The main difference between public and private companies are that private companies are owned by a 100 individuals and are not traded publicly. Public companies are traded and have zillions of shareholders. Public companies also are responsible to the Securities and Exchange Commission whereas private companies are not. Private companies are not responsible for reporting financial data which means that they do not need workers to report the financial data. Public companies must report financial data which means they do need to hire workers to report that data. I think that a good difference between them would be the amount of people who own the company. Private companies save money because they do not have to hire an accounting team to report the financial data but this could be bad because is someone reporting the data or is the data just not being reported? An example of a private company would be IKEA and it is a very successful company. A successful public company is Microsoft.