Every company 160
1 books · Companies
Abraaj was a Dubai-based private equity firm that raised billions for emerging market investments and collapsed in 2018 after investors found that mon
7 books · Companies
The insurer whose London derivatives unit required a $182bn rescue; there is no single canonical book, and crisis-wide accounts carry much of the stor
4 books · Companies
Short-term rental marketplace whose founding story and city-by-city regulatory conflict are covered by a small but solid literature.
1 books · Companies
Alfa Romeo built racing and sports cars in Milan from 1910, passed through state ownership under IRI, and became a Fiat brand in 1986. It shows how en
8 books · Companies
China's dominant e-commerce group; the literature mixes insider accounts with outside histories of Jack Ma's rise.
10 books · Companies
Search and advertising company reorganised as Alphabet in 2015, with a literature split between founding narratives and management texts by its own le
1 books · Companies
The multistrategy fund that lost $6bn on natural gas spreads in 2006, then the largest hedge fund loss ever; one dedicated book exists.
7 books · Companies
Retail and cloud-computing company whose operating doctrine and Bezos-era expansion are documented by both journalists and departing executives.
5 books · Companies
A payments and travel franchise with a long history but a thin book literature, concentrated on the turbulent 1980s.
3 books · Companies
Amway sells household, nutrition and beauty products through independent distributors who buy at wholesale, sell at retail and earn bonuses on the vol
2 books · Companies
Anglo Irish Bank lent to Irish property developers on relationship terms, grew its loan book many times over in a decade, and funded that growth in wh
4 books · Companies
AB InBev is the result of four mergers run by Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Beto Sicupira: Brahma and Antarctica into AmBev in 1999, AmBev wit
1 books · Companies
AOL signed up tens of millions of dial-up subscribers in the 1990s, merged with Time Warner in 2001, and then lost its subscriber base to broadband. I
14 books · Companies
Consumer computing and devices company whose founder cult, near-death in the 1990s and record-breaking second act have produced the deepest single-com
1 books · Companies
Aravind performs cataract surgery in India at high volume, charges paying patients and treats the poor free, and funds itself from operations. Operato
1 books · Companies
Bill Hwang's family office, whose 2021 total-return-swap unwind cost prime brokers over $10bn; no dedicated book exists, and the best coverage sits in
2 books · Companies
Arthur Andersen audited Enron, WorldCom, Waste Management and Sunbeam, and by the late 1990s its consulting arm earned more than its audit practice, w
6 books · Companies
Britain's oldest merchant bank, destroyed in 1995 by one Singapore futures trader; the founding case study in rogue trading and control failure.
7 books · Companies
The first big broker-dealer to go, sold to JPMorgan in March 2008 in the run-up to Lehman.
1 books · Companies
Bell Labs was AT&T's research arm, funded by the regulated telephone monopoly, and produced the transistor, the laser, information theory, and Unix. I
13 books · Companies
Buffett and Munger's textile shell turned insurance-funded conglomerate, and the most written-about investment vehicle in history.
8 books · Companies
The $65bn Ponzi scheme run for decades out of a legitimate market-making firm, exposed in December 2008.
1 books · Companies
Betfair built a betting exchange that matches customers against each other and takes a commission rather than setting odds as a bookmaker. Investors r
5 books · Companies
The largest alternative asset manager, built from a two-man advisory shop in 1985.
4 books · Companies
The video rental chain built by Wayne Huizenga, sold to Viacom and then killed by mail and streaming; one dedicated history, with the endgame told ins
2 books · Companies
Bloomberg sells one product on one price list: the Terminal, at roughly $30,000 a year per user with no discounts, to more than 300,000 subscribers, a
1 books · Companies
BNSF formed from the 1995 merger of Burlington Northern and Santa Fe and now hauls freight across the western United States; Berkshire Hathaway bought
6 books · Companies
A duopoly aircraft maker whose engineering culture, McDonnell Douglas merger and 737 MAX crashes have produced a focused critical literature.
7 books · Companies
The world's largest hedge fund and its 'radical transparency' culture, contested between the founder's own account and the reporting on it.
