Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization 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 one of the biggest private
companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of
modern corporate America.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman
Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from
the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our
pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall
Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much
about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch
brothers want it that way.
For five decades,
CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in
deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits.
He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn
from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence
for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These
strategies have made him and his brother David together richer than
Bill Gates.
But there’s
another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed
the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled
progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the
influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.
Seven years in the
making, Kochland reads like a true-life thriller, with
larger-than-life characters driving the battles on every page. The
book tells the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated
power over half a century—and how in doing so, it helped transform
capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many
Americans today.