One of the largest companies which is privately held is Koch Industries and the book Sons of Wichita written by Daniel Shculman published by Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, NY, 2014. The Koch Industries was founded by Fred Koch who was a petroleum engineer. His company helped build refineries which were slightly different than the major oil companies to give independents greater control of their companies. Eventually Koch owned the refineries and went into pipelines. In the west, if you look around you desire land and ranches for cattle grazing. Some of the land would have oil on it to supply the refineries. Fred made a great start and son Charles made the families multi billionaires. The company believes its expertise is in the gathering, transportation, processing and trading of goods. Whether the good be oil, timber or something related. On the business side, there is an introduction of Charles management system called Market Based Management which besides offers the expectation of doing good, it offers a decentralized management system which expects everyone to continuing find better ways to do their job and then share the information to the company.

One of the reasons the company is known is two or three of the brothers are involved with organizations that leave individuals with the greatest control and the government doing less, the philosophy is called libertarian. The brothers back organizations which help fund the Tea Party and with super PACs dominating the political fundraising environment, the Koch have been and continue to be major contributors. The book goes into some of the reasons why the Koch’s offer large dollars. Outside of the less government issue they are major contributors to hospitals, universities, art institutions in New York and Wichita. In addition, for a company which does not the government, its method of earning money is government regulated – pipelines and it is not surprising that lawsuits have been filed and fines paid (the law firms are always on retainer).

Linking to dividend paying stocks, early on the company bought a refinery in Minnesota which turned out to be a cash cow or because of its monopoly position – the biggest refineries are in Texas, which allowed the company to expand and grow. It took good management to do this, which is a credit to Charles Koch and the people who work(ed) for him.