Category
Organizations
Companies, institutions, NGOs and awarding bodies.
- 12Go
Singapore-incorporated, Bangkok-based ground-transport booking platform founded by Alexey Abolmasov in 2012. It grew from a Thai bus-journey search site into a 4,000-operator network across 26 Asian countries, joined the Bookaway Group in 2021 and partnered with AirAsia in 2024.
- 1789 Capital
Palm Beach venture fund where Donald Trump Jr. became a partner in November 2024; its "patriotic capitalism" strategy made billions — and in September 2026 a congressional document fight over whether politics fed the returns.
- 60 Minutes
CBS's primetime newsmagazine since 1968; its November 2025 Trump interview became a press-freedom flashpoint when conflict-of-interest questions about the Binance pardon were cut from both the broadcast and the extended video.
- 60 Minutes (CBS News)
The CBS newsmagazine profiled through its October 2025 interview with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — the first detailed account of direct U.S.–Hamas talks, the condolence exchange over lost sons, and the "betrayed" reaction to the Doha strike.
- A7A5
A7A5 is a ruble-backed digital token issued by Kyrgyzstan-registered Old Vector LLC for the Russia-tied A7 Network. U.S. Treasury treats it as blocked property tied to sanctions evasion; an Accountable.US report alleged a World Liberty Financial token buyer had also used it.
- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP): from anti-corruption movement to national party, Delhi defeat, and Punjab
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), founded 26 November 2012 out of the 2011 anti-corruption movement, governed Delhi from 2015 to 2025, won Punjab in 2022, gained national-party status in April 2023, and lost Delhi in February 2025 — leaving Punjab, under Bhagwant Mann, as its only state government.
- AARP
The senior lobby that operates one of America's largest brand-licensing businesses: AARP took a $9 billion advance from UnitedHealth Group — about 31 times its annual member dues — while its members faced a 57% Part D premium surge over 2022-2025.
- AARP Financial Services
The for-profit AARP affiliate that holds the organization's real estate: a wholly owned subsidiary that began in 1984 as AARP's general partner in the Scudder mutual-fund venture behind 15 AARP funds.
- AARP Foundation
AARP's 501(c)(3) charity: the nation's largest free tax-prep program has helped more than 68 million filers, and its legal work joined a $60 million predatory-lending settlement for older borrowers.
- AARP Insurance Plan
The grantor trust behind AARP-branded insurance: the AARP Insurance Plan holds the master group policies, processed $13.1 billion in member premiums in 2024, and remits premiums to UnitedHealthcare net of royalties paid to AARP. It is not an insurer.
- AARP Services
AARP's for-profit licensing arm: the Delaware taxable subsidiary that negotiates brand-licensing deals like the UnitedHealth relationship, with royalties of $1.2 billion in 2024 — about four times member dues.
- ABC News
ABC News is the news division of Disney's ABC television network — home of Good Morning America and This Week. In 2026 it is suing the Trump administration's FCC, accusing it of unconstitutional retaliation against the network's broadcast licenses.
- ABET
The nonprofit that accredits individual engineering, computing, engineering technology, and applied-science degree programs — not universities — across 4,863 programs in 42 countries and areas; founded 1932 as the Engineers' Council for Professional Development.
- Academy Awards
The nonprofit film-industry body behind the Oscars: ~11,300 members across 18 branches, Best Picture inclusion standards since 2024, a new casting category in 2026, a stunt-design Oscar coming in 2028, and a Los Angeles film museum.
- Accel
American venture capital firm founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz, known for a $12.7 million 2005 investment in Facebook that became one of venture capital's most lucrative bets.
- Acceptance Insurance
Nashville non-standard auto insurer born from a 2004 Liberté Investors/USAuto merger — not the bankrupt Iowa insurer of the same name; AM Best cut its financial-strength rating to C++ (Marginal) and withdrew its ratings at the company's request in July 2025.
- Acceptance Insurance Companies Inc.
A Council Bluffs, Iowa insurance holding company whose crop-insurance subsidiary American Growers collapsed in 2002. AICI filed Chapter 11 in January 2005; its Eighth Circuit fight with Granite Re ended with AICI owing the $15M premium, and its U.S. takings suit failed at the Supreme Court.
- Accountable.US
Progressive-leaning watchdog whose September 2025 "American Sell-Out" report accused World Liberty Financial of selling tokens to sanctioned-linked buyers — its star North Korea claim debunked as a memecoin false positive — and which filed a 2024 IRS complaint against The Epoch Times' nonprofits.
- Acme Foundry of Blackwell, Oklahoma
The Acme Foundry and Machine Company of Blackwell, Oklahoma, was one of the town's major employers before the May 25, 1955 F5 tornado destroyed it. Unlike the neighboring Hazel-Atlas plant, it was later rebuilt.
- AdExchanger
Trade publication founded in 2008 covering programmatic advertising and data-driven marketing technology, acquired by Access Intelligence in 2017 and merged with AdMonsters in 2025-2026.
- Adobe
The design-software giant born at Xerox PARC in 1982 — PostScript, Photoshop, PDF — that agreed to buy Figma for $20 billion in 2022 and ended up paying a $1 billion termination fee for a deal regulators never let close.
- AdRoll
San Francisco adtech company founded in 2007 by Aaron Bell and Adam Berke as a display ad network, pivoted to retargeting, renamed its parent to NextRoll in 2019, then reunified everything under the AdRoll brand in 2025 with RollWorks folded in as AdRoll ABM.
- Advocate (charity)
A UK barristers' pro bono charity founded in 1996 as the Bar Pro Bono Unit, co-founder of the National Pro Bono Centre in 2010 and rebranded as Advocate in 2018.
- Adyen
Second-time Dutch founders who refused to sell built a payments company on one in-house platform instead of a patchwork of legacy systems — then won a European banking licence and a blockbuster 2018 IPO.
- Affinity Partners
Jared Kushner's private equity firm, founded in 2021 and overwhelmingly financed by Gulf sovereign wealth funds; in 2026 it closed the $55 billion Electronic Arts buyout while Kushner raised fresh billions from the same governments he negotiated with as a U.S. envoy.
- Affirm
The buy-now-pay-later lender founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — a $1.2B IPO that nearly doubled on debut, an Amazon partnership, and a two-act regulatory arc as the CFPB moved to supervise BNPL like credit cards.
- Afterpay
The Australian BNPL pioneer Block bought for $29B in 2022 — now a feature of Cash App rather than a standalone company, with its brand living on inside Block's commerce machine.
- Agate (game company)
Indonesia's largest homegrown video game developer, founded in Bandung in 2009 by a group of college friends and grown from a $500 first game into a roughly 200-employee studio behind titles including Valthirian Arc and Code Atma.
- Ain’t It Cool News: the bedroom site that invented geek scoops
Harry Knowles' 1996 Austin film-news site pioneered spoiler-era scoop journalism — the Batman & Robin leaks, the "spy" network — before studio coziness, decline, and the 2017 allegations that pushed Knowles out.
- U.S. Air Force
America's air and space service, founded in 1947, reshaped in 2026 by 38 days of combat in Operation Epic Fury and a new chief of staff who declared the era of sanctuary bases over.
- AirAsia
Malaysia's low-cost airline group, bought for RM1 in 2001 and relaunched as a budget carrier in 2002. In January 2026 AirAsia X completed the Capital A aviation consolidation, uniting seven branded airlines; the group's super app sells flights alongside 12Go ground transport.
- Airtable
The no-code database darling valued at $11B in 2021 — sold to Italy's Bending Spoons for $1.28B in 2026 despite $480M in growing ARR, a valuation unwind that became the SaaS era's cautionary tale.
- Al Jazeera
The Doha-based Arabic and English news network founded in 1996; in 2026 it faces a UN-podium attack from Netanyahu, a U.S. lawsuit over alleged Hamas ties, and the Gaza war's toll of 270+ journalists killed, at least 12 its own.
- All Pueblo Council of Governors
New Mexico-based advocacy body representing 20 Pueblo Nations, leading a 2025-2026 campaign to permanently protect the Greater Chaco region from oil and gas leasing.
- All-In podcast
Business-and-tech podcast hosted by four venture capitalists — "The Besties" — that grew from a COVID-era poker-table chat into a White House talent pipeline, with an annual $7,500-a-ticket summit and administration officials as regular announcement guests.
- Alliance Defending Freedom
Conservative Christian legal advocacy group, founded in 1993 and based in Scottsdale, Arizona; 20 direct Supreme Court victories since 2011, capped by its 2026 women's-sports and counseling wins, plus an international arm that litigates forced-marriage cases in Pakistan.
- Allianz Australia
The Australian arm of Germany's Allianz Group — a century-old insurer that began in 1914 as Manufacturers' Mutual, now Australia's third-largest non-life insurer and the quiet underwriter behind bank insurance brands.
- Allianz Group
Germany's Munich-headquartered insurance and asset-management giant, founded in Berlin in 1890 as a transport and accident insurer, now serving more than 126 million customers in over 70 countries through brands including PIMCO and Euler Hermes, and the parent of Allianz Australia.
- Allies of World War II
The coalition that defeated the Axis in World War II — the "Big Four" of the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, United States, and China plus the signatories of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations — which became the basis of the United Nations.
- Alloy
The full arc of the KYC unicorn most coverage treats as a funding headline: how a three-founder New York startup turned identity verification into a lifecycle platform, hit a $1.55B valuation, and expanded into 40 countries.
- Ally Bank
The branchless online bank behind Ally Financial: born from GMAC in the financial crisis, now holding about $157 billion in deposits as its parent refocuses on auto, corporate finance, and consumer banking.
- Alphabet
Google's $4-trillion parent since 2015 — a holding company built to separate search from the "Other Bets" that twice beat U.S. Justice Department breakup bids in 2025–26 and absorbed a €2.95 billion EU ad-tech fine in between.
