What does it mean to “take a company public”?
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A privately owned company is owned by one person or a group of people. New owners can come and old owners can go, but if you want to buy in or sell your share of the company, if can be difficult because you need to find somebody willing to buy and then agree on a value.
When a company is publicly traded, it means ownership can be bought or sold by anybody on a stock exchange. It makes it much easier to buy or sell ownership of any company.
Companies start as privately owned. At some point they may decide to become public. Usually because they want to raise money to expand. So they sell a share of the company in an IPO (initial public offering) to get a bunch of money. They then use that money to grow really fast.
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