Bloomberg Businessweek Sep 17, 2026 13 min
With Joe Magazzini, partner at Fortuna Investments and a Miami Beach City Commissioner
Joe Magazzini's venture firm has bought into private issuances at SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and its stated purpose is to get the companies it backs onto a public exchange early rather than late.
The rest of the industry is moving the other way. Money keeps flowing into private rounds, and the largest technology companies now reach trillion-dollar valuations without filing an S-1. Magazzini said that is precisely where the gains stop reaching ordinary savers.
"But think about the wealth that that has created for doctors, for teachers, for lawyers, for the everyday person."
Magazzini spent 15 years on Wall Street, starting at Merrill Lynch's structured credit trading desk in 2005. He is now a partner at Fortuna Investments and a Miami Beach City Commissioner, and he brought the Future Proof conference to his city. He spoke from the Huntington Beach edition of that conference.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Fortuna does not write passive checks — it takes an operating role, down to CFO help and accounting, and treats a public listing as part of what it supplies
The distributional case for early IPOs: when a company lists at $1.5 trillion rather than $400 million, the gains have already been captured privately
The sector list — nuclear, critical metals, defense technology in space, robotics, data centers — survives a change of administration, in his telling, because the dependence on China does not go away
What he wants from government is permitting, not equity stakes
Miami is not trying to overtake New York; he wants a 20-year-old to be able to take an aerospace company public from Miami Beach
The risk he names is a public backlash against AI and against data centers, not a weekend of market weakness
1. Inside Fortuna's Model
Magazzini described Fortuna as an America-first venture capital firm carrying a private equity habit: it buys in, then works inside the company. He listed what the firm supplies alongside the money, and included a route to the public market in that list.
"And we do have that hybrid of a private equity field because we don't traditionally just do a lot of passive investing." — Joe Magazzini
"We have had rounds in issuances like SpaceX and Rocket Lab and things like that." — Joe Magazzini
"But our more bread and butter model is to find great founders, great companies, some of the technology that is really on the frontier of American exceptionalism and look to take an active role." — Joe Magazzini
"We will look to provide that strategic advisory, the infrastructure, whether it be CFO, accounting, relationships, networking, and it's access to the public markets, right?" — Joe Magazzini
2. The Private-Markets Gap
The program put Amazon's market value at its listing at $400 million. Magazzini used that as the contrast: a company that went public small handed decades of compounding to people who bought it on an exchange, and the companies of comparable ambition today do not reach an exchange until the compounding is over. He named Anthropic as a case where the incentive to list is weak, given the filings and the scrutiny that follow.
"I truly believe at some point in time it will become a societal issue where these are creating unprecedented amounts of wealth in such a concentrated amount of hands." — Joe Magazzini
"That is just not available when these companies are staying private until they get into a $1.5, $2 trillion market cap." — Joe Magazzini
"You're looking at things like Anthropic and you're wondering, well, do they really have this incentive to go public now with all this scrutiny and the S1s that they'll have to file and things like that?" — Joe Magazzini
3. Sectors Beyond Politics
Bloomberg Businessweek read Fortuna's sector list back to him (nuclear, critical metals, defense technology in space, robotics, data centers, automated industrial manufacturing) and asked whether he is taking companies public into a friendly administration that the midterms could replace. Magazzini answered that the need is structural.
"There are such critical elements for where America is heading right now that this is going to last across administrations, right?" — Joe Magazzini
"In defense technology, what is missing? Critical minerals, critical metals. That doesn't matter who is president. Right now, we're relying on China for that." — Joe Magazzini
"And when I think about what competitive advantages America has versus the rest of the world, make no mistake, the world is better when America leads." — Joe Magazzini
4. Permits, Not Equity
The show pushed back with the reason the refining of critical minerals sits in China: thin margins, difficult processing and an environmental cost the United States chose not to carry. Asked whether the work can be made to pay without government money, Magazzini separated two kinds of help. He set aside the question of the government taking equity stakes as a separate argument, and pointed at permitting. He also invoked the cost of pulling a pound of copper out of the ground today against what it cost 20 years ago.
"But what government can really do is help with things facilitating that process, the permitting issues." — Joe Magazzini
"And the government doesn't have to be there as an equity partner in it, but they have to sit there and help facilitate a more accommodative environment." — Joe Magazzini
5. Wall Street South
Five years of talk about a talent and wealth exodus from New York has not produced one, the program said, and large financial firms still struggle to staff Florida offices. Magazzini did not argue with the premise. His claim is narrower: the job a graduate can get in Miami has changed.
"We are not looking to overtake New York City." — Joe Magazzini
"We want to bring that same sense of optimism and opportunity where if you're a 20-year-old grad out of college, you can go to Miami and work at a venture capital firm and take an aerospace company public" — Joe Magazzini
"It's no longer just the wealthy people that are moving there, but it's the employees that they're bringing, the opportunities and the jobs that they're creating that is really exciting." — Joe Magazzini
6. The Cost of Success
Bloomberg's reporting has found Miami more expensive than New York on insurance and homeownership, and the question was whether the growth he is selling prices out the people he says it lifts. Magazzini conceded the strain on infrastructure and schools, then answered with his city's tax record.
"So we've had such tremendous success, but that actually comes with some challenges, right?" — Joe Magazzini
"But I would much rather be in a position where we are looking to determine how we smartly grow and deal with some of those issues than how to manage our decline." — Joe Magazzini
"Right here in Miami Beach, we actually just cut our tax rates two years in a row. We have our lowest millage rate in the last 10 years." — Joe Magazzini
"When Seattle, when California are proposing some of these wealth taxes, sometimes government's best role is just getting out of the way, right?" — Joe Magazzini
7. The One Big Risk
With half a minute left, the show asked him for the biggest risk to the market outlook. He did not name a rate or an earnings season. He named public opposition to the thing his sector list depends on, and then said he does not expect it to hold.
"I think it's certainly if there's going to be this AI backlash, whether it be from a local perspective on this backlash against data centers." — Joe Magazzini
"But I think there's too much on the line, not just for our economy, for America, for the future of this world, to really have that be a hiatus." — Joe Magazzini
Bonus Insights
Magazzini runs the Miami edition of Future Proof, and he gave its numbers. It opened at roughly 3,000 attendees, moves to March, and is aiming to pass the Huntington Beach event.
"So we started at about 3,000 attendees, and I think this year we're going to have it in March." — Joe Magazzini
"We're actually going to look to surpass what we have here in Huntington Beach, so we're going to aim for about 5,500 to 6,000." — Joe Magazzini
He also made a point of the Huntington Beach gathering itself, arguing that the shorts-and-polos setting hides how much business gets done there, and that the attendee list is the senior end of Wall Street.
The program described his Miami Beach office building as a former Burger King. Magazzini said what occupies it now is AI companies, venture capital firms and hedge funds.
Magazzini's bottom line is that the route back to broadly shared investment gains runs through earlier listings, and that the most useful thing Washington can do for the industries he backs is clear the permitting, not buy a stake.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Fortuna Investments (Magazzini's firm; an America-first venture capital firm with a private equity overlay that takes an operating role in the companies it backs)
SpaceX and Rocket Lab (Named as issuances Fortuna has taken part in)
Anthropic (His example of a company with little incentive to face public-market scrutiny and file an S-1)
Amazon (The listing the program put at a $400 million market value, used as the contrast with today's private valuations)
Merrill Lynch (Where he started in structured credit trading in 2005)
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs (Named as the headquarters Miami Beach will not win, in his own answer)
Future Proof (The conference he was speaking from, and whose Miami edition he brought to his city)
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