Kochland

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalisation through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world became that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
 

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year.

The extraordinary account of how the secretive Koch Industries became one of the largest private companies in the world.

Koch Industries, the sprawling industrial conglomerate owned by Charles and David Koch, specializes in the kinds of stunningly profitable businesses that undergird every aspect of modern life: it controls the nitrogen fertilizer that puts food on your table, the fibres in your clothes, the building materials that make your homes and offices, and the microchips that drive your life online.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view towards very, very long-term profits. He’s a brilliant businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disruptor.

Seven years in the making, Kochland tells the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated power over half a century – and, in doing so, helped transform capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many Americans today.