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They perfectly succeeded at their purpose, no? Dump terrible companies on public investors under $GME-era hype without the usual disclosures required for public listing. They nailed it!

Sure a few sponsors got burned here and there, but the gamble was obviously the whole point.

And ... Chamath is now worth about $1B, and is generally perceived as being "very successful."

A good PR firm and some well-placed donations should silence any remaining dissenters.

Chamath was a billionaire from Facebook IPO
"Man rich from destroying the internet as we know it makes even more money ripping off retail investors"
The purpose of an SPAC is solely to circumvent to regulations governing IPOs.

Specifically those rules and regulations preventing repeated fraud on investors.

The SPACs failure is by design, if an SPAC could succeed, they would IPO as they could raise more money because they'd have backing of real audits and reports.

I don't know strictly whether or not that's true, but given the names associated with the most publicly advertised SPACs, it's easily believable.
Hidden ownership can lead to a significant lack of transparency. Potential investors and partners may be wary of getting involved with a SPAC when they can't ascertain who the real decision-makers or beneficiaries are. This wariness can affect fundraising efforts and the SPAC's overall credibility.
This is absolutely true. I invested a tiny amount in the SPAC that became Lucid Motors. Imagine my surprise when the official investor docs disclosed (in a very obtuse way) that the actual owner and controller of the company is MBS, the King of Saudia Arabia!

People like me who bought in are just suckers for a company over which we have no control.

I think the first time I actually heard a SPAC be mentioned was when the MariaDB situation happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34070451

It was quite unfortunate to hear, because having a company related to the RDBMS project seemed like a nice thing and it lent credibility to MariaDB appearing like a stable and viable supported alternative to MySQL.

I mean, PostgreSQL exists, sure, but it's always nice to have to have other options and alternatives (modern MySQL/MariaDB are both passable for many use cases).