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.
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“In Kochland, Christopher Leonard has done an impressive job of breaking through that secrecy and getting insiders as well as outcasts to talk. As a result, Kochland is the most definitive account yet of how one of America’s richest and most powerful families amassed its fortune.”
— Washington Post
“Kochland is a corporate history, lucidly told.”
— New York Times“Jacques Roy provides a masterful narration…Roy’s low-key professorial tone eases the listener through a highly complex market-based business portrait. It would be challenging to find a clearer discussion of how dark money may wield profound influence on American politics.”
— AudioFile“Deeply and authoritatively reported…[Kochland] marshals a huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries: how the Kochs got so rich and how they used that fortune to buy off American action on climate change.”
— New Yorker“Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.”
— New York Times Book Review"A massively reported deep dive.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
Jacques Roy is a audio narrator and actor, known for The Lower Angels and Room and Board.