pretty quickly. Sure. By the way, what do you think the legal fees are?

Oh, you think it's going to eat into that amount, the $16 million amount, by a lot? By default. I mean, this has been going on for how many months? That's true. I mean, this is going to be millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of legal fees. By the way, it could be $10 million legal fees for both sides to begin with. Maybe it's the same law firm handling the merger. I don't know the answer, but I'm assuming it's a lot. ♪

Meantime, Figma filing its S1. By the way, I love this company, just so you know, because I use this stuff. And I think Figma's awesome. The design software maker planning to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FIG. I don't know if I love it as a stock, just...

Right, right. Full disclosure, but the product. According to the filing, Figma reported $821 million in revenue over the past year with a 46% year-over-year growth rate. You may remember, I mean, this is a long journey here. In 2023, Adobe had tried to buy this company and then abandoned its plan to take over Figma in what was then a $20 billion deal.

In his founder letter, CEO Dylan Field, who is a Thiel fellow, we should mention, writes, quote, Given the trend of many amazing companies staying private indefinitely, you might be wondering why I've decided to take Figma public in the first place. He writes about obvious benefits, including liquidity, adding, quote, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma, and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets. He later writes, quote,

Expect us to take big swings when we see a chance to invest in our platform or pursue M&A at scale. And we just had a big conversation yesterday on our broadcast about just the idea of so many of these companies actually staying private for longer and what it means to the public markets. Also, by the way, what it has meant for a long time, just to talk about liquidity, illiquidity of just...

how much money venture capitalists and private equity have not gotten back. There's no exits happening, which means that the pension funds have no money to give, and they don't have any money to get back. And so there's got to be a way for more companies to go public. We also had a guest on yesterday talking about how they're now trying to, I don't know if you saw this, tokenizing effectively the private market and what that means.

I don't know, we'll have to see whether... - Or increase liquidity. - I don't know what regulators should really be thinking about that. It's a little bit more like ICO, like, remember initial coin offerings? Companies that are private are considered private because they don't have disclosure requirements that public companies do. So once you start allowing the public to start buying into private companies,

that are not accredited investors, it's a very complicated scenario. There's also a move on the SEC to... To get rid of accredited investors. Right, exactly. To basically widen the net as to who is considered accredited. Basically, anybody would be if they had the right education as a proposal. So that's also an interesting element to that whole discussion. OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman addressing Mark Zuckerberg's meta-platforms.

He's trying to hire away OpenAI's workers. In a memo to OpenAI researchers that was obtained by Wired, Altman said the following. He said, quote, Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list. Altman dismissing what he called mercenaries and said that he believes Meta's behavior will lead to cultural problems for that company. He also said, quote,

OpenAI is evaluating compensation for its employees and that he thinks there is much more upside to shares of OpenAI than of the publicly traded meta. Now, CNBC has reached out to OpenAI for comment just to put some numbers on this thing. Supposedly, some of these people have been offered multi-year deals worth $300 million. These are for scientists and engineers, with some of them receiving $100 million straight up

in year one, $100 million. - Wow. - And one of the things that's interesting that's, I do have some agreement or sympathy for Sam Altman's argument, and I actually wonder what'll happen. He's raised the question of what happens to the culture of a meta. If you're offered, if you're getting paid $400 million, virtually no matter what, or $100 million, virtually no matter what, meaning it's not a fully performance-based thing,

How hard do you think these people are really going to work? Right. Or if they go to Meta because of the highest paycheck,

They could easily leave Meta for another high paycheck. There's no loyalty to the company either. So it's an interesting dynamic. And we'll see how Meta is able to take this. You know, they're trying desperately to transform Lama into one of the truly large language models that's used. I mean, I think it is, and I think it's been quite successful, but obviously not nearly as successful as what Anthropic's done or OpenAI's done or Google's done thus far. Tease will be next.

Next on SquawkPod, who gets the opportunity to invest in private companies? Historically, it was about being accredited, a monetary threshold. SEC Chair Paul Atkins is leaving the door open for tweaks to standing law. There is a lot of demand on the investor side to be able to invest into private

private products. But that has to be done, I believe, with our eyes open because we don't want to have people go in where they don't understand what they're doing. What that means for you, for public companies, and for the new efforts from the likes of Robinhood, Vanguard, and startup Republic to expand access to the private market. That's right after this break.

