In the modern world of business, there exists two broad categories of corporations: public, and private.
The distinction is typically made as a matter of whether or not control of the corporation is available in theory to the general public at large, and barring some miscellanea about stock-based ownership and distinctions of form with democratic state-owned enterprises, that qualification is what raises what is, by default, a private corporation into the ‘big leagues’ as a public corporation.
But what if I told you that it was also possible to take a company in the other direction? What if, say, instead of a corporation striving for transparency and public goodwill in service of its charter granted on the premise of commerce, it instead chose to exclude public participation at all meaningful intervals? This is called going confidential, in contrast to going public, and it’s an increasingly common phenomenon in the world of tech.