Why the world’s biggest tech companies may never IPO again - Peter Singlehurst [Baillie Gifford]

On this episode of BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Peter Singlehurst, who built the private companies team from scratch at legendary investment firm Baillie Gifford, deploying billions into more than 100 of the most important private companies on the planet.

Peter operates on a timeline that makes typical venture capitalists look shortsighted. From backing Tesla in 2013 at a $3B market cap to entering SpaceX at a $30B valuation, his strategy completely bypasses the short-term noise of quarterly earnings.

In this masterclass, he breaks down why optimizing for the highest possible price at an IPO is a lethal mistake, the massive arbitrage hidden within the world's most misunderstood tech giant (ByteDance), and the raw post-mortem of their highest-profile mistake: Northvolt.

We break down:

• The Philosophy Swerve: How a philosophy graduate skipped a PhD to build a multi-billion dollar growth engine and why Baillie Gifford deliberately hires people with no finance background.
• The Death of the IPO Monopoly: Why the world's most valuable hyper-growth companies no longer need public exchanges to unlock liquidity.
• Debt Kills, Dilution Doesn't: Peter's contrarian warning to scaling founders on why leverage is a ticking time bomb for pre-profitable businesses.
• The ByteDance Arbitrage: The inside story of buying shares at ~4x free cash flow while Western investors ran away.
• The Northvolt Post-Mortem: A transparent breakdown of their highest-profile mistake and how to spot a venture-stage asset masquerading as a growth-stage giant.
• Disrupting the 2-and-20 Norm: How Baillie Gifford structures an ultra-LP-friendly 1-and-10 fee model charged on invested capital, not committed capital.

TIMELINE :

• 00:00 – "You get the shareholders you deserve": the long-term underwriting mindset
• 00:53 – From philosophy to growth equity: why Baillie Gifford avoids finance backgrounds
• 05:44 – Entry mechanics: Tesla's $3B public entry vs SpaceX's $30B private scale
• 08:23 – The leverage trap: why a little dilution never killed a business, but debt does
• 13:50 – Democratizing elite assets: how the Schiehallion Fund opens up Stripe, SpaceX & Databricks to everyday savers
• 23:15 – Designing the ideal IPO: why chasing the highest possible price destroys public-market trust
• 30:07 – The founder risk matrix: Bezos' 1997 shareholder letter & Musk's "bet the house" blueprint
• 35:30 – The ByteDance arbitrage: buying shares at ~4x free cash flow
• 52:47 – Flipping the venture fee model: the LP-friendly 1-and-10 on invested capital
• 56:09 – The Northvolt post-mortem: growth equity risk vs venture equity risk

REFERENCES

• Elon Musk 

• Jeff Bezos 

• Jeff Bezos’s letter to his shareholders in 1997

• Warren Buffett 

• Larry Ashbrook

• Hendrick Borginon 

• Baillie Gifford 

• Tesla 

• SpaceX 

• ByteDance 

• Amazon 

• Alibaba 

• Anduril 

• Bending Spoons

• Airbnb

• Spotify 

• Stripe

• Databricks

• Affirm

• Wise

• Tempus

• Klarna 

• Figma

• Northvolt

• Uber

• Lyft

• Meta (Facebook)