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This is SquawkPod from CNBC, today with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Melissa Lee. And they're following up on a conversation from yesterday's SquawkBox with Republic co-CEO Andrew Dergie. Now, Republic is offering unaccredited investors an opportunity to get in on private companies pre-IPO, and it's

starting with SpaceX. But there is a legal reason why unaccredited investors have not historically had access to pre-IPO shares of companies. Legal reason upheld.

by the SEC. I don't know if I want to say we're at odds. We're using the laws that exist. We're not bypassing anything. We're using a pre-existing structure that has been tried and true. Right, but you recognize the intention of the SEC law was to prevent the public with less than a million dollars being an accredited investor from accessing private company stock because the view was that they didn't have the same kinds of disclosures and rules that a public did. And that effectively, this is a workaround to that.

I think the reality is when you really titrate it down, ultimately, we very much limit what people's exposure can even be to this. The maximum that anyone can do in the SpaceX offering is $5,000. So we are giving people an opportunity to participate in a very limited capacity in something that they've been kept out of previously.

If you want to hear that full interview with Republic's co-CEO, scroll in your feed to Tuesday's SquawkPod. But for now, let's get back to today's big interview. Up and Andrew, cue.

We are joined right now at the table by SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. We're thrilled to have you. A lot going on in Washington, as you know, drinking from a fire hose at this point. And we've got about a million questions about the market, about what you're doing, about what the regulatory landscape looks like. And so there's so many different places we can go.

I wanted to start with actually something that happened on this set yesterday, if you'd indulge me. Sure. Only because it was such an interesting conversation, and it's now even, again, in the press today, there's Vanguard doing something similar, which is, you know, we've long talked about public markets and the benefits of public markets, but we've also talked about how in the private markets, there's so many companies that are still private and what it takes to get them to be public. But one of the things that's happening now is this idea of trying to let people

the public have access to the private markets. And there was a company that came on yesterday. They're, quote unquote, tokenizing, if you will, shares in a private company, in this case, SpaceX. You have Robinhood now doing something similar, but they're doing it outside of the United States in Europe. I'm so curious just how you, given where you sit, think about what's happening right now.

Well, Andrew, it's great to be here. Thank you very much for you all having me. The markets have changed a lot, obviously, over the span of the last few decades. And so whereas the IPO market used to be like when I was a young lawyer starting in the mid-'80s,

out that was a way for companies to raise money for to build property plant equipment develop their r d and things like that apple microsoft all of those companies started that way now fast forward to now you have a really robust private markets and so there hasn't been that drive to go public and part of that also is not just the

of capital that's there in the private market but also the impediments to be a public company that's litigation threats just the cost of doing of being public and and and the other and so what is the answer then is the answer to make it more attractive to be a public company or is the answer to make private markets more accessible to the public and more transparent right i mean that's a key aspect to this i mean companies stay private for a reason one of the reasons is

They don't have to file as many things with the SEC. They're not the same disclosure requirements. But to protect investors, particularly average investors, you would think you want that transparency. Right. Well, so that's exactly true. The law is clear as to public companies and what needs to be disclosed.

And so what my goal is, is to make IPOs great again, basically, is to, there's been a lot of red tape and a lot of impediments, as I mentioned. I think if we address those sorts of aspects, I think we can make the public market. What are the one, two, three top things that you think you need to do to make IPOs?

being a public company, as you say, great again? Well, first of all, the disclosure is important. But if you look at, I dare you all to look at an average 10K or a proxy statement and tell me what actually is going on with the company.

Over the years, there has been so much disclosure. A lot of it is CYA, basically, for potential lawsuits. So if we can address those sorts of aspects, I think we can make it better and more attractive to be a public company.

In the meantime, though, there are these efforts taking place to effectively change what it means to be a quote unquote accredited investor in private markets. Historically, you've had to have a million dollars as a sort of threshold with the idea being that if you're wealthy enough and have over a million dollars, you can afford to lose money or do something that's quote unquote more risky because you don't have all the same disclosure requirements in a private company. But you, I think, have a different view of this.

Yeah, well, I think we will definitely take a look at those rules to see, you know, what should be tweaked, because there is a lot of demand on the investor side to be able to invest into private products. And so but that has to be done, I believe, you know, very with our eyes open.

because we don't want to have people go in where they don't understand what they're doing and they're not well equipped. And so what would that mean? We were talking about tests or other kinds of things to suggest there's an education process and that it's the education that would make you accredited, not how much money you actually have.

Well, so there are lots of different ways. I mean, part of the accredited investor standard came about because the idea is, well, if you don't know about it yourself, you can hire somebody or you have the means to kind of ferret out the information and make decisions or hire somebody to make decisions for you.

