Ugh, c'mon. I mean, there's plenty of weird garbage in finance that it's entirely reasonable to throw shade at. SPACs aren't really one of them.<p>The SPAC itself has to do its own IPO, and has to disclose what it plans to do. And if you decide to read those disclosures and they say that they're going to use the money to buy whatever company they feel like in whatever industry strikes their fancy after they've been smoking pot continuously for 72 hours, then that's your choice; you can also light your money on fire if that's your thing. But maybe you should pick one where the managers have an investing philosophy aligned with yours, and who plan to use the money in narrower ways that you agree with?<p>Obviously you don't get as much information about the business (because there isn't one yet) as you do in a traditional IPO. But so what? If you're investing in a SPAC you're saying that you have a chunk of money that you want to invest, and that you trust the SPAC's managers to find a good way to invest it better than you'd do on your own. And that's not at all a weird thing to do. It's not significantly different from giving your money to a hedge fund or VC fund, or (as a retail investor) investing in an actively-managed mutual fund or ETF (which are maybe things that most retail investors shouldn't do, but still have the option to do if they want to).<p>This is just not a big deal. You can simply choose not to invest in SPACs if you don't like them. The IPO market is generally closed to your average retail investor anyway, so having fewer conventional IPOs doesn't really affect retail investors. (SPACs are publicly-traded before the reverse-merger, though, so if a retail investor does really want in, they can do that, with shares usually trading pretty close to the original $10 price until acquisition rumors start flying.) Regardless, my sympathy for people who throw money they can't afford to lose at other people without doing their homework is at an all-time low.<p>SPACs aren't going to cause the next dot-com crash, or the next Great Financial Crisis, or whatever. They may be in a bit of a bubble, and they may start to decline (and hard) in less than a year, but it'll barely be a blip.