Largest Private Companies

01

Trafigura

In 2006, Trafigura's chartered ship offloaded 500 tonnes of toxic waste at 18 sites around Abidjan, sickening over 100,000 people. The company settled for $200 million without admitting liability.

02

Hobby Lobby

A craft-store chain generating $7 billion annually tithed tens of millions to build a biblical museum in Washington D.C. — then watched federal agents seize 5,500 smuggled Iraqi antiquities from its own collection.

03

Glencore

Glencore traces its founding to Marc Rich, a trader who fled U.S. fraud indictments in 1983 and built his empire from a Zug, Switzerland office — later pardoned by Bill Clinton on his final day in office.

04

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann printed millions of Nazi-era devotional books and Wehrmacht field hymnals during World War II, then commissioned a self-exonerating history in 1998. An independent commission contradicted it in full by 2002.

05

Aldi

Brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht split their German grocery chain in 1961 along the Ruhr River — one taking the north, one the south — and never reconciled. Two global empires grew from a single family silence.

06

Bosch (company)

Robert Bosch died in 1942 leaving 94% of his company to a charitable foundation, structuring the gift so that no heir, buyer, or market could ever dissolve what he built. The foundation still holds it today.

07

Cargill

The Cargill-MacMillan family, with roughly 14 members among the world's wealthiest individuals, owns the largest private company on Earth — a grain-and-commodity empire moving food across every ocean, entirely off public markets.

08

Bloomberg L.P.

The Bloomberg Terminal — a single black keyboard and dual-screen workstation renting for $24,000 a year — is leased by 330,000 finance professionals worldwide and generates enough revenue to have funded two New York City mayoral campaigns.

09

Louis Dreyfus Company

A single Alsatian farmer named Léopold Louis-Dreyfus founded a grain trading business in 1851. His descendants, working through a Luxembourg holding company, now move a sixth of the world's grain across every inhabited continent.

10

Vitol

Vitol trades roughly 8 million barrels of oil per day — more than Saudi Arabia produces — and is owned entirely by its own employees, none of whom are household names. It operates from Rotterdam with near-total invisibility.