So we need to take a look at that, but we also need to look at, for example, for long-term investing, for people investing for retirement in funds that are very long-lived, the aspects about private markets, liquidity is not what it is in public markets. Valuations are a little bit more tricky, let's just say. And so those sorts of things, you cannot go in

to a private fund or a private investment and expect to turn that around. What do you make of these sort of tokenization efforts? I mean, it seems to me that we have rules. We could debate whether the rules are the right rules and maybe they should be changed. But given the rules that are in place and the intention of the rule today, it seems to me that the effort to sort of, quote unquote, tokenize something, you know, an underlying asset and to sort of use this structure effectively

is really effectively just a workaround to what the actual intent of the rule is. Well, I guess I disagree with that a bit because tokenization is an innovation and we at the SEC should be focused on how do we advance innovation in the marketplace. And so I would argue here over the last several years, the SEC has been standing athwart

efforts to innovate in the marketplace because things have been unclear. The rules have not been clear. We've had regulation through enforcement. That day is over. We are now, my whole goal is to make things transparent from the regulatory aspect and give people a firm foundation upon which to innovate and come out with new products so that they know what they're doing.

I think there are two things to think about, Andrew, and that's tokenization of U.S. stocks, which is one thing, which could drive a lot of cost savings for all parties involved. Oh, I'm not against tokenization. And settlement times would be reduced to nothing. I'm talking about if you wanted to tokenize SpaceX, which is a private company. And then there's also access to private credit, I think you were mentioning, which is a complete individual investor access to private credit, which is also another sort of tricky thing.

area in that this is also, as you mentioned, it's not as much liquidity. You know, valuations are very difficult, particularly, I would imagine, for an individual investor. I mean, there's there are a lot of things here that are new at new frontiers for investors. Where do you stand on that? Well, so so two questions. So as far as tokenization, other innovations in the marketplace to make

trading and holding securities easier and with quick settlement. My predecessor pushed for what we call T plus one, meaning a settlement and clearance the day after the trade, the trading day.

And so tokenization and other aspects of doing that, tokenization in the marketplace is yet the next step to have much more efficiency in the marketplace and certainty of having a trade settle. But way back in the 60s, 1960s, before our time, basically the New York Stock Exchange had a close for

two days a week just to catch up on the paperwork from the stacks of paper certificates that were going from one brokerage to another. So then came DTCC and digitization of a securities book entry. That was a huge advance. And so now we are in a new world for...

Where do you land on SPACs? We had sort of a big number of blank check companies go public a couple years ago. Most of them did not work out. It was a bad vintage, if you will. I've argued that SPACs could be very interesting if, and I don't know if you'll agree or disagree with me, if whoever the sponsor or promoter is, is locked in place

for whatever duration of the forward-looking statements they make about a deal is. Meaning, if you wanna come on TV or put in your documents or do whatever you want and say, here are the future prospects for this company and we'll give you the numbers when we think it's three years out, four years out and five years out, great.

you should be locked for the three, four and five years out. Part of the problem was that these promoters and sponsors of these things could technically, depending on where the stocks traded and other things, they had ways to get out oftentimes six months into the process.

Yeah, well, so I don't have anything against SPACs, basically. I do think that, again, we were talking about IPOs and how the incidences of IPOs have really decreased over time. And so SPACs are yet another symptom of that because it's a much faster way of going public. You have a ready-made company.

Disclosure is very important. Obviously, the structure of it is very important. But I think if we pay attention to going public and what are the impediments for people to access the public markets through IPOs and other means like that, I think the other situation will be able to solve itself. So let me just a philosophical question, because what I hear you saying is two things at the same time. One is I want to fix the system so that

the IPO market is a more attractive place to be. And if I do that, I won't necessarily have to deal with tokenizing private companies and I won't have to really think too much about SPACs because those will be less attractive options compared to going public. My question is, since we all have to walk and chew gum at the same time, what do you do while you're working on fixing the IPO system to make it more attractive? You have all of these other things going on in the background, in the foreground. What do you do about that?

Well, so that's I mean, I've been on the job for two months, which is great. And again, like you said, drinking from a fire hose. So we will you know, we are going about it. We have a really good program, I think, now addressing the crypto markets. So we have that underway working with folks in the administration and on the Hill. So there's moving afoot with Bill's.

the two bills, particularly on the Hill. So with respect to the IPO market, you will start seeing our proposals coming out. We obviously are cognizant of what's going on. There have been new...

rules adopted by the Commission the last couple of years regarding SPACs. Those were very, you know, rather controversial, let's say. So we'll be looking at all of those things. So you can't build Roman, you know, overnight, but we'll be addressing that. Is there a time or place for the SEC to say we should halt the tokenization of private companies for now until we can examine this and the impact to the markets and to investors?

Well, again, I think, you know, we have our rules. Well, we have our rules. And again, I'm looking at that as an innovative way to address, you know, the workings of the marketplace. I don't view that as a wholesale new type of product. And so I view that as beneficial. I have a question about insider trading.

