A Few Unicorns Are No Substitute for a Competitive, Innovative Economy
The world's unicorns, VC-backed startups worth more than $1 billion, have been getting a lot of press. At the moment, Google News lists about 16 million results for Uber and 7 million results for Snapchat. By contrast, there are fewer than 3.5 million stories about Walmart, 2.6 million about General Motors, and fewer than 700,000 focused on Exxon. Unicorns are to business journalists what Kim Kardashian is to Instagram users. As of November 2016, the market value of the world's 179 unicorns was estimated to be $646 billion. U.S.-based unicorns accounted for 56% of the total, with a combined market value of $353 billion. While that's a big number, it's less than 2% of the market value of the companies that make up the S&P 500 ($19.9 trillion). By this barometer, the unicorns are mostly irrelevant. More here