Keep pulling the thread on Charles Koch & Chase Koch.
The value of Koch Industries has increased 9,000 times since the early 1960s.
Koch Industries follows an operating model that includes reinvesting 90% of its profits into new businesses and growth.
Koch Industries' core strategy is to be 'capability bounded, not industry bounded,' focusing on leveraging core competencies into new industries.
In 1973, reckless trades made by employees with 'terrible values' created a situation that could have bankrupted Koch Industries.
In the late 1990s, failures in Koch Industries' agriculture and refining groups almost wiped out the company's entire earnings for that period.
Koch Industries acquired a large animal feed business and discovered days after closing that it had unknowingly taken on hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-the-money hog contracts due to a lack of due diligence.
Koch Industries acquired Georgia-Pacific in 2005 for $20 billion.
After acquiring a refinery in Minnesota in 1969, Koch Industries endured a violent, nine-month union strike to change work rules, eventually transforming the culture and increasing the plant's capacity tenfold.
Charles Koch believes Koch Industries could not have achieved its success as a public company because its principle-based, capability-bounded strategy would be misunderstood by public market analysts.
If Koch Industries were a publicly traded company, its revenue would place it in the top 25 of the Fortune 500.
Koch Industries employs over 130,000 people across 60 countries.
Charles Koch stated that Insightec, a company in the Koch Disruptive Technologies portfolio, has a business structure that makes it difficult to be profitable despite its technological achievements.