An issue that the SEC has always sort of oversaw, but there hasn't been a huge number of insider trading cases in recent years. I mean, not big famous ones. But there's this whole crypto industry that is not really regulated. And I'm curious what you think of that, which is to say that there's lots of people doing things. And the reason I mention this is

Three or four months ago, if you remember, somebody developed a Sorkin coin, briefly, for Hot Minute. Worth, I think, a couple hundred million dollars at some point. Wow. Nice. It was a wild thing. And what I saw happening was people were creating these Telegram and Signal accounts, and they were all talking to each other about how they were going to buy and sell. I mean, it was literally like the pools of the 1920s. It was a very interesting thing to watch. And the question, just to see how it was happening...

And I was curious where you think the SEC should play in that universe. Well, I think there has been a fair amount of regulation in that area or regulatory activity over the last few years, which has been also part of the problem of innovation. But getting back to it, fraud is fraud. And the mission of the SEC is to look after investors, protect investors, but also look after capital formation and

orderly and efficient markets. So those are all important aspects of our mission. So the SEC has been very active on that. Do you have different ideas about how companies communicate with the public, though? Because for so long, it was, you know, you had to put your statement on both

Edgar, but really on business wire or something like that. And now obviously you can go on Twitter, you can do this. And, but you know, people are going on podcasts. Obviously they come on places like squawk, but how do you think about sort of broadly pushing out all of this information at the same time? Well, so the, uh, the markets live on information obviously. And that's why, you know, inside trading, uh, comes up, uh, you know, uh,

very often, you know, as far as people who have more information than others and abuse their aspect there. But as far as, you know, the access to information, that's what's so wonderful about modern markets is that information is all over the place, but it's up to the company, up to the issuer. What do you think about Congress? So this is going to be a bite the hand that feeds you situation. But no, no, I remember talking to Jay Clayton about this.

I've always thought it should be the SEC who could somehow step in and start to really look at insider trading in Congress because we've had a lot of questions about whether it's Nancy Pelosi and that family. And there's so many examples where you go to yourself, how is it possible that these people are trading? Do you think there should be a rule in place that makes it much more complicated or difficult or a disclosure that doesn't exist today? Well, a few years ago, Congress did enact a rule

a rule that's called the Stock Act. I'm aware of it, but it doesn't seem to have shifted the balance. When you see some of the disclosures and also how well they've done, you say to yourself, how is that happening? Well, I've seen there are all sorts of different studies as to that, whether or not there's any evidence of it. The SEC gets literally thousands and thousands of tips from all over the place coming in from the net and from companies

people on the outside, whistleblowers and whatnot. So obviously we take tips seriously and look into them. So obviously I can't comment on anything, but just let's say that the SEC is very active.

I want to get back to our conversation about private companies, private credit. These are things that individual investors want to have access to. How do you view the role of the SEC in terms of products that investors want to have access to, products that investors should have access to, and what your role is? Is it your role to put up guardrails here? Is it your role to...

just say all these products, as long as you disclose properly, they are available to individual investors? Or are there some products that are not a good idea for individual investors and the SEC will take a more activist standpoint? Well, right now we are at a cusp of where we need to look at the rules and how they apply. But obviously there are standards for public disclosure. And in the private markets, because of these particular products,

are not publicly registered, those rules of disclosure don't necessarily apply. But the private markets have developed a lot over the last 40 years. And institutional investors and others demand, make demands on issuers for information. So there's been kind of a leveling of the amount of information that's in both of the markets. But a separate issue, private credit,

which is the new, you know, it's been done on Wall Street for, I don't know, 10 years, maybe more. But in terms of access by individual investors, that's only opening up right now. Is that an area that investors should have access to now that

I mean, some might argue here that we're in sort of the waning days of private credit, and the investors will be marketed the worst of the credits out there that aren't rated properly, that are, you know, the dregs of what's left over that the institutions don't want. Well, I'm afraid of that, too, obviously. And so we will, as we look at, you know, the accredited investor standard and other things, we'll be cognizant of that. And as I said earlier, it's very important to have...

you know, good standards as to, you know, what retail investors would be getting into. Chairman Atkins, we are out of time. I wish we could continue this. I want to talk about semi-liquid investments. Be reading some of those kind of things. There's so much to do. Come on back, sir. I'd be happy to. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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That's the podcast for today. Thank you for tuning in. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick, and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Weekday mornings on CNBC at 6 Eastern. To get the best parts of that TV show right into your ears, follow Squawk Pod wherever you're listening now. We'll meet you right back here tomorrow. Have a great day. We are clear. Thanks, guys. Life insurers put life into the things you live for.

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