Bridger PenningtonFund Launch & Investment Expert

Should we Keep Accreditation Standards to Invest in Private Companies, or Updated it For 2026?

22 Jun 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:05

Bridger Pennington examines whether SEC accreditation standards for private company investment should stay the same or change by 2026. He cites examples like SpaceX, Stripe, and OpenAI to explore whether retail investors deserve access to these deals.

Chapters

You can gamble, you can trade options, you can even buy meme coins, but you can't invest in private startups or companies unless you're an accredited investor or a millionaire. This is what CEO Brian Armstrong is fighting against. Now, these are the rules from the SEC on what qualifies you as an accredited investor. The both arguments are, well, these are retail investors, they're uninformed, they're unsophisticated, they have much more to lose percentage net worth, and so we should protect them and not allow them to invest in private startups. The counterargument is you're already allowing them to do everything else, and a lot of wealth creation is created in Privately held startups. Companies like SpaceX. I've been pitched on SpaceX many times. I actually passed, unfortunately, many times. But you have to be an accredited investor to invest into SpaceX pre-IPO. This is the last 25 years. You can like Stripe, Databricks, Anthropic, OpenAI, all have rounds right now, but you have to be an accredited investor to be able to get access to these types of offerings. Comment down below what you think. Should there be accredited investor rules? Should they stay or should they get taken away and allow more retail money to flow into startups? Comment down below what you think.