1 books · Companies
Canadian Pacific runs freight rail across Canada and, after acquiring Kansas City Southern in 2021, into Mexico. Investors read it for precision sched
1 books · Companies
Capital Cities was a small broadcaster run by Tom Murphy and Dan Burke that bought the much larger ABC network in 1985 with Berkshire's backing and so
5 books · Companies
The Washington-based buyout firm known for its defense holdings and political roster; almost nothing serious has been written about it, and the one de
6 books · Companies
Chanel stays private under the Wertheimer family and reported revenue close to $20 billion in the mid-2020s, most of it from fragrance, beauty and lea
1 books · Companies
Chick-fil-A is a family-controlled US chicken restaurant chain that closes on Sundays, keeps low franchisee counts, and has grown to among the highest
2 books · Companies
Chrysler was the smallest of the Detroit carmakers, survived a federal loan guarantee in 1979, went through Daimler and Cerberus ownership, and ended
2 books · Companies
Citigroup came out of Sandy Weill's roll-up of Commercial Credit, Primerica, Shearson, Travelers and Salomon Brothers, which merged with Citicorp in 1
1 books · Companies
Cleveland-Cliffs has mined iron ore on the Great Lakes since 1847 and now also makes steel after buying AK Steel and ArcelorMittal USA. Investors read
8 books · Companies
The canonical global consumer brand, with a substantial history literature covering the bottling system, the formula and the cola wars.
8 books · Companies
The largest US cable operator; despite its scale the book literature is thin, mostly policy criticism and one authorized family history.
1 books · Companies
A famously press-shy warehouse club: despite enormous investor interest there is almost no serious book-length literature about it.
5 books · Companies
Angelo Mozilo's lender, the largest US mortgage originator before its 2008 sale to Bank of America; one insider book plus the subprime-industry histor
4 books · Companies
The 167-year-old Swiss bank that ran through Greensill, Archegos and a deposit flight into a 2023 shotgun merger with UBS.
1 books · Companies
CrossFit licensed its training method to thousands of independent gyms, charging affiliation fees rather than owning locations, and built the CrossFit
1 books · Companies
Cumberland Packing makes Sweet'N Low and has stayed in the Eisenstadt family in Brooklyn since 1957. It shows a single-product business defending a br
1 books · Companies
One of the best-performing industrial compounders ever, and almost entirely unwritten about: no standalone book exists.
1 books · Companies
Death Row Records dominated hip-hop sales in the early 1990s under Suge Knight and Dr. Dre, then collapsed amid violence, lawsuits, and the loss of it
1 books · Companies
Dell sold personal computers directly to customers, built to order, and used negative working capital to fund its growth before going private in 2013
1 books · Companies
Dow Jones published The Wall Street Journal and owned the market indexes and newswires under Bancroft family control until Rupert Murdoch's News Corp
6 books · Companies
Michael Milken's junk bond machine, bankrupt in 1990 after the insider-trading prosecutions; the founding literature of the 1980s takeover era.
1 books · Companies
East African Airways was the joint carrier of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania from 1946 until the collapse of the East African Community broke it up in 19
1 books · Companies
The English East India Company traded with Asia from 1600 under a royal charter, raised capital from shareholders, ran its own army, and governed much
5 books · Companies
The standard case study in disruption, but the book literature is thin: mostly founder biography and cultural history, no definitive fall narrative.
2 books · Companies
Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in 1995, and eBay charged a listing fee and a percentage of each completed sale on goods it never owned or shipped.
8 books · Companies
The 2001 accounting fraud that destroyed Arthur Andersen and produced Sarbanes-Oxley; the most heavily documented corporate collapse of its era.
7 books · Companies
Standard Oil's largest successor and a notably closed company: the single indispensable book is Coll's, with the industry histories supplying the rest
1 books · Companies
Ferrari builds low volumes of high-priced sports cars, races in Formula One, and listed separately from Fiat Chrysler in 2015. Investors read it for p
4 books · Companies
Fiat dominated Italian car production for a century under the Agnelli family, then absorbed Chrysler and became Fiat Chrysler under Sergio Marchionne.
2 books · Companies
Harvey Firestone built a tire company in Akron that supplied Ford and became one of the largest US rubber manufacturers before Bridgestone acquired it
8 books · Companies
The archetypal American mass-production company, and the subject of a deep literature on Henry Ford, the assembly line and repeated near-death turnaro
1 books · Companies
Fox News launched in 1996 under Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and became the most-watched US cable news channel and the main profit source within its
6 books · Companies
Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange, collapsed in November 2022 with roughly $8bn of customer funds missing.
2 books · Companies
Robert Swanson and Herbert Boyer founded Genentech in 1976 to turn recombinant DNA into products, and it delivered human insulin, licensed to Eli Lill
6 books · Companies
For decades the most admired industrial conglomerate in America, now the subject of a large post-mortem literature on financialized management.
