Comments on: Which companies own which companies

Question: Which companies own which companies

banished — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:20:26 -0800

Is there a chart that shows what major companies own other companies (preferably constantly updated)? A lot of buyouts / mergers have been taking place lately and I'd like to see how the corporate power is centralized / organized. I also seem to recall a site that mapped power relations between powerful corporate individuals, and that would be of interest as well.

By: mudpuppie

mudpuppie — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:32:37 -0800

Banished,

My personal professional experience researching this stuff is limited to print sources. However, here's a primer I found that ought to help you find info online.

The SEC site is useful as well, although you need to have a little background information before you start searching there.

By: Jairus

Jairus — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:41:33 -0800

Who Owns What.

By: robbie01

robbie01 — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:45:03 -0800

I think the site you're referring to that mapped connections between corporate individuals is They Rule. [Flash required]

By: milkrate

milkrate — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:33:34 -0800

Wikipedia's Who owns what

By: Jack Karaoke

Jack Karaoke — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:35:19 -0800

Badcorp also has a listing "Who owns who". It's quite decent, includes a product search function.

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:46:06 -0800

You can always spend a couple hours studying Altria ...

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:49:14 -0800

('Cuz, ya know, you pretty much can't breathe without Altria making some kind of profit off you... )

...and by the way, Oligopoly Watch is cool in general.)

By: XiBe

XiBe — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 05:44:50 -0800

On a side note : TheyRule

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:31:30 -0800

On a side note : TheyRule

Oh. My. God. That's brilliant! I clicked on Load Map, then Popular, then Why Harvard doesn't fund alternative medical research ....

Brilliant. Goldmine. Jackpot.

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:53:43 -0800

They Rule has been around for some time, and I'm not sure if the connections are still valid, but as everyone here suggests: It Rules

By: zpousman

zpousman — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 07:21:06 -0800

Now that everyone's done answering the question, I'll give an example.

Look, Cingular (co-owned by BellSouth) bought AT&T Wireless, but AT&T retained the name "AT&T Wireless" so that they could bring out cellphone service under that name. The plan was to use Sprint's towers / service to do so. But then SBC bought AT&T (or agreed to). SBC has a big investment in Cingular, so now it looks like AT&T Wireless' new service will come out thru SBC, and use Cingular's towers / service. So though Cingular just went thru the very expensive transition period to get rid of AT&T Wireless, chances are they're going to have a new competitor, that uses their backend hardware, that's called AT&T Wireless.

By: kimota

kimota — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 13:04:06 -0800

Remember those commercials in the early-to-mid-80s (I'm talking in the USA here) that'd end with "We're Beatrice"? Whatever happened to Beatrice? Did it get renamed, bought out, or what? There was a period there where stand-up comics would crack about Beatrice's buying the world, and today I have no idea what the deal is....

By: j

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 08:43:33 -0800

Catching up on my mefi reading on the weekend, so no one is probably reading this thread anymore, but, I too, was fascinated/horrified by the Beatrice ads back then...
I did a quick search on the web and found this:

Every Milken-funded [corporate] takeover resulted in the sell-off of divisions or units ... A striking case in point was the breakup of the Beatrice Companies, an ungainly agglomeration that combined, with little logic, Avis car rentals, Coca-Cola bottling, Playtex brassieres, the manufacture of tampons, along with the food processineg that had once formed its core business. After its parts were sold to other companies, Beatrice was a much smaller firm operating more sensibly in the food, cheese and meat business (Toffler pp. 52-53).