Koch, Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate corporation based in Wichita, Kansas, and is the second-largest privately held company in the United States, after Cargill. Its subsidiaries are involved in the manufacturing, refining, and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, cloud computing, finance, raw materials trading, and investments. Koch owns Flint Hills Resources, Georgia-Pacific, Guardian Industries, Infor, Invista, KBX, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, Koch Engineered Solutions, Koch Investments Group, Koch Minerals & Trading, and Molex. The firm employs 122,000 people in 60 countries, with about half of its business in the United States.
Edward E. Clark is an American lawyer and politician who ran for governor of California in 1978, and for president of the United States as the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the 1980 presidential election.
McKinsey & Company is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, McKinsey is the oldest and largest of the "MBB" management consultancies (MBB). The firm mainly focuses on the finances and operations of their clients.
Tyson Foods, Inc. is an American multinational corporation based in Springdale, Arkansas that operates in the food industry. The company is the world's second-largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork after JBS S.A. It is the largest meat company in America. It annually exports the largest percentage of beef out of the United States. Together with its subsidiaries, it operates major food brands, including Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, Ball Park, Wright Brand, Aidells, and State Fair. Tyson Foods ranked No. 79 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
James Oscar McKinsey was an American accountant, management consultant, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago, and founder of McKinsey & Company.
Marvin Bower was an American business theorist and management consultant associated with McKinsey & Company. Under Bower's leadership, McKinsey grew from a small engineering and accounting firm to a leader in the consulting industry. Bower, alongside Edwin G. Booz, is regarded one of the individuals most responsible for the rise of management consulting after World War II; he is considered by many to be the "father" of the modern consulting industry."
Walt Bogdanich is an American investigative journalist and three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.
Zilpaterol is a β2 adrenergic agonist. Under its brand name, Zilmax, it is used to increase the size of cattle and the efficiency of feeding them. Zilmax is produced by Intervet, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., and marketed as a "beef-improvement technology". Zilpaterol is typically fed in the last three to six weeks of cattle's lives, with a brief period before death for withdrawal, which allows the drug to mostly leave the animal's tissues.
The Koch family is an American family engaged in business, best known for their political activities and their control of Koch Industries, the 2nd largest privately owned company in the United States. The family business was started by Fred C. Koch, who developed a new cracking method for the refinement of heavy crude oil into gasoline. Fred's four sons litigated against each other over their interests in the business during the 1980s and 1990s.
Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award is an annual award given to the best business book of the year as determined by the Financial Times. It aims to find the book that has "the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues". The award was established in 2005 and is worth £30,000. Beginning in 2010, five short-listed authors each receive £10,000, previously it was £5,000.
Charles de Ganahl Koch is an American billionaire businessman. As of February 2024, he was ranked as the 23rd richest man in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with an estimated net worth of $64.9 billion. Koch has been co-owner, chairman, and chief executive officer of Koch Industries since 1967, while his late brother David Koch served as executive vice president. Charles and David each owned 42% of the conglomerate. The brothers inherited the business from their father, Fred C. Koch, then expanded the business. Koch Industries is the largest privately held company by revenue in the United States, according to Forbes.
Sebastian Christopher Peter Mallaby is an English journalist and author, Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post.
OSI Group is an American privately owned holding company of meat processors that service the retail and food service industries with international headquarters in Aurora, Illinois. It operates over 65 facilities in 17 countries. Sheldon Lavin was the owner, CEO and chairman until his death in May 2023.
Paul Solman is an American journalist focused on economics, business, and politics since the early 1970s. He has been the business and economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour since 1985, with occasional forays into art reporting.
Duff McDonald is a Canadian American business journalist and writer based in New York.
John Carreyrou is a French-American investigative reporter at The New York Times. Carreyrou worked for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years between 1999 and 2019 and has been based in Brussels, Paris, and New York City. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice and helped expose the fraudulent practices of the multibillion-dollar blood-testing company Theranos in a series of articles published in The Wall Street Journal.
Charles Chase Koch, is an American businessman and the son of Charles Koch, the co-owner, CEO, and chairman of Koch Industries. Koch directs the venture capital company Koch Disruptive Technologies, and is a leading figure in Koch Industries and the family's philanthropic activities.
Elspeth "Elle" Reeve is an American journalist. Before joining CNN as a correspondent in 2019, she reported on the 2017 white-nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia for HBO's Vice News Tonight. Reeve and Vice News Tonight won a Peabody Award, four Emmy Awards, and a George Polk Award for their reporting.
The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business is a 2014 book by Christopher Leonard about the meat processing industry in the United States that focuses on Tyson Foods as the market leader. Widely reviewed on publication, the book gained additional attention during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America is a 2019 book by Christopher Leonard about account of how Koch Industries became one of the biggest private companies in the world.