- Alt
Alternative-asset platform founded by Leore Avidar where collectors research, trade and vault graded trading cards — then borrow against them through its ALT Advance lending arm.
- Altair Engineering
A Troy, Michigan simulation-software maker that bootstrapped for 32 years, soared 41% on its 2017 IPO, then sold to Siemens for $10.6 billion — completing in March 2025 and ending its run as an independent company.
- AM Best
The credit rating agency that rates nothing but insurers — founded 1899, headquartered in Oldwick, New Jersey, and one of 10 SEC-registered NRSROs. Its financial-strength ratings run from A++ to S, split at the secure/vulnerable line between B+ and B.
- AMAC
The conservative seniors group Dan Weber founded in 2007 as an AARP alternative claims over 2 million members — a self-reported figure that has barely moved since 2020 — and funds its 501(c)(4) lobbying arm partly through compensation from affiliated insurance carriers.
- Amazon
The everything-store turned cloud and AI empire; in 2026 it deepened its Anthropic bet to $13B+ plus a $100B AWS compute commitment, then CEO Andy Jassy's warning to Treasury triggered the federal shutdown of Anthropic's flagship models — while the FTC and 22 states sued over rigged ad auctions.
- Amazon Web Services
Amazon's cloud-computing division — the world's leading cloud platform, launched in spring 2006 after a 2003 memo by Chris Pinkham, with its Elastic Compute Cloud developed by a small team in Cape Town, South Africa. It posted $128.7 billion in 2025 net sales under CEO Matt Garman.
- Amerant Bank
A Coral Gables community bank chartered in 1979: spun off from Venezuela's Mercantil group, rebranded Amerant in 2018, and refocused on Florida after selling its Houston branches in 2024.
- American Agrisurance, Inc.
A defunct insurance-services subsidiary of Acceptance Insurance Companies Inc. ("AmAg") — the marketing and service affiliate of American Growers' federally reinsured crop insurance business. Filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in Nebraska on January 7, 2005, alongside its parent's Chapter 11.
- American Civil Liberties Union
Nonprofit civil-liberties organization founded in New York in 1920; litigates First Amendment, due-process and equality cases through a national office and affiliates in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
- American Commitment
A conservative 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit founded in 2012 by Phil Kerpen whose "Commitment to Seniors" reports claim AARP paid $135.8 million more in employee pay than it collected in dues — an analysis no independent outlet has separately audited.
- American Constitution Society
The nation's leading progressive legal organization, founded after Bush v. Gore as the left's answer to the Federalist Society; in 2026 it handed the presidency to 38-year-old former Biden judicial-nominations chief Phil Brest for a rebuild amid its lowest funding since 2018.
- American Institute of Chemical Engineers
The chemical engineers' professional home since 1908 — 60,000+ members worldwide and creator of the Center for Chemical Process Safety after Bhopal.
- American Institute of Electrical Engineers
The electrical engineers' institute founded 1884 in New York — the wire-and- power establishment that merged with its radio rival to form IEEE in 1963.
- American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers
Founded 1871 in Pennsylvania's coal country — the engineering society a future U.S. president once led, now a federation of four societies.
- American Red Cross
The American National Red Cross, founded by Clara Barton in 1881, is the U.S. humanitarian organization chartered by Congress to provide disaster relief, blood services, and aid to military families — a National Society of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, distinct from the ICRC and IFRC.
- American Society for Engineering Education
The engineering educators' society, born 1893 at the Chicago World's Fair — the teaching profession's seat at the table when ABET was created.
- American Society of Civil Engineers
America's oldest engineering society, founded 1852 in New York City — publisher of the quadrennial Report Card for America's Infrastructure.
- American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Founded 1880 in New York after deadly boiler explosions — author of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, adopted into law across North America.
- American Thymele Theatre
A New York nonprofit founded in 1993 to stage free Greek and classical drama. After a decade as a touring repertory company, it ran the New York Euripides Summer Festival (2009-2023), staging Euripides' extant plays in chronological order.
- American Ventures
The Trump-family investment vehicle backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — Dominari Securities-run special-purpose vehicles holding stakes in drone companies like Powerus and Xtend, valued near $750 million in 2026 reporting, plus bets from AI to a Kazakhstan tungsten venture.
- Anchorage Digital
The first crypto company to receive a U.S. federal banking charter (Jan 2021), whose charter then subjected it to an OCC consent order over BSA/AML failures — terminated in August 2025.
- Andreessen Horowitz
American venture capital firm founded in July 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, known for its talent-agency operating model and for growing from a $300 million debut fund to more than $90 billion in assets under management.
- Anduril
Defense-technology company founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and co-founders, building autonomous systems on its Lattice AI platform. Its March 2026 $20B Army enterprise contract and September 2026 Armory storefront show a company selling warfighting like software.
- Angel Trains
One of three rolling-stock leasing companies created in the 1994 privatisation of British Rail, owning about a third of Britain's trains and leasing them to operators.
- Ansys
Engineering simulation software company founded in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, which grew by acquiring simulation tools like Fluent and LS-DYNA, then was itself acquired by Synopsys for $35 billion in July 2025.
- Anthropic
American AI safety-focused research and product company founded in January 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees, known for its Claude model family and a valuation reported at $965 billion by mid-2026.
- Anysphere
The San Francisco company behind the Cursor AI code editor — founded by four MIT graduates in 2022, worth $29.3B by late 2025, and the target of SpaceX's $60B all-stock acquisition in 2026.
- AOL
The dial-up giant that introduced millions to the internet as America Online — from a $106 billion Time Warner merger to a $4.4 billion Verizon sale, and a 2026 sale to Bending Spoons as a surviving email and portal brand.
- Asociación Española de Familias de Personas con Sordoceguera (APASCIDE)
A Spanish nonprofit supporting people with deafblindness and their families, recognized as an association of public utility and operating specialized social, educational and residential services.
- Apollo Projects
Venture fund of Sam Altman and his brothers Max and Jack that backs moonshot companies with fast seed rounds, evidenced by its backing of Alt's Series B and KoBold Metals' Series B — not Apollo Global Management or Apollo GraphQL.
- Appen
The Australian AI-training-data company founded by a linguist in 1996 that rode the AI boom to a $5B market cap — then crashed 37% in a day when Google cancelled the contract behind a third of its revenue.
- Appian
Appian (Nasdaq: APPN) is a low-code automation platform founded in Virginia in 1999. It stayed private for 18 years on just $10 million of venture capital, went public in 2017 as the first low-code IPO, and reached GAAP profitability in 2025 on AI-driven process automation.
- Apple
The American technology company founded in a Los Altos garage in 1976 that made the personal computer, the Macintosh, the iPod and the iPhone — and whose LaserWriter, powered by Adobe's PostScript, launched desktop publishing.
- U.S. Army National Guard
America's oldest military component — the citizen-soldier reserve whose 2025 federalization across six U.S. cities tested the Posse Comitatus line, and whose most famous alumnus now runs the Pentagon.
- U.S. Army
America's land-warfare service, founded as the Continental Army in 1775, being rebuilt live in 2025–2026 through the Army Transformation Initiative and the deepest leadership shakeup in its modern history.
- Article 25
A UK humanitarian architecture charity that designs schools, hospitals and housing in the Global South, which won a 2024 RIBA International Award for a school in Niger and nearly collapsed in 2015 after a former office manager was convicted of stealing over £260,000 from its accounts.
- Associated Press
The not-for-profit news cooperative founded in 1846, owned by U.S. newspapers and broadcasters; in 2025–2026 it sued the Trump White House over press access and filed briefs defending rival outlets' access too.
- Astronomer
Astronomer Inc., founded in Cincinnati in 2015, is the commercial company behind Apache Airflow, selling the managed platform Astro. Valued near $740 million after its May 2025 Series D, it became a household name that July when its CEO resigned over the viral Coldplay kiss-cam video.
- Asure Software
Asure Software (Nasdaq: ASUR) provides cloud payroll and HR software for small and mid-sized businesses from Austin. Founded in 1985 as Forgent Networks, it once extracted $110M+ from the tech industry by enforcing a JPEG patent before reinventing itself.
- AT&T
Dallas-based telecom giant descended from the original Bell System, broken up in 1984 and rebuilt through Baby Bell acquisitions. AT&T detoured into media with DirecTV and Time Warner, exited both by 2025, and refocused on wireless and fiber.
- Atalaya Capital Management
New York alternative-credit manager founded in 2006 by Ivan Zinn that financed asset-based lending, including Alt's $200 million debt round for ALT Advance, before Blue Owl acquired its business for $450 million in 2024.
- U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York
The Justice Department's most independent prosecutor — a Manhattan office that recovered more than $12 billion in two years and counts the sitting U.S. Attorney General among its alumni.
- Aureus Greenway Holdings
A Nasdaq-listed Florida golf-course operator already trading as 'PUSA' while awaiting a reverse merger with the Trump-sons-backed drone maker Powerus — a golf company co-announcing foreign military orders before the deal has closed.
- Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
Australia's prudential regulator, created on 1 July 1998 from the Wallis Inquiry reforms: it licenses and supervises banks, insurers and most superannuation funds, sets capital and governance standards, and administers the Financial Claims Scheme, while conduct regulation sits with ASIC.
- Autonomy Pictures: the US label that released The Bunny Game uncut
Autonomy Pictures — the 2012 US horror distribution label launched by Derek Curl, David Gregory (Severin Films) and Lewis Tice (Danger After Dark) — whose first release was The Bunny Game, out uncut on DVD and Blu-ray in July 2012.
- Avant
Chicago consumer fintech (founded 2012 as AvantCredit) that lends to middle-income borrowers through bank-origination partnerships, was sued by the FTC in 2019 over loan servicing, and funds itself via securitizations.
- Awareness 360
Youth-led non-profit founded in Bangladesh in October 2014 by Shomy Hasan Chowdhury and Rijve Arefin, running SDG-aligned community-service projects in more than 20 countries with over 1,500 young volunteers.
- Axiom Space
The Houston company building the world's first commercial space station became a centerpiece of a July 2026 CNN investigation showing its federal awards more than doubled after Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital invested in it.
- Axios
The brevity-obsessed news company founded in 2016 is betting its local-news future on OpenAI — taking funding and AI tools from the AI giant it covers, without disclosing the money in its job listings.
- Axis Powers
The military coalition of Germany, Italy, and Japan — with five European satellites — that fought the Allies in World War II, united against the United States and the Soviet Union but never building a joint command.
- Axoni
New York blockchain firm whose Veris network — used by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Citi for equity-swap reconciliation — was bought by the London Stock Exchange Group in 2024.
- AzerNews
AzerNews is Azerbaijan's first English-language newspaper, published in Baku since 1997. It is a WAN-IFRA member and an ECO media partner.
- Baidu
Chinese internet and AI company founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu; its 2026 arc runs from a first-ever AI-revenue crossover to a Q2 miss and a securities class action, alongside a global robotaxi push and a chip-unit listing.
- Bakkt
The ICE-backed crypto venture that went from physically-settled bitcoin futures to a 2021 SPAC listing, then reinvented itself as a B2B2C stablecoin-infrastructure play — including acquiring a firm founded by its own CEO.
- Banned Books Museum
A small non-profit museum in Tallinn, Estonia, opened in December 2020, displaying censored and banned books from around the world and covered by independent press in the UK, continental Europe and India.
- BasicNeeds
UK-founded mental-health NGO (1999/2000) whose community-based treatment-plus-livelihoods model was field-tested from Karnataka, India to 15 countries; it merged into CBM UK in 2017, and its country programmes continue as the independent BasicNeeds Network formed in 2022.
- Beckett Grading Services
Trading-card grading arm of Beckett, launched in 1999 from the price-guide publisher founded in 1984, known for four printed subgrades and the Black Label Pristine 10 — and, since December 2025, part of Collectors, the parent company of rival grader PSA.
- Behavox
AI employee-surveillance platform founded in 2014 by ex-Goldman Sachs analyst and Man GLG partner Erkin Adylov; SoftBank invested $100M in 2020 only after becoming a customer itself, and in 2026 BlackRock's HPS put in $175M as the firm expanded from comms to trade surveillance.
- Bending Spoons
The Milan-based serial acquirer that buys faded software brands, rebuilds them with a small central team, and holds them forever — from Evernote to Airtable, via a $29-a-share Nasdaq IPO in July 2026.
- Bessemer Venture Partners
A venture firm rooted in the Phipps family's steel-era fortune, known for early bets on Shopify and Pinterest, its public Anti-Portfolio of missed deals, and a $3.85 billion early-stage fund closed in 2022.
- Better Business Bureau
The private nonprofit that grades American businesses A+ to F — founded 1912 as an advertising-industry vigilance committee, funded by the businesses it rates, and twice burned by documented pay-to-play scandals.
- Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): from two seats in 1984 to India's ruling party
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): founded in 1980 from the Jana Sangh, India's ruling party since 2014 under Narendra Modi — it won 240 Lok Sabha seats in 2024 and governs through the National Democratic Alliance coalition.
- Bikers for Trump
Pro-Trump biker network led by Chris Cox from 2015; its organizers say it split into three rival groups and renamed two of them — Bikers for America and Bikers for 47 — in October 2024.
- Billboard
The 1894-born music trade magazine behind the Hot 100, Billboard 200 and Global 200 charts - from a bill-poster trade paper to the chart institution that launched its first global ranking and joined Variety's orbit in September 2020.
- Bilt Rewards
The rent-rewards fintech valued at $10.75 billion in July 2025 — built on a Wells Fargo card partnership the bank exited as a money-loser, forcing a high-stakes migration to a new Cardless-issued card lineup.
- Binance
The world's largest crypto exchange, founded 2017; survived a $4.3B U.S. guilty plea, became entangled with the Trump crypto empire, and is pivoting to U.S. stock trading in 2026.
- Bitcoin.com
Bitcoin.com is a cryptocurrency services company founded by early bitcoin investor Roger Ver, best known for its self-custodial wallet, its crypto newsroom, and the VERSE token. Its history runs through a 2015 domain fight with OKCoin, a 2016 mining pool, and its founder's U.S. tax case.
- BitTorrent / Rainberry Inc.
The company behind the pioneering BitTorrent protocol and µTorrent; renamed Rainberry in 2017, bought by Justin Sun's TRON in 2018, and fined $10M by the SEC in 2026.
- Blackwell Journal-Tribune
Weekly newspaper serving Blackwell and Kay County, Oklahoma, now in the Reaves & Williams Publishing Group; known for its 1955 tornado damage survey used by the National Weather Service.
- Blend
San Francisco fintech that digitizes mortgage and banking origination for lenders — listed on the NYSE in 2021, then battered by the 2022 rate shock after its $422M Title365 bet.
- BlinkRx
Digital pharmacy and patient-access platform run by Blink Health, Inc. — best known for its $140M Series D led by Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital and the October 2025 congressional oversight letter that followed its "Operation Access Now" launch.
- Block
Square renamed: the payments company behind Cash App and the $29B Afterpay deal, now Block, Inc. — no single headquarters, NYSE ticker XYZ.
- Bloody Disgusting: from horror blog to streaming-era horror division
Founded in 2001 by Brad Miska and Tom Owen, Bloody Disgusting grew from a horror-news site into a producer (V/H/S), distributor, podcast network, and — since Cinedigm's 2021 buyout — Cineverse's horror division.
- Bloody Flicks: the UK horror blog behind the Bloody Flicks Awards
Bloody Flicks is a UK horror blog run by Paul Downey, championing independent horror and cult cinema. It stages the audience-voted Bloody Flicks Awards in Stoke-on-Trent and covered Jinga Films' 2025 North American Blu-ray/DVD release of The Bunny Game.
- Bloomberg
Privately held financial data, software, and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981 — built on the Bloomberg Terminal subscription engine, and now the subject of active succession planning as its founder enters his mid-80s.
- Bloomberg Law
A subscription legal-research platform whose own pro-bono awards once honored people and firms that later stood at the center of the 2025 legal fight with the White House.
- Blue J
The Toronto legal-tech company founded in 2015 by a University of Toronto tax professor that torched its predictive-AI business model for generative AI — and became a $300-million-plus tax-research platform.
- Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos's private space company, whose strangest chapter is a $28 million auction seat that sat empty for four years before its crypto-billionaire buyer finally flew.
- BlueVine
The SMB fintech that started in invoice factoring, grew into a digital small-business banking platform with $2.1B in deposits, and agreed in September 2026 to be acquired by Valley National for $340M — roughly half its 2019 private valuation.
- Board of Peace
The U.S.-led international body created under UN Security Council Resolution 2803 to oversee Gaza's transitional administration — chaired permanently by Donald Trump, backed by $17 billion in pledges, and chartered with a mission deliberately broader than Gaza.
- Booksy
Polish-founded beauty and wellness appointment-booking SaaS, launched in 2014 by iTaxi veterans Stefan Batory and Konrad Howard, that grew across six markets on a merchant-first subscription model — funding rounds from $800k to a $70M Series C and an M&A rollup including Lavito and Versum.
- Bottomline Technologies
The 1989 paper-check-killer that IPO'd in 1999 and spent 23 years as a public fintech before Thoma Bravo's $2.6B take-private in May 2022 — a textbook PE deal with a 42% premium and a day-one CEO swap.
- Bounty Films: Australian distributor in the 2011 BBFC battle
Australian home-media distributor that, with UK partner Eureka Entertainment, fought the BBFC's June 2011 refusal of The Human Centipede 2 to an 18 certificate — and still distributes Australian independent film worldwide.
- BoxGroup
New York seed-stage venture firm led by David Tisch that spent its first decade investing only its partners' own capital before raising outside funds, growing from $165 million in 2019 to $425 million in 2023 on a "first yes" philosophy.
- Brex
A startup credit-card fintech that soared to a $12.3B valuation, ditched tens of thousands of SMBs, and ended in Capital One's hands in 2026 for $5.15B — less than half its peak.
- Breyer Capital
Global venture investment firm founded in 2006 by Jim Breyer, the Accel investor behind the early Facebook bet, now run from Austin as a family office focused on artificial intelligence in healthcare and life sciences.
- Bridges Partners LLC
Delaware-incorporated PR and political-consulting firm registered under FARA (no. 7652) for an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs-funded influencer campaign, Project Esther, with a $900,000 budget and an itemized $97,054 disbursement ledger in its own filings.
- British Board of Film Classification: the UK film censor since 1912
The BBFC — Britain's film classification body since 1912, statutory video censor under the Video Recordings Act — which refused The Bunny Game a certificate in October 2011 and reversed its Human Centipede 2 ban the same year.
- British Council
Founded in 1934, the British Council is the UK's flagship cultural-soft-power agency — now in financial crisis: a £197 million pandemic loan it cannot repay, auditors warning of going-concern risk, 11 country offices closing, and an offer to hand over its art collection that the government rejected.
- Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
The Cambridge genomics institute built on a father's $650M quest — the largest gift ever for psychiatric research, driven by his son's bipolar diagnosis — to crack the genetics of mental illness; it also won the CRISPR patent war against Berkeley.
- Business Wire
The press-release distribution newswire founded in 1961 by Lorry I. Lokey and owned by Berkshire Hathaway since 2006 — a distributor of company-issued news, not a journalism outlet.
- C-nario
Israeli digital-signage software company (founded 2002, acquired 2011) whose flagship product outlived it: after YCD Multimedia's acquisition, C-nario Messenger became the playback engine inside YCD's RAMP platform while the brand kept appearing on major airport deployments.
- Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft
Wall Street's oldest law firm (1792-2026), a finance and structured-products powerhouse whose independence ended with the July 2026 merger into Hogan Lovells Cadwalader.
- CalAmp
American telematics company based in Irvine, California, and a fleet-tracking industry player for decades. In June 2024 it filed a voluntary Chapter 11 to execute a lender-backed debt-for-equity restructuring, emerging within weeks as a private company owned by Lynrock Lake Master Fund LP.
- The Cambodia Daily
Independent English-language Cambodian newspaper (1993-2017) whose investigative reporting included a 2002 profile of adoption facilitator Lauryn Galindo, shut down after a disputed $6.3 million government tax bill and later relaunched as a Washington-based digital nonprofit.
- Cambridge Analytica
A British political consulting firm that shut down in 2018 after its harvest of millions of Facebook users' data detonated a global scandal — yet eight years later, in September 2026, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading users in the same case, proving the firm's story is not finished.
- Canapi Ventures
A Wilmington fintech venture firm backed by a network of banks that double as its portfolio companies' distribution channel, with $1.4 billion raised across two funds and Alloy among its Fund I investments.
- Capital & Main
California-based nonprofit investigative news publication founded in 2012 to investigate economic inequality. It covers California and national stories, co-publishes investigations with larger outlets, and reported on Accountable.US's 2022 American Democracy Scorecard for Fast Company.
- Capsule
New York digital pharmacy founded by Eric Kinariwala in 2015 that hit a $1B+ valuation in 2021, then faced a 2022 data breach affecting 27,000 customers — not the fashion trade show of the same name.
- Carta
San Francisco equity-management company founded as eShares in 2012, which replaced paper stock certificates with cap-table software, peaked at an $8.5 billion valuation, then exited secondary trading after a 2024 trust controversy.
- Cash App
Block's mobile money app, launched in 2013 as Square Cash: an email-based way to send money that grew into a 59-million-user wallet, debit card, investing and buy-now-pay-later platform — now Block's vehicle for banking its users and connecting them to Square sellers.
- CBM UK
UK disability-inclusion charity (est. 1996, Cambridge), the UK member of the CBM Global Disability Inclusion federation. Absorbed mental-health NGO BasicNeeds in 2017 (formalised 2022); funds eye-health, education and livelihood programmes with local partners across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
- Central Bureau of Communication
India's bureau under the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, formed in December 2017 by merging the DAVP, Directorate of Field Publicity and Song & Drama Division, renamed in 2022. It runs 23 regional and 148 field offices, and co-produced Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: Bharat Hain Hum.
- Cerence
American automotive conversational-AI company spun off from Nuance Communications in October 2019. Its voice-assistant technology ships in about half of worldwide auto production, and it trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CRNC.
- Chapter One
Los Angeles early-stage venture firm founded by former Tinder product chief Jeff Morris Jr. that moved from AngelList syndicates to a $40 million web3 fund, backed Alt's early rounds, and ran a $1 million-check incubator for crypto startups.
- Charter Communications
Charter Communications is the American telecom company behind the Spectrum brand, the largest US cable operator after its 2026 Cox merger. Founded in St. Louis in 1993, it grew through bankruptcy and the 2016 Time Warner Cable deal — and finished bottom ten on a 2022 Accountable.US scorecard.
- ChatGPT
OpenAI's chatbot, launched November 30, 2022: built with technology trained on a 10,000-NVIDIA-GPU supercomputer, it hit 1 million users in five days, 100 million by January 2023 — and turned its chipmaker into the world's first $4 trillion company.
- Chime
The neobank that insists it is not a bank — founded in 2012, rejected by 100 VCs, grown on interchange fees from Americans earning under $100K, and taken public in June 2025 at $18.4 billion after a 59% first-day pop.
- Chuck Lorre Family Foundation
The philanthropic foundation of sitcom creator Chuck Lorre, established in 2013 to fund STEM education, health and the arts — behind the $30M Cedars-Sinai allied health school, a $10M Children's Hospital LA scholars program, and the Project Angel Food Kitchen & Campus opened in February 2026.
- CircleUp
The consumer-brands funding platform that raised $235M to bring data science to CPG investing — then broke itself up in 2023, selling its lending arm and VC fund and being acquired for its Helio data engine.
- ClickUp
San Diego productivity-software company (Mango Technologies Inc.) that raised $400 million at a $4 billion valuation in 2021, then cut 22% of staff in 2026 while deploying 3,000 internal AI agents under a "100x org" thesis.
- Cloudflare, Inc.
The San Francisco internet-infrastructure company whose network sits in front of millions of websites — and which keeps colliding with the power that position confers, from cutting off extremist customers to a Tokyo court holding it liable for manga piracy.
- Club for the Future
Blue Origin's nonprofit foundation, founded in 2019 to inspire young people toward STEM careers through its Postcards to Space program — student postcards flown past the Kármán line and mailed back — which became a $19M grantmaker after the 2021 $28M first-seat auction.
- CNBC
U.S. business-news cable channel founded in 1989; after buying the Financial News Network in 1991 it became the industry leader, and in January 2026 it spun out of Comcast into the independent company Versant — keeping its name, getting a new logo — while dueling Fox Business Network for ratings.
- CNN
American cable news network co-founded by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld in 1980 as the first 24-hour all-news TV channel in the U.S. Owned by Warner Bros. Discovery and led by Mark Thompson, it still trails Fox News in the ratings.
- CNP Assurances
The French personal insurer born as a state provident fund in 1959 — absorbed in 2022 into La Banque Postale's takeover bid at €21.90 a share, the final act of a state-engineered "grand pôle financier public".
- U.S. Coast Guard
The U.S. maritime military service overseen by the Department of Homeland Security — its first female commandant was fired in January 2025, and its Force Design 2028 overhaul is billed as the biggest change since 1915.
- Coatue
American technology-focused investment firm founded in 1999 by Philippe Laffont, a former Tiger Management analyst, which grew from a $45 million hedge fund into a crossover platform managing more than $70 billion across public and private markets.
- Coinbase
The largest US crypto exchange went public in 2021, was sued by the SEC in 2023 for operating unregistered, and had the case dismissed in 2025 — with the regulator stressing the dismissal was not on the merits.
- CoinTelegraph
Cryptocurrency news outlet founded in 2013, known for cartoon-style illustrations. Its 2023 false ETF-approval tweet, 2025 Google traffic penalty, and a disputed 2026 sale report frame an industry publication under pressure.
- Colleges and Institutes Canada
The Ottawa association that spent decades prying federal research money loose for Canada's colleges — taking them from 13 NSERC-eligible institutions to 108 — after universities had the funding earmarked for themselves.
- Columbia Journalism Review
Journalism's in-house watchdog survived its own industry's contraction — and now investigates outlets bigger than itself, from a 280-newsroom-staffer revolt at the Wall Street Journal to Axios's $852 billion partnership with OpenAI.
- Comcast
Comcast Corporation is the Philadelphia telecom and media conglomerate founded in 1963 as a 1,200-subscriber cable system in Tupelo, Mississippi. Led by co-CEOs Brian L. Roberts and Mike Cavanagh, it is unwinding its empire: cable networks went to Versant in 2026, an NBCUniversal/Sky split planned.
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia
Australia's largest bank by domestic franchise — founded in 1911 as a government-owned bank, split from the central bank in 1959, fully privatised by 1996, and now the retail-banking leader of Australia's big four alongside ANZ, NAB and Westpac.
- Competition and Markets Authority
The UK's independent competition and consumer authority, created in 2014 from the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission; its provisional finding that Adobe's $20 billion Figma deal would harm innovation helped end the merger.
- Compugraphic
The American phototypesetting company that put cheap, direct-entry typesetting into small newspapers — then, as the dominant incumbent, turned Adobe away, lost the PostScript bet to underdog Linotype, and was absorbed by Agfa in 1988.
- Concerned Veterans for America
A Koch-network veterans advocacy group — founded in 2011, run by Pete Hegseth until his 2016 exit — that has expanded from VA reform into war powers, NATO drawdown, surveillance reform, and energy policy.
- Confiction Labs
Game studio co-founded by Agate chairman Arief Widhiyasa and former Agate marketing chief Igor Tanzil, which raised $6.5 million in 2023 as "Mythic Protocol" before rebranding as Confiction Labs and releasing the co-op shooter "Riftstorm."
- Congressional Budget Office
Congress's nonpartisan scorekeeper: CBO estimated Medicare's Part D premium-stabilization demo would add $5B in 2025 spending plus $2B in interest — and later admitted it overestimated savings from the 2022 reconciliation drug provisions.
- Construction Enquirer
Free, online-only breaking-news service for UK construction, founded in 2010 and edited by Aaron Morby; its daily newsletter and contract leads reach deep into Britain's biggest contractors.
- Copernicus Foundation
A Chicago Polish-American cultural nonprofit, founded in 1970 to fund a Copernicus monument, which later acquired the historic Gateway Theatre and became the subject of a 2020 lawsuit against the City of Chicago.
- U.S. Copyright Office
The federal copyright registration office inside the Library of Congress — thrown into a separation-of-powers fight when the White House tried to fire Register Shira Perlmutter in May 2025, a removal the courts have blocked.
- CoreStack
The independent funding record of the Bellevue cloud-governance company — from its 2016 founding through a $30M Series B to a $50M Post Road growth financing — and where company-issued claims about it could not be verified.
- Coursera
American online-learning platform founded at Stanford in 2012; a Delaware public-benefit corporation and certified B Corp that listed on the NYSE in 2021 and completed its combination with rival Udemy in May 2026.
- Covid Act Now
A U.S. nonprofit that launched a COVID-19 risk-tracking website on 20 March 2020, used by some state and local governments during the pandemic, and formally wound down its data pipeline in 2024–2026.
- Cross Ratio Entertainment
Singapore independent record label founded in 2015 by music-industry veteran Dean Augustine; grew from artist management into distribution, publishing and events, landing a 2022 regional partnership with Universal Records Philippines and a 2023 global distribution deal with Warner Music Singapore.
- CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.
The cybersecurity company whose Falcon sensor — software meant to protect Windows machines — crashed about 8.5 million of them on 19 July 2024 in a worldwide outage, drawing congressional scrutiny, a Delta lawsuit, and a shareholder class action.
- CSAB
The computing-sciences accreditor founded in the early 1980s — accreditation for a field with no licensing exam, merged into ABET in 2001.
- Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye
Türkiye's culture-and-tourism ministry: runs museums, heritage sites and film funding from Ankara, and backed the Oscar campaigns of Ayla and Hayat. Established 2003; minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.
- D.A.S. Rechtsschutz
D.A.S. (Deutsche Automobil Schutz), founded in Berlin in 1928, pioneered legal-expenses insurance in Germany and became Europe's market leader. Absorbed into ERGO in 1997, it was later dismantled — its foreign operations sold to Allianz and ARAG between 2018 and 2025.
- The Daily Caller
Conservative news and opinion website founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel; owner of the CheckYourFact fact-checking operation that Facebook admitted to its fact-checking program, and a member of the White House press pool rotation.
- Dassault Systèmes
French 3D design and product-lifecycle software company founded in 1981 from Dassault Aviation's CATIA team, known for CATIA, SOLIDWORKS and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, and for its 2019 move into life sciences via Medidata.
- Datadog
New York-based cloud observability company founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc; its September 2019 Nasdaq IPO raised about $648 million at a $7.8 billion valuation after it reportedly rebuffed a Cisco takeover approach.
- DataDome
New York-headquartered cybersecurity company founded by serial entrepreneurs Benjamin Fabre and Fabien Grenier. Its AI-driven bot-management platform fights automated fraud on websites, mobile apps and APIs, and has expanded into Device Check, Account Protect and Ad Protect.
- Dataiku
Paris-founded, New York-headquartered enterprise AI platform created in 2013 by Florian Douetteau, Clément Stenac, Thomas Cabrol and Marc Batty. Its 'Everyday AI' platform survived a 2022 down round without layoffs and pivoted into the generative era with the 2023 LLM Mesh.
- DATAllegro
A data warehouse appliance maker based in Aliso Viejo, California, whose large-scale, commodity-hardware technology was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 to strengthen SQL Server's enterprise business intelligence capabilities for the very-large-database market.
- Deadline Hollywood
Nikki Finke's 24/7 Hollywood trade site founded in 2006, sold to Penske Media in 2009, and the outlet that documented the Michael biopic's delay chain.
- Debeka
Germany's largest private health insurer, organized as a mutual (Versicherungsverein auf Gegenseitigkeit) — facing a 2026 federal consumer-protection class action over cancellation fees on early-terminated life and pension contracts.
- Deccan Herald: Bengaluru's English daily since 1948
Deccan Herald is an English-language daily newspaper published from Bengaluru, Karnataka, founded in 1948 by K. N. Guruswamy and published by The Printers (Mysore) — a family-owned paper known for sober, regionally rooted reporting.
- Google DeepMind
Alphabet's AI research division, formed by the 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain. In 2026 it disbanded its Nobel-winning AlphaFold team to re-focus on Gemini, and Demis Hassabis handed day-to-day leadership to Koray Kavukcuoglu, becoming Chair and Alphabet's Chief Scientist.
- Delta Lloyd Group
A 210-year-old Dutch insurer that rejected NN Group's first takeover bid as an undervaluation, then surrendered six weeks later — and whose brand was erased within two years of the 2017 acquisition.
- Democratic National Committee
The governing body of the U.S. Democratic Party, founded in 1848 and chaired by Ken Martin since 2025 — publicly begged by Chuck Lorre in September 2026 to flee "far-left woke culture" for the political center.
- Democratic Socialists of America
The largest socialist organization in the U.S., founded in 1982 — whose members include New York City's mayor, and which a July 2026 State Department report accused Cuba of using to infiltrate American politics.
- U.S. Department of Defense
The federal department responsible for national security and the armed forces, led by Secretary Pete Hegseth since January 2025, renamed with a secondary "Department of War" title by executive order, and fighting a split-court legal battle over its blacklisting of Anthropic from military contracts.
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
The Cabinet-level federal agency for veterans' benefits, led by Secretary Doug Collins, faced a turbulent September 2026: a Ninth Circuit defeat over West LA veteran housing and New York City's exit from the Grant and Per Diem program — even as it announced record $1.17 billion homelessness grants.
- Descript
The AI-powered audio/video editor founded in 2017 by ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason — born as an internal tool of his failed audio-tour startup Detour — that lets creators edit media by editing a transcript.
- Detroit Free Press
Michigan's leading media brand, founded in 1831 as the Democratic Free Press and Michigan Intelligencer; the state's first daily newspaper. Its art critic from 1974 to 1995 was Marsha Miro, who left to become an architectural historian and founding director of MOCAD.
- DIC Entertainment
French-American children's animation studio behind Inspector Gadget and The Real Ghostbusters; its biggest business triumph was relaunching Strawberry Shortcake into a $5-billion retail empire.
- DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc.
The New York cloud company that built its identity on $5 "droplets" and simplicity-for-developers against the hyperscalers — priced at $47 in its March 2021 NYSE debut, then slipped about 7% on day one.
- U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
The federal trial court for Washington, D.C., created by Congress in 1863 to replace courts tainted by secessionist sympathies; in September 2026 Judge Amir Ali, one of its judges, blocked the Trump administration from tying counterterrorism grants to election-administration changes.
- Dominion Voting Systems
Canadian-founded voting-machine maker whose equipment processed votes in 28 states in 2020, target of debunked election-rigging claims, winner of the $787.5M Fox settlement in 2023 — and, as of October 2025, a company that no longer exists: it was acquired and rebranded as Liberty Vote.
- Doordarshan
India's public-service television broadcaster, founded 1959 and a division of Prasar Bharati since 1997 — 35 satellite channels, 66 studio centres, DD Free Dish, and the network that carried both "Mann Ki Baat" and "Krish, Trish and Baltiboy."
- Draganfly
Draganfly: the Saskatoon drone maker founded in 1998 whose 2013 rescue drone was the first credited with saving a human life; in September 2026 it took a $10 million strategic investment from Trump Jr.-backed Unusual Machines and a U.S. fund.
- Dread Central: the horror-news site that outlived its owners
American horror-news site founded in 2006: four straight Rondo Best Website wins, a decade under Epic Pictures' DREAD empire, and a 2026 return to independence under Brad Miska's Be Afraid Media.
- Dreyer & Traub
Defunct New York real estate law firm where Steve Witkoff met Donald Trump in 1986, where Witkoff and Larry Gluck worked before founding Stellar, and where George Ross represented the Trump family — father and son — across two generations.
- CS Drobeta-Turnu Severin
A football club founded in 2025 by the municipality of Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Romania, which won a county league-and-cup double in its debut season, earned promotion to Liga III in June 2026, and appointed former Liga I manager Flavius Stoican as head coach in July 2026.
- DST Global
Late-stage internet investment firm founded by Yuri Milner, famous for buying large stakes in Facebook and Twitter without board seats, for secondary share purchases that let founders delay IPOs, and for backing Anysphere's Series C and Series D.
- E!
Entertainment cable network founded as Movietime in the mid-1980s; home of E! News — canceled in 2020, revived in 2022, canceled again in 2025 — and Keeping Up with the Kardashians; owned by Versant Media Group since Comcast's January 2026 spinoff.
- EarnIn
The earned-wage-access app founded by Ram Palaniappan as Activehours — from a $125M Andreessen Horowitz-backed round and a tip-based "no mandatory fees" model to a DC attorney-general lawsuit alleging its instant-transfer fees equal 300% interest.
- East Midlands Trains
Stagecoach's train operator that ran the East Midlands franchise from November 2007 to August 2019, when Abellio took over and renamed it East Midlands Railway.
- eBay
San Jose online marketplace founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, where individuals and small businesses sell to buyers worldwide through auctions and fixed-price listings, reporting $10.3 billion in 2024 revenue on $74.7 billion in merchandise volume.
- Eintracht Frankfurt
The Frankfurt football club founded in 1899 — the "moody diva" with one league title, five DFB-Pokals and two European trophies. Profile leads with the club's current youth pipeline: Jeremiaha Maluze's path from Rot-Weiß Erfurt to a 2031 contract extension.
- Ekuator Games
Bandung-based Indonesian video game studio behind the crowdfunded RPG series "Celestian Tales," acquired by fellow Bandung developer Agate in January 2019 for about Rp5 billion.
- ElevenLabs
AI voice company valued at $22B in September 2026: built on licensed music deals and enterprise voice agents, shadowed throughout by voice-cloning misuse scrutiny.
- Eli Lilly and Company
Eli Lilly and Company is an American pharmaceutical company founded in 1876 in Indianapolis, Indiana, whose 150-year history runs from the first commercial insulin (1923) and Prozac to the tirzepatide franchise — Mounjaro and Zepbound — which became the world's best-selling medicine in 2025.
- EliseAI
The New York AI company founded in 2017 by Minna Song and Tony Stoyanov that automates leasing and front-desk work for housing and healthcare — valued at $4 billion after a $350 million raise in September 2026.
- Enbridge
Calgary-based Canadian energy infrastructure company whose pipeline network is North America's longest — now on a 2026 expansion sprint ($2.55bn Tallgrass acquisition, new Texas and New England gas projects) while its Line 5 fights trespass rulings and a major Wisconsin spill.
- Enveda
Boulder-based AI drug-discovery biotech that trains a foundation model on nature's chemistry — more than $845M raised through a 2026 Series E at a ~$2B valuation, with three clinical-stage candidates led by eczema pill ENV-294.
- Epoch Public Foundation
The Epoch Public Foundation (EIN 68-0650661) is the U.S. nonprofit fundraising arm for The Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty media operations. Its treasurer was Weidong Guan, and its 2021-2022 tax filings drew an IRS complaint and scrutiny from three tax-law professors.
- Esri
The privately-held giant behind ArcGIS — founded 1969 by Jack and Laura Dangermond, profitable since day one, never VC-funded, holding over half the global GIS software market and surviving the Google Maps threat.
- Eureka Entertainment: UK distributor, Masters of Cinema label
British home-video distributor behind the Masters of Cinema series; in 2011 it fought the BBFC's refusal of The Human Centipede 2 to an 18 certificate after 32 cuts totalling 2 minutes 37 seconds.
- European Union
Political and economic union of 27 European countries sharing a single market; in the Adobe–Figma case its European Commission issued a formal antitrust complaint, the Statement of Objections, in November 2023.
- Even
New York embedded-finance marketplace founded by Phillip Rosen that matched consumers with financial products via API — bought by MoneyLion for up to $440M in 2022 and rebranded Engine by MoneyLion.
- Eventbrite
The self-service ticketing platform founded in 2006 that went public at a $1.76 billion valuation in 2018, survived the pandemic collapse in live events, then sold to Bending Spoons for about $500 million in 2026.
- Evernote
The note-taking app founded in Stepan Pachikov's 2000 venture, relaunched for the smartphone era in 2008, valued at nearly $1 billion in 2013 — then sold to Milan's Bending Spoons in early 2023 after years of retrenchment, staff cuts, and a free plan capped at 50 notes.
- Evolve Bank & Trust
A 1925 Arkansas community bank that rode banking-as-a-service to national prominence, then became the central bank in the 2024 Synapse collapse, a Federal Reserve enforcement action, and a fight over tens of millions in missing customer funds.
- U.S. government (executive branch)
The branch of the federal government headed by the President under Article II, employing over 4 million people across 15 departments; in June 2026 it issued an export-control directive that forced Anthropic to disable its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models worldwide.
- Extend
New York virtual-card fintech founded in 2017 by American Express and Capital One veterans — issuer-agnostic virtual cards that modernize banks from the inside, ~$74M raised, 10,000+ businesses, now expanding into expense-management SaaS.
- Facebook
The social network Mark Zuckerberg launched from a Harvard dorm room in 2004 — still one of the world's largest online services, but no longer where the young are: just 32% of U.S. teens use it, down from 71% a decade ago, even as its data scandals keep generating jury verdicts.
- Fairfax Financial
The Toronto insurance conglomerate Prem Watsa built from a bankrupt trucking insurer in 1985 into "Canada's Berkshire Hathaway" — a $100-billion-asset float engine, a prescient 2008 crash call, a costly hedging decade, and now a succession plan.
- Fast Company
American business magazine and media brand published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, covering innovation, technology, leadership, creativity, and design since its November 1995 founding by former Harvard Business Review editors Alan Webber and Bill Taylor.
- Federal Aviation Administration
The U.S. federal agency that regulates civil aviation — certifying aircraft and airmen, running air traffic control, and licensing commercial space launches — whose oversight of aircraft manufacturers faced global scrutiny after the 737 MAX crashes.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
The U.S. disaster-relief agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security since 2003, whose mission is "helping people before, during and after disasters"; in September 2026 a federal judge vacated FEMA's rule tying counterterrorism grant money to state election-administration changes.
- Federal Trade Commission
The U.S. consumer-protection and antitrust agency created in 1914 — five commissioners, three bureaus — whose own 1935 Supreme Court case made it the model of agency independence, until Trump v. Slaughter (2026) overruled that case and made its commissioners removable at will.
- Figma
Figma, founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, put professional interface design in the browser for real-time collaboration — then saw Adobe's $20 billion acquisition collapse in 2023, leaving Figma independent with a $1 billion fee.
- Financial Conduct Authority
The UK's conduct regulator for financial services, created on 1 April 2013 when the old Financial Services Authority was split — the FCA polices firm conduct while the PRA handles prudential safety.
- Financial Times
The British business newspaper, printed on salmon-pink paper since 1893 and owned by Nikkei since 2015. It broke Google's $300M Anthropic investment, licensed its archive to OpenAI in 2024, and reported the Trump-brothers' American Ventures positions.
- Fingerprint
Born from an open-source browser-fingerprinting library, this Chicago company raised $77M to sell device identification as fraud infrastructure — arguing anonymous identifiers keep it on the right side of privacy law.
- Finix
The payments-infrastructure startup Sequoia decided was too competitive with Stripe to keep backing — so Finix became a full-stack processor in 2023 and now competes with Stripe head-on, pitching cost-plus pricing against Stripe's flat 2.9%.
- Fireblocks
The New York digital-asset infrastructure company whose MPC-based custody platform serves more than 2,000 institutions, raised $550M at an $8B valuation in 2022, and is building a unified digital-asset operating system through acquisitions including First Digital, Dynamic and TRES Finance.
- FireEye
The cybersecurity firm that discovered the SolarWinds breach and then split itself in two: its products business and name went to private equity for $1.2B (becoming Trellix), while its Mandiant services arm went public again and was bought by Google for $5.4B.
- First Hawaiian, Inc.
Hawaii's oldest bank holding company, tracing to an 1858 Honolulu savings bank, which spent 15 years as a wholly owned BNP Paribas subsidiary before a 2016 IPO returned it to public markets.
- First Round Capital
Seed-stage venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan, known as Uber's first institutional investor and for backing startups at their earliest stage from offices in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.
- FiscalNote
AI-driven policy and regulatory intelligence company based in Washington, DC, founded in 2013. After a 2022 NYSE listing and the 2018 acquisition of CQ Roll Call, it was delisted from the NYSE in April 2026 and now trades over the counter amid divestitures and a 25% workforce reduction.
- Flickering Myth: the UK film site behind Flickering Myth Films
Flickering Myth is a UK film and pop-culture publication founded in 2009 by Gary Collinson, covering film, TV and genre culture. It reported Jinga Films' 2025 US Blu-ray/DVD reissue of The Bunny Game and has expanded into film production through Flickering Myth Films.
- Flutterwave
The Lagos-born payments fintech that became Africa's most valuable startup — raising $475m to a $3b valuation — then endured a Kenyan money-laundering freeze, repeated Nigerian security breaches, and founder controversies on the way to clearing its name.
- Flywire
Not a generic cross-border processor but vertical payments software embedded in universities', hospitals' and travel operators' billing workflows — specializing in high-value regulated transactions, now expanding through a $330M hospitality acquisition.
- FM
The mutual commercial property insurer formerly known as FM Global — founded in 1835 by mill owner Zachariah Allen, rebranded as simply FM in 2024, and expanding into renewables and wildfire intelligence with the 2026 FortressFire acquisition.
- Focus on the Family
Colorado Springs evangelical nonprofit founded by James Dobson in 1977, known for its daily radio broadcast, the Adventures in Odyssey drama, and conservative advocacy on marriage, parenting and religious liberty.
- Forbes
Century-old American business magazine founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917 — famed for its Rich List and billionaire rankings, owned since 2014 by Hong Kong's Integrated Whale Media, and probed by CJR over a contributor model that published a $4.5B crypto-laundering figure.
- Forter
E-commerce fraud prevention company founded in 2013. It raised $300 million in May 2021 at a $3 billion valuation led by Tiger Global, and operates an identity-intelligence network across merchants, banks, and payment providers.
- Fortinet
The cybersecurity firm Ken Xie founded in 2000 after selling NetScreen to Juniper for $4 billion — built on dedicated security hardware, public since 2009, and still run by its founder at a ~$50 billion valuation.
- Fox Business Network
Financial news channel launched by Fox News in 2007 to challenge CNBC; now a Fox Corporation unit that has beaten its rival in total business-day viewers for over a year, and the stage where Mike Johnson said "We do not need a moratorium" on AI before Trump's September 2026 tech-CEO summit.
- Fox Nation
Fox News Media's subscription streaming service for "superfans," launched in 2018; known for original series like Scorsese's The Saints and its annual Patriot Awards ceremony.
- Fox News
U.S. cable news channel launched in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, owned by Fox Corporation, and the country's most-watched cable news network. It paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion's 2023 defamation lawsuit.
- Free Representation Unit
A UK charity founded in 1972 by law students that provides free legal representation in employment, social security and criminal injuries compensation tribunals to people who cannot afford lawyers, training volunteer law students under qualified supervision in the process.
- Freedom Guard
Mike Johnson's Louisiana pro-bono public-interest law firm, founded in 2015 to defend religious-liberty clients; Tony Perkins served on its board, and its signature case was the 2016 federal win restoring Kentucky tourism tax incentives to Answers in Genesis's Ark Encounter.
- FreightWaves
Chattanooga's freight-market data-and-media company split itself in two in 2024 — the SONAR SaaS data business went one way, some 35 media titles into Firecrown the other — after raising $76M+ on a Bloomberg-for-freight thesis.
- FreshBooks
Toronto-based cloud accounting software company for small businesses, founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment and self-funded for its first eleven years before raising venture capital and reaching a $1 billion-plus valuation in 2021.
- Front Row Joes
The Front Row Joes are the roving band of Donald Trump superfans who travel the country and camp out for hours or days to claim front-row seats at his rallies — a devotion once unconditional, until prominent members began breaking with him in 2026.
- FTX
Bahamas-based crypto exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried in 2019, valued at $32 billion before collapsing in November 2022; its $500 million Anthropic stake was sold for about $1.3 billion to repay creditors.
- Fujitsu
Japanese IT services giant founded in 1935, whose flawed Horizon accounting software sits at the heart of Britain's Post Office scandal — nearly 1,000 wrongful prosecutions — even as Fujitsu kept winning tens of millions in contracts to run the system until its 2026 replacement.
- Fundbox
Israeli-founded SMB working-capital fintech that hit a $1.1B valuation in 2021, then rebuilt itself from direct lender into embedded capital infrastructure — culminating in a 2022 Visa partnership and the 2025 Vaya team hire.
- Galveston County Republican Party
County Republican chapter in League City, Texas; its site documents 2024 RNC delegate Trisha Hope's 2025 Smithsonian donation, a year before she publicly broke with Trump on Politico's Playbook podcast.
- Gartner
IT research and advisory firm founded as the Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1979 by Gideon Gartner. Its Magic Quadrant began as an internal sketch its founder never meant to publish; the instrument now names logistics firms such as Sheer Logistics in its 2025 4PL edition.
- Gazprom
Russia's state-controlled natural gas giant, built from a Soviet ministry and reshaped by Putin's 2000–2001 takeover; after a $6.9bn loss in 2023 it rebounded in 2024 and now leans on China as European markets close.
- General Atlantic
General Atlantic is a global growth investor managing about $129 billion. Founded in 1980 as the family office of Duty Free Shoppers co-founder Chuck Feeney, it took outside capital from 1993. Since 2020 it has built a multi-strategy platform spanning credit, climate, and infrastructure via Actis.
- GoDaddy
The domain registrar Bob Parsons founded in 1997 — its 2006 IPO collapsed when bankers demanded a 50% haircut, so it sold to KKR and Silver Lake for $2.25 billion instead, scrubbed its racy image, and finally went public in 2015.
- Google
The search giant founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 — now an Alphabet subsidiary that holds ~90% of search, was ruled an illegal monopolist in 2024, and spent 2023 quietly becoming one of Anthropic's biggest backers.
- Google Brain
Google's deep-learning research team, founded in 2011 by Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado and Andrew Ng — home of TensorFlow and the 2012 cat experiment — merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.
- Government of Israel
The national government of the State of Israel, currently the 37th administration led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since December 2022, and Israel's counterpart in the Gaza ceasefire negotiations.
- Grammy Awards
Annual peer-voted music awards presented by the Recording Academy since 1959, spanning 95 categories including the prestigious Big Four, with voting reforms in the 2020s aimed at fairness and wider representation.
- Graphiti Multimedia
Mumbai-based Indian animation studio launched in 1995, led by co-founders Munjal Shroff and Tilak Raj Shetty and once chaired by Ram Mohan, the "father of Indian animation"; maker of Krish, Trish and Baltiboy and the Netflix Original Deepa & Anoop.
- Great American Economic Revival Industry Group
A 220-member advisory roster President Trump announced on April 14, 2020, organizing executives across 17 industries to advise on reopening the US economy — whose own members were warning him about testing within 48 hours.
- Great Public Schools Association of Queensland – Rugby Union
The GPS rugby premiership contested since 1918 by Queensland's nine Great Public Schools — played as rugby league through the 1920s before reverting to union in 1928, now Australian schoolboy rugby's most productive nursery, led by St Joseph's Nudgee College's 47 titles.
- Grupo Sura
The Medellín financial holding born as a 1944 insurer that built the cross-shareholding fortress of the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño, survived Jaime Gilinski's 2021–2022 takeover bids, and in July 2025 unwound 46 years of cross-holdings to become a pure financial player.
- The Guardian
Britain's 1821-founded newspaper of record, owned by the Scott Trust to protect its journalism: record £282m revenue in 2026 with 1.4 million digital supporters and a £1.35bn endowment, even after selling The Observer in 2025.
- Guideline
San Francisco 401(k) fintech serving 65,000+ small businesses with $20B in assets — Gusto agreed to buy it in August 2025 after it reached $140M in annualized revenue.
- Gulf News: Dubai's English-language daily, from 1978 tabloid to paywalled digital publisher
Gulf News is an English-language daily newspaper published in Dubai, UAE, launched 30 September 1978 and owned by Al Nisr Publishing. The UAE's largest English daily, it ended weekend print in 2023 and put its site behind a paywall in 2021.
- H Company
The Paris AI startup that raised a then-record $220 million seed round in May 2024 on a team of five cofounders — then lost three of them within three months, replaced its CEO with Palantir France's ex-chief in 2025, and saw its last cofounder leave for Microsoft in 2026.
- Hamas
Palestinian Sunni Islamist movement governing Gaza since 2007 and designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and EU. In July 2026 it elected Khalil al-Hayya as leader by a single vote, and now faces a ceasefire, a deadlocked internal election, and a planned return to Palestinian elections.
- Hambrecht & Quist
San Francisco investment bank founded in 1968 that bankrolled the tech revolution — backing Adobe's founding and the IPOs of Apple, Genentech, Netscape and Amazon — before Chase bought it for $1.35 billion in 1999.
- Harford County Public Library
A Maryland county library system tracing to an 1885 Bel Air reading room, now operating 11 branches with more than 187,000 registered borrowers, independently covered by regional and trade press for its pandemic response, digital-literacy programs and longtime CEO Mary Hastler.
- Harvard Kennedy School
Harvard University's public-policy school, founded in 1936 as the Graduate School of Public Administration on a $2 million gift, renamed for John F. Kennedy in 1966 — after Harvard's own leadership nearly shut it down.
- Harvard Law School
The law school of Harvard University, opened in 1817 with wealth from enslaved labor, birthplace of the Langdell case method — and the site of a 2017 reckoning with its own founding.
- Hazel-Atlas Glass Company
A Wheeling, West Virginia glassmaker formed by a 1902 merger, Hazel-Atlas grew into one of America's largest producers of glass containers and Depression glass before Continental Can acquired it in 1956 — a merger the U.S. Supreme Court held violated antitrust law in 1964.
- HBO Max
The Warner Bros. Discovery streaming service that launched as HBO Max in 2020, rebranded to Max in 2023, then publicly reversed course in 2025 with its own CEO calling the change a mistake. The restored HBO Max now sells prestige over volume.
- Heritage Foundation
Washington conservative think tank founded in 1973; shaped Reagan-era policy through Mandate for Leadership, publishes the Index of Economic Freedom, led Project 2025, and launched a Legal Action Center in 2026.
- Hertz Foundation
The private nonprofit behind the Hertz Fellowship, the doctoral award that has funded more than 1,300 scientists and engineers since 1963 with up to five years of support — and whose thesis-prize roll includes future Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
- High Country News
Nonprofit, reader-supported magazine covering the American West since 1970 — public lands, water, climate and Indigenous affairs — based in Paonia, Colorado, and winner of multiple George Polk Awards.
- Hofstra University
Private university in Hempstead, Long Island, founded in 1935 on a lumber magnate's estate. It is the only university to host presidential debates in three consecutive cycles, and its 2016 debate was the most-watched in history.
- Home Depot
The Home Depot is the world's largest home-improvement retailer, an Atlanta-based public company (NYSE: HD) founded in 1978. A 2022 Accountable.US scorecard identified it as the top corporate donor to lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Federal cabinet department created after the 9/11 attacks, the third-largest in the U.S. government; in September 2026 a federal judge blocked it from tying counterterrorism grants to election-administration changes.
- U.S. House of Representatives
The 435-member lower chamber of the U.S. Congress. Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has been its Speaker since October 25, 2023, and on January 20, 2026 he became the first sitting Speaker to address the British Parliament.
- House Oversight Committee
The U.S. House's main investigative committee, with jurisdiction stretching across the entire federal government. In 2026 it is defined by its Epstein investigation — including a billionaire's federal lawsuit against it — a self-declared 'wins' report, and two openly opposed partisan agendas.
- House Republican Conference
The party caucus for Republicans in the U.S. House — the body that elects GOP leadership, coordinates messaging, and has run an unbroken chair lineage since 1863. Today it is Lisa McClain's operation; in 2021 it staged the Cheney-to-Stefanik succession fight.
- House Select Committee on January 6
The nine-member House panel that probed the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack: 1,000+ interviews, four Trump criminal referrals, ethics referrals of four GOP House members, a seditious-conspiracy charge it couldn't agree on, and an 814-page report calling for a 14th Amendment office bar.
- HubSpot, Inc.
The Cambridge software company that invented "inbound marketing" as a category — and built a CRM business by giving the idea away — priced at $25 in its October 2014 NYSE debut and jumped 20% on day one.
- iCapital
The fintech platform that turned alternative investments into wealth-management plumbing — $945 billion serviced, a $7.5 billion valuation, and backing from the same Wall Street incumbents whose products it distributes.
- Idman.biz
Idman.biz ("Sports and Us") is a Baku sports news portal launched in September 2023 as a project of Trend News Agency, publishing in Azerbaijani, Russian, and English.
- IEEE
The world's largest technical professional organization — a U.S. nonprofit formed in 1963 from the AIEE and IRE merger. Its Standards Association writes the IEEE 802 family (Ethernet, Wi-Fi), but product certification is the Wi-Fi Alliance's job. 533,000+ members in 190+ countries.
- Ignatius Press
American Catholic publishing house founded in San Francisco in 1978 by Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J., known as the primary English-language publisher of Pope Benedict XVI's works and, in 2014, at the center of a dispute over a book mailed to Synod on the Family participants.
- Imaginando
Braga, Portugal music-software studio founded in 2014 by solo developer Nuno Santos from a self-funded Ableton Live controller side project; it grew a cross-platform line of synths, controllers and effects, including the rent-to-own FRMS granular synth and the 2023 BAM production studio.
- Indian National Congress: from the independence movement to India's principal opposition party
Indian National Congress (INC): founded in 1885, the party that led India's independence movement and dominated its first 50 years — now the principal opposition party, with 99 Lok Sabha seats after the 2024 election.
- The Information
A privately owned digital technology and business news publication founded by journalist Jessica Lessin in late 2013, built around deeply reported journalism and a subscription-oriented model.
- Instagram
The photo-and-video app Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012 — now an estimated 3 billion users and about 44% of Meta's revenue — whose acquisition the U.S. government tried and failed to unwind in a 2020–2025 antitrust case.
- Insurance Australia Group
Australia's largest general insurer — born from the 2000 demutualisation of NRMA's insurance arm, built through the CGU and NZI acquisitions, an umbrella for brands like NRMA Insurance and CGU, with Berkshire Hathaway once holding 3.7%.
- Intel Corporation
Founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Intel dominated PC chips for decades as one half of the "Wintel" duopoly — then stumbled, delayed its $20 billion Ohio fabs to 2030, and watched the U.S. government convert its federal grants into an equity stake in 2025.
- Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
The UNESCO body created by the 2003 Convention that decides inscriptions on the intangible heritage lists, grants international assistance, and guides how States Parties safeguard living heritage.
- Internal Revenue Service
The United States' federal tax agency — a Treasury bureau that collected $5.1 trillion in FY2024 — founded in 1862 to finance the Civil War, and now operating through a leadership vacuum and a 28% workforce cut.
- International Atomic Energy Agency
Vienna-based nuclear watchdog with 182 member states. The IAEA verifies that nuclear material stays peaceful, sets global safety and transport standards, and reports to the UN General Assembly and Security Council — but it is not a UN specialized agency.
- International Boxing Association
The IBA was once Olympic boxing's world governing body — until the IOC suspended it in 2019 and stripped its recognition 69-to-1 in 2023 after Russian money and governance scandals, and 2026 brought a new one: its president secretly bankrolling a Trump family wedding celebration.
- International Chovgan Federation
The International Chovgan Federation is the international governing body for chovgan, the Azerbaijani horseback game. It was formed at a Baku assembly in 2024 and runs world and continental championships.
- International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is a donor-funded investigative network headquartered in Washington, D.C., whose cross-border collaborations have forced leader resignations and anti-corruption laws across 70-plus countries.
- International Maritime Organization
The United Nations specialized agency for shipping safety, security and pollution prevention, based in London with 176 member states. Its conventions govern ships worldwide — and its net-zero climate framework stalled in 2025.
- Investor AB
The Wallenberg family's century-old investment vehicle — born in 1916 when Swedish banking law forced banks to shed industrial holdings — now the active owner behind stakes in ABB, AstraZeneca, Atlas Copco, Ericsson, SEB and Nasdaq.
- InvGate
Buenos Aires-founded ITSM and IT asset management software company that bootstrapped for 14 years before a $35 million growth round in 2023, and was named a 2025 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice with a 4.9/5 user rating.
- Iru
A private IT and security software company led by CEO Adam Pettit — the October 2025 rebrand of Kandji, the Apple device-management firm founded in 2018 that raised $288 million before relaunching as an AI-powered unified platform.
- J6 Pardon Project
Activist campaign founded by Suzzanne Monk that pushed clemency for January 6 defendants — building a defendant database and strategy guide, anchoring a Day-One petition coalition, and later pressuring Trump's own Justice Department.
- Janakpur Bolts
Nepal Premier League cricket franchise that won the tournament's inaugural title in December 2024, finished last in the 2025 season, and in 2026 acquired a second franchise, JB Bruges, in Belgium's EU T20 League.
- Janata Dal (United): the Bihar party built on mergers and alliance switches
Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), is a centre-left Indian political party formed on 30 October 2003 from a merger of Janata Dal, Samata Party and Lokshakti factions. Based in Bihar and led by Nitish Kumar, it has switched between the NDA and the Mahagathbandhan four times in a decade.
- Jenner & Block
A century-old Chicago litigation firm that challenged a 2025 executive order targeting it, and won a court ruling declaring the order unconstitutional.
- The Jerusalem Post
Israel's oldest English-language daily, founded 1932 as The Palestine Post. It survived a 1948 car bombing, a 1990 staff walkout under Hollinger, and a fraud-tainted 2004 sale — emerging as the Azur-owned paper behind JPost.com (1996), describing itself as centrist.
- Jinga Films: the UK genre sales agent behind A Serbian Film
Jinga Films — the London-based world sales agent founded by Welsh filmmaker Julian Richards — handled The Bunny Game and A Serbian Film, and launched the Danse Macabre horror label in 2020, which reissued The Bunny Game in the US in 2025.
- Joint Chiefs of Staff
The body of the most senior uniformed leaders in the U.S. Department of Defense, serving as the principal military advisory body to the president, the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council.
- U.S. Department of Justice
The federal department that enforces U.S. law and runs the FBI, DEA, ATF and federal prisons; in August 2026 Todd Blanche became its 88th Attorney General after Pam Bondi was fired.
- Khan Academy
American nonprofit educational organization founded by Sal Khan in 2008, offering free world-class learning resources sustained by philanthropy rather than fees, and known for its GPT-4-powered AI tutor Khanmigo.
- Kiavi
The fix-and-flip lender founded in 2013 as LendingHome and rebranded in 2021 — a $21 billion-plus private investor lender with a revolving Wall Street securitization machine, acquired by blockchain lender Figure for $717 million in September 2026 and now operating as its subsidiary.
- Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation
Vietnamese industrial real estate developer listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, chaired by Dang Thanh Tam, whose subsidiary Hung Yen Hospitality is developing the Trump Organization's licensed golf and residential project in Hung Yen province.
- Kino Films
Japanese film distributor and producer owned by Kinoshita Group; handled the Japan releases of Conclave and Michael, which grossed ¥8.66 billion.
- Kirkland & Ellis
The first $10 billion law firm: Kirkland & Ellis industrialised Big Law with lateral poaching, salaried-partner leverage and an up-or-out tournament — paying equity partners $11M each at a firm law students least want to join.
- Kremlin
The Russian presidential office — the seat of government in Moscow whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov framed the 2024 Putin interview with Tucker Carlson as "pro-American." Its history runs from 12th-century wooden walls to a UNESCO-listed seat of power run through the Presidential Executive Office.
- Kresna Graha Investama
An Indonesian investment group that rode a digital-pivot story onto Forbes Asia's Best Under A Billion list — then collapsed into the Kresna Life insurance scandal, criminal charges against its founder, an Interpol red notice, and a 2023 rename to Quantum Clovera Investama Tbk.
- Kushner Companies
Charles Kushner's family real estate firm, founded in 1985; the $1.8 billion 666 Fifth Avenue gamble nearly broke it, and a Forbes 2024 deep-dive valued the rebuilt firm at $2.9 billion — more than Donald Trump's own real estate portfolio.
- LawWorks
A UK solicitors' pro bono charity founded in 1997, co-founder of the National Pro Bono Centre in 2010, which runs England and Wales's largest network of free legal advice clinics.
- Lazarus Group
The name U.S. agencies and cybersecurity researchers use for North Korean state-backed hacking operations attributed to units of the Reconnaissance General Bureau — linked by the DOJ to a $1.3B theft campaign, by the FBI to the $1.5B Bybit hack, and by OFAC to the $625M Ronin bridge heist.
- Lehman Brothers
American investment bank founded in 1850 in Montgomery, Alabama, that grew into the fourth-largest US investment bank before filing the largest bankruptcy in US history on September 15, 2008.
- Leicester Crown Court
Leicester Crown Court is the Crown Court centre for Leicester and Leicestershire at 90 Wellington Street, hearing the area's most serious criminal trials, sentencing committals and appeals from the magistrates' court.
- Leicester Royal Infirmary
Leicester Royal Infirmary (LRI) is an NHS teaching hospital in Leicester, founded in 1771 as a voluntary infirmary and now the city's main emergency hospital, run by University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.
- Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention
A Philadelphia-based all-volunteer nonprofit issuing genocide early warnings through Red Flag Alerts. Founded in 2016/2017 as the Iraq Project for Genocide Prevention and renamed in 2021, it tracks Ukraine, Gaza, Artsakh and other crises, and faces a naming dispute with relatives of Raphael Lemkin.
- Levitate
ShareFile founder Jesse Lipson built Levitate into a $71M "keep-in-touch marketing" platform — a category pitched against mass-blast email — now evolving into AI-assisted Service-as-Software for relationship businesses.
- Liberté Investors
The defunct Dallas holding company — NYSE-listed as LBI, chaired by Gerald J. Ford — that acquired USAuto Holdings in 2004 and renamed itself First Acceptance Corporation, the Nashville non-standard auto insurer.
- Library of Congress
The de facto national library of the United States and the world's largest library, founded in 1800 — now the subject of a 2025 leadership fight that has reached the Supreme Court.
- LIFE Magazine
LIFE was the American weekly photo magazine launched in 1936 by Henry Luce and published by Time Inc., famous for photo-essays by Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and others. It ran weekly until 1972, then as a monthly, a newspaper supplement, and special issues.
- Lightspeed Venture Partners
A Menlo Park multi-stage venture firm founded by four Stanford classmates, famous for the first institutional check into Snapchat and for leading Anthropic's $3.5 billion Series E in 2025.
- Linotype
The type company behind the line-casting machine that set newspapers for a century — and the underdog that bet its Helvetica and Times fonts on