1/ I’ve been holding onto the title “The American Dream Is Delisted” for a while. Today, I finally finished my opinion article.

What pushed me over the edge?

First, Tucker Carlson’s incredible interview with Trevor Milton (@nikolatrevor). No matter what you think you know, watch it, beginning to end🔥It’s not just about Nikola...
It’s about what happens when innovation collides with unchecked regulatory power.

Second, and most disturbingly, the sheer gall of SEC Commissioner @HesterPeirce, (served under Mr Gary Gensler) saying this out loud in an interview with @paulbarron and @paulbarrontv:

"Something's wrong in the public markets. And I think that we are seeing signs that there's something wrong now... in the public markets.
We're not seeing companies decide to go public EARLY in their lives. And, and there are a lot of reasons for that. We don't have time to talk about all of them here, but one of the reasons is that...
I don't think the SEC has gotten the regulatory balance right on public companies. And that's something that I'm, I'm really enthusiastic about seeing, the SEC under Chairman Atkins, really tackle and work on."

Is this the same @SECGov that oversaw the collapse of retail trust in the markets, the same system that punishes tech founders but enables hidden trading via dark pools and @FINRA /@OTCMarkets loopholes, now admits, years later, it “hasn’t gotten the balance right”⁉️⁉️

Here’s your reality check:

📉 U.S. IPOs — Then vs. Now:
• 1996: 676 IPOs
• 1999: 480 IPOs
• 2022: 71 IPOs
• 2023: 128 IPOs

That’s a ~40% collapse in listings since the 1990s. While Asia-Pacific surges ahead with nearly 29,000 public companies, America is bleeding out its innovation pipeline.

⚠️ If you’re a tech founder, emerging issuer and entrepreneur thinking of going public in the U.S., please read this first.

The American Dream Is Delisted
(Op-Ed by @palikaras - Not Financial Advice)
Introduction
The U.S. public market, once a beacon of innovation, transparency, and growth capital, now risks ceding its leadership. As IPOs dwindle and market opacity deepens, emerging companies increasingly view public listing not as a launchpad but as a liability. Meanwhile, capital-rich markets in Asia-Pacific offer founders the support and visibility America once promised. (thank you for reading on)
👇👇👇 2/ The American Dream Is Delisted: How U.S. Public Markets Became Hostile to Innovation

By George Palikaras

This paper outlines the current challenges facing the U.S. market structure, highlights examples of reduced transparency and access, and offers constructive reform paths and ideas to restore fairness and competitiveness.

SEC Candidness Falls Short

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce recently acknowledged that early-stage companies are increasingly avoiding public markets, citing the SEC’s failure to achieve an appropriate regulatory "balance". While her comment was unusually candid for a sitting commissioner, she’s right to sound the alarm, but it only begins to scratch the surface of what’s gone wrong.

What was once the engine of U.S. economic dynamism has, in my opinion, over the last two decades, been re-engineered to benefit legacy financial power, foreign influence, and suffocate the very innovation it once fueled.

For most tech founders today, the public market increasingly represents less of a destination and more of a deterrent.

What was once a path to scale and democratized ownership, has become an unpredictable gauntlet of legal ambiguity, market opacity, and structural disadvantage.

Rather than fund builders and allocate capital efficiently, today's public market infrastructure seems increasingly designed to extract value from those least able to defend against it.

1/10 Thank you @denniskneale for your timely article backed by the March 2025 research working paper "Reg SHO at Twenty". I read the 81-page paper by John W. Welborn, PhD in Economics, who works at Dartmouth University. He is a well-published academic with a proven track record in financial markets research, particularly on short selling and Regulation SHO (Welborn's other research is available here: faculty-directory.dartmouth.edu/john-w-welborn) . There is a two-decade failure to enforce fair market rules, failures that mirror and explain the unresolved issues behind a number of stocks, including $TSLA $DJT $MMAT $MMTLP and many, many more. Here is my take and opinion... 2/10 The Never-Ending (Naked) Short - How Reg SHO’s Farce Fuels Trainwrecks [opinion]:

ETFs like $XRT saw FTDs peak at $418M and short interest as high as 699% of float, yet the SEC seems to have taken no action for years (Welborn, 2025, p. 27)...

If British bureaucracy is a masterclass in delayed gratification, America’s Regulation SHO is a Kafkaesque circus where the clowns run the show.🤡

Welborn’s damning paper, exposes two decades of regulatory theater...a saga of loopholes wider than the Atlantic, “reforms” that reformed nothing, and settlement failures so brazen they’d make a loan shark blush.

1/ Breaking News🚨56-PAGE FOIA DOCUMENT:
In the next few posts, I will be sharing and unpacking a 56-page document released under FOIA
- It includes SEC’s own emails (by Washington senior policymakers directly under Gensler - NOT enforcement), strategic coordination with Congress BEFORE enforcement actions, timelines, and narrative control around Meta Materials Inc. and $MMTLP.

I encourage everyone and particularly the media, to look into the context of these emails, the names involved, timelines etc. Public debate is the cornerstone of democracy and your protected 1st Amendment right.

This post contains personal commentary and PUBLIC RECORDS. It does not constitute legal advice or assert any confidential information. All source documents were lawfully obtained.

#MMTLP #MMAT #Ripple #Coinbase #DJT
@cvpayne @EleanorTerrett @MariaBartiromo @Public_Citizen @kshaughnessy2 @fnez_blogger @DanNewsManBall
Are you ready? Let's begin....
2/ DOWNLOAD the 56-page PDF FOIA document here: dropbox.com/scl/fi/2i9i57j…

Who in the SEC knew? And when?
Did the SEC pre-brief a U.S. Senator about the MMTLP case, before any enforcement?

Emails now confirm that MMTLP was on Commissioner Uyeda's office's "hot-topic" list, tied to my former company (@Metamaterialtec) and the infamous @FINRA U3 halt.

Taylor Asher is the Policy Advisor & Confidential Assistant to Commissioner Mark Uyeda. This isn’t just some intern. Taylor Asher advises an SEC Commissioner. In July 2023, she flagged #MMTLP as a "hot topic" before a Senator meeting. Who else knew?

I’m sharing this document so that the public and retail investors understand how intertwined these issues have become. This is not about MMAT/MMTLP. This is about accountability.

I get asked by young #entrepreneurs what is the cost and the output of R&D activities and how long would it take to reach certain milestones? There is considerable variability in the amount of investment in R&D needed to generate a patentable #invention 1/7 🦋 When we started @Metamaterialtec with @timaras we found that #IBM spent about $6 billion on R&D in 2011 and generated 6,146 patents, implying an average R&D cost per patent of $976,000. At same year #Qualcomm, spent $2.3 billion on R&D and generated 1,000 patents, 2/7 🦋