30: Who are the Capitalists Now?
“But while people like Bezos, Gates and Musk top the modern ‘rich list’ and capture the public imagination, most large corporations are controlled by men in suits, if no longer in ties, whose careers have been spent ascending corporate bureaucracies. Of the ten largest companies in the Fortune list discussed in Chapter 7, none was founder-controlled.
Related Quotes
The Corporation in the 21st Century- John Kay
PART 1: The Background
1: Love the Product, Hate the Producer
“Some of these billionaire executives are no superstars: individuals such as Philip Green, who extracted nine-figure sums from retailer BHS before selling the company to multiple bankrupt Dominic Chappell for £1, Mike Ashley, the domineering boss of the retailer Sports Direct, and Eddie Lampert, who inflicted similar destruction on Sears, for a century America’s leading store chain. The lifestyle of these executives contrasts with the fate of their businesses. The 90-metre yachts of Green and Lampert make good newspaper pictures. Green’s is moored in the harbour of the tax haven of Monaco, where he is resident, while Lampert’s is named Fountainhead, after Ayn Rand’s turgid paean to individualism.
The business magazine Fortune published a list of the largest 500 US corporations in 1955 and has continued to do so annually ever since. The subsequent fate of the initial top ten provides a powerful rejoinder to the claim that large businesses acquire a scale that leaves them masters of their environment.
23: The Finance Curse
“But between 1981, when Welch took control at GE, and 2005, when Lampert took control of Sears, a new approach to business developed. Managers like Sir Denys Henderson and Simon Marks, Alfred Sloan and Owen Young, had seen themselves as public figures with associated responsibilities to a wide range of constituencies. The generation that succeeded them had a narrower conception of their role. A successor generation of corporate executives paid close attention to quarterly reporting and the stock price.
Wealth is not equally, or even equitably, distributed, but it is more broadly distributed than in the past. To see a modern capitalist, perhaps you should go to the mirror in the home you own.
Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped “the company.” I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it is.