Tel Aviv's exchange bets that a rising New York revenue bar will send Israeli unicorns home

Everything in the pitch hangs on that revenue threshold, and the figure is Ben-Zeev's own ^[17]. The excerpt of the interview does not include a source for it, or for the data he says shows a Tel Aviv listing brings more liquidity and more demand for a company's shares ^[12]. Take the bar as true and every company with annual revenue between the old level and the new one has lost a route it had before.

The index lead needs the same scrutiny, or rather its start date does. Both margins run from Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the attacks, when by Semafor's account the bear case for Israel's stock market was obvious ^[13]. A lead measured from there records a recovery from low expectations: a price that has already moved, and a weak guide to what a listing is worth at today's level. The same two margins imply that the Nasdaq Composite beat the S&P 500 by 27 points ^[22] (if both gaps are cumulative returns), so the 23-point gap is the fairer one for a pitch to tech companies ^[3].

Ackman's $23 million, now $230 million by his account ^[6], is a tenfold gain ^[16] since 2024 ^[5]. Ackman, who called owning an exchange "the purest way to bet on a country" ^[14], and Ben-Zeev, the exchange's CEO ^[1], are on the same side of the table.

The companies in the story point both ways. Wiz, Monday.com and Fiverr all went public in New York or sold to US rivals ^[9], and Palo Alto Networks dual-listed in Tel Aviv after buying CyberArk ^[10]. Ben-Zeev's route for the next group is to start in the Israeli market and add a dual listing once they are ready ^[15]. If a company lists first in Tel Aviv and adds New York later, the first listing stays in Tel Aviv and the larger float may not.

We think the exchange keeps the companies the bar turns away and loses the ones that clear it. On that reading the year's roughly 30 IPOs ^[2] are mostly fallbacks, and a count weights a small issue the same as a large one. The counter-thesis is Ben-Zeev's own: that the bar stays high and the fallback becomes the default ^[18]. A global-bank-led offering on Tel Aviv alone from a company above $500 million in revenue would show we have it backwards.