10 books · Companies
The company that invented the modern multidivisional corporation and then spent fifty years being written about as its cautionary case.
2 books · Companies
Marc Rich and Pincus Green left Philipp Brothers in 1974 and built a trading house on spot-market crude, dealing through embargoes on Iran, South Afri
1 books · Companies
The Golden State Warriors went from a losing NBA franchise to a championship team after Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought it in 2010 and rebuilt the fr
7 books · Companies
The partnership that became the archetype of Wall Street power, and a magnet for institutional histories and insider exits.
1 books · Companies
Goodyear is one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world and takes its name from Charles Goodyear, who developed vulcanised rubber but earned li
2 books · Companies
HBO began selling a monthly subscription for uncut films over cable systems in 1972 and moved to satellite distribution in 1975, which made a national
5 books · Companies
An engineering-led outlier among Japanese automakers; English-language book coverage is unusually thin for a company of its size.
9 books · Companies
Century-old computing company whose Watson dynasty, near-death in the early 1990s and wartime record are each the subject of major books.
4 books · Companies
A privately held, deliberately opaque retailer; most English-language books are authorized or design-historical rather than investigative.
0 books · Companies
A highly decentralized 80/20 industrial compounder; no book-length treatment of the company could be verified in Open Library.
1 books · Companies
In-N-Out is a family-owned California burger chain that has stayed private, refused to franchise, and grown slowly on a menu of a few items. Operators
8 books · Companies
Microprocessor company whose founders wrote some of the most durable management books in business, alongside a strong outside literature.
1 books · Companies
Motorola launched Iridium's 66-satellite phone network in 1998; the venture went bankrupt within a year after spending about five billion dollars, and
1 books · Companies
The J.G. Boswell Company farms cotton, tomatoes, and other crops on drained lakebed land in California's Central Valley and is one of the largest priv
2 books · Companies
JetBlue launched in 2000 as a low-cost US carrier with new aircraft, leather seats, and live television, and grew quickly out of New York. Operators r
5 books · Companies
A large healthcare conglomerate long treated as a governance exemplar; book-length critical coverage arrived late and remains sparse.
8 books · Companies
The surviving Morgan house and its Chase and Chemical antecedents; most of the literature is either dynastic history or crisis reporting.
8 books · Companies
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the firm that made the leveraged buyout an industry and then survived its own signature deal.
1 books · Companies
Koch Industries is a private American conglomerate in refining, pipelines, chemicals, and consumer products, built by Charles and David Koch on retain
1 books · Companies
L.L.Bean sells outdoor clothing and gear by catalogue, online, and from its Maine stores, and stayed family-owned with a long-standing returns guarant
8 books · Companies
The 2008 bankruptcy that turned a credit crunch into a global panic; the richest single-firm failure literature after Enron.
2 books · Companies
Lloyd's is a marketplace rather than an insurance company: brokers bring risks to syndicates, and until the 1990s the capital behind those syndicates
1 books · Companies
Lockheed's Skunk Works built the U-2, the SR-71, and the F-117 under small teams, tight secrecy, and unusual contracting terms. Operators read it for
8 books · Companies
The Nobel-laureate arbitrage fund whose 1998 collapse forced a Fed-brokered bank rescue and became the standard parable of leverage.
8 books · Companies
The dominant luxury conglomerate; serious English-language coverage is surprisingly thin and mostly sits inside broader luxury-industry books.
9 books · Companies
The franchising and real-estate model that defined fast food, with a strong founder memoir and a defining critical work.
6 books · Companies
McKinsey advises corporations and governments on strategy and organisation, and it charges for partner judgement rather than for measurable outcomes.
7 books · Companies
Social networking company renamed Meta in 2021, with a literature that turns sharply from founding legend to investigative and whistleblower accounts.
1 books · Companies
Method sold designed, non-toxic household cleaners into a category dominated by Procter & Gamble and Unilever, and sold itself to Ecover in 2012. Oper
9 books · Companies
Software platform company whose PC-era dominance, antitrust ordeal and cloud-era revival each generated their own shelf of books.
8 books · Companies
The world's largest food company, yet with strikingly little English-language book coverage outside the infant-formula controversy.
8 books · Companies
DVD-by-mail company turned streaming studio, unusually well documented by its own founders as well as by outside reporters.
7 books · Companies
Rupert Murdoch turned one Adelaide newspaper into a group holding British and American papers, Fox, HarperCollins and Sky, then split it in 2013 into
1 books · Companies
Steve Jobs founded NeXT in 1985 after leaving Apple; it sold few workstations, shifted to software, and Apple bought it in 1996 for its operating syst
9 books · Companies
The marketing-led athletic brand, covered by one very successful founder memoir and a small set of unauthorized histories.
6 books · Companies
Finnish handset maker that led global mobile phones and then lost the smartphone transition, producing a compact literature of post-mortems.
7 books · Companies
The Newcastle building society turned wholesale-funded lender whose September 2007 queues were Britain's first bank run since 1866.
2 books · Companies
Nucor became the largest steelmaker in the United States by melting scrap in electric arc minimills instead of running blast furnaces, and by paying w
5 books · Companies
Graphics-chip designer that became the central supplier of AI compute; its literature is recent and still thin relative to its size.
8 books · Companies
AI research lab turned product company whose nonprofit-to-capped-profit conversion and 2023 board crisis made it the subject of a fast-growing literat
5 books · Companies
Oracle sold the first commercial SQL relational database in 1979 and built a sales organisation that Larry Ellison drove on quota and commission. It b
7 books · Companies
Government and enterprise data-analytics company whose secrecy, defence contracts and ideological founders have only recently drawn book-length treatm
1 books · Companies
Juan Trippe built Pan American World Airways into the dominant US international carrier, then it lost its protected routes after deregulation and shut
1 books · Companies
Patagonia makes outdoor clothing, limits its own growth, and transferred ownership in 2022 to a trust and non-profit that direct profits to environmen
3 books · Companies
PayPal came from the 2000 merger of Elon Musk's X.com and Peter Thiel's Confinity, listed in 2002 and sold to eBay for $1.5 billion months later. It b
5 books · Companies
Consistently less written about than Coca-Cola; the literature is mainly executive memoir plus the cola-wars accounts.
1 books · Companies
Kiewit is an employee-owned construction and engineering contractor in Omaha that built highways, dams, and mines across North America. Investors read
2 books · Companies
Pixar built the first computer-animated feature studio and released a run of hits from Toy Story onward before Disney bought it in 2006. Operators rea
1 books · Companies
Power Corporation is a Montreal holding company that Paul Desmarais built into a controlling owner of insurers and asset managers, including Great-Wes
7 books · Companies
The company that invented brand management; its literature is mostly management doctrine plus a small number of critical and scholarly histories.
8 books · Companies
The private maker of OxyContin; the opioid litigation produced an unusually strong and recent investigative literature.
1 books · Companies
R.C. Willey is a Utah furniture and appliance retailer that Berkshire Hathaway bought in 1995 and that expanded to other states while keeping its prac
1 books · Companies
Reddit runs a user-moderated discussion network, was bought by Condé Nast in 2006, later spun out, and went public in 2024. Investors read it for a pl
1 books · Companies
Dhirubhai Ambani built Reliance from textile trading into India's largest private company across petrochemicals, refining, retail, and telecoms, and h
5 books · Companies
Jim Simons's quantitative fund, whose Medallion returns are the best on record; extreme secrecy means one book carries the subject.
7 books · Companies
The 1988 leveraged buyout that closed the decade of debt; Burrough and Helyar dominate the deal literature, and the tobacco histories carry the busine
1 books · Companies
Ryanair adopted the Southwest model in Europe, cut fares and services, and became the continent's largest airline by passenger numbers under Michael O
1 books · Companies
Salesforce sold customer relationship software as a subscription service from 1999 and established the software-as-a-service model that most enterpris
7 books · Companies
The bond house that invented mortgage trading and nearly died in the 1991 Treasury auction scandal, saved by Warren Buffett as interim chairman.
7 books · Companies
The chaebol that became the world's largest electronics maker; a small but sharp literature covers the Lee family and the Sony rivalry.
7 books · Companies
The dominant American retailer of the twentieth century; the best books are from before the collapse, and the Lampert era lacks a definitive history.
1 books · Companies
See's Candies makes boxed chocolates on the US West Coast and has been owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 1972, when Buffett paid twenty-five million d
0 books · Companies
The venture-ecosystem bank whose March 2023 deposit run was the fastest in US history; book-length coverage amounts to one academic history, with the
5 books · Companies
Masayoshi Son built SoftBank from Japanese software distribution into a telecom operator and then into the world's largest venture investor through th
6 books · Companies
Japanese electronics and entertainment group whose postwar rise, Hollywood purchases and loss of the portable-music franchise anchor its literature.
7 books · Companies
The low-cost carrier model; the literature is largely admiring culture-and-management writing rather than investigative history.
9 books · Companies
Launch company that made reusable rockets routine; its literature is dominated by close-access engineering narratives.
10 books · Companies
The trust whose breakup shaped American antitrust law, and the subject of the founding work of investigative business journalism.
6 books · Companies
A retail brand whose literature is dominated by Howard Schultz's three memoirs, with a thinner critical and cultural strand.
1 books · Companies
George Mecherle founded State Farm in 1922 as a mutual auto insurer for farmers and it grew into the largest US personal lines insurer, owned by its p
1 books · Companies
Glen Bell opened the first Taco Bell in 1962, franchised it through the 1960s, and sold to PepsiCo in 1978; the chain is now part of Yum! Brands. Oper
9 books · Companies
India's oldest large industrial group, with an unusual trust ownership structure and a literature dominated by authorized histories.
2 books · Companies
Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky founded Teledyne in 1960 and acquired about 130 companies through the 1960s, paying with stock while it traded at
9 books · Companies
Electric vehicle and energy company whose survival, production crises and founder have produced both admiring and adversarial book-length accounts.
1 books · Companies
The Buffalo News is a daily newspaper that Warren Buffett bought in 1977 and ran through a costly circulation war before it became the city's only dai
3 books · Companies
Estee Lauder sells prestige cosmetics and fragrance through department store counters, specialty retail and airport travel retail, with brands includi
1 books · Companies
The New York Times moved from print advertising to paid digital subscriptions and now earns most of its revenue from readers rather than advertisers.
1 books · Companies
Doris Christopher started The Pampered Chef in 1980 selling kitchen tools through home parties and built a large direct-sales force before Berkshire H
8 books · Companies
Vanguard is owned by its own funds, so profits return to fund shareholders as lower fees, and its largest index funds now charge a few basis points on
6 books · Companies
An IP conglomerate whose succession fights and CEO memoirs have produced one of the richest corporate literatures in media.
1 books · Companies
Elizabeth Holmes's blood-testing startup, valued at $9bn on a machine that did not work; the literature is essentially one book, since the reporting t
6 books · Companies
The origin of lean production; most of the literature is management-method writing rather than corporate narrative.
2 books · Companies
Trader Joe's stocks roughly 4,000 items against 30,000 or more at a conventional supermarket, sells about 80 percent private label, buys direct from m
1 books · Companies
HVAC and industrial equipment; coverage amounts to one commissioned corporate history, with nothing on the modern split.
8 books · Companies
Microblogging platform with two distinct literatures: the founder wars of its first decade and the 2022 Musk takeover.
8 books · Companies
Ride-hailing company whose regulatory brawls and 2017 governance collapse made it the case study of growth-at-all-costs startup culture.
6 books · Companies
An Anglo-Dutch consumer group whose literature runs from Lever's soap-and-palm-oil origins through commissioned business history to a recent CEO manif
10 books · Companies
The largest retailer in the world; the literature splits between Sam Walton's operating story and critical work on supplier and labor power.
9 books · Companies
A studio and conglomerate defined by serial mergers; the AOL deal alone generated several of the best merger post-mortems written.
4 books · Companies
The Seattle thrift that became the largest bank failure in US history in September 2008; one book carries the subject.
3 books · Companies
Adam Neumann's office-sublet company sold as a technology platform, whose 2019 IPO withdrawal wiped out most of a $47bn valuation.
2 books · Companies
The DAX-listed German payments firm that admitted 1.9bn euros did not exist; the serious English-language literature is essentially one book, with mor
1 books · Companies
Wired launched in 1993 as a magazine covering digital culture, expanded into a web business that failed to go public, and sold to Condé Nast in 1998.
7 books · Companies
Bernie Ebbers's roll-up and the $11bn accounting fraud that was the largest US bankruptcy until Lehman; a thinner literature than Enron's.
12 books · Companies
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which invented much of modern personal computing and whose parent failed to commercialise it - the canonical innova
3 books · Companies
Y Combinator funds startups in twice-yearly batches on standard terms, currently $125,000 for 7 percent plus a further $375,000 on uncapped terms, and
6 books · Companies
Web portal that defined the 1990s internet and then lost search, social and mobile in turn; its literature is small and concentrated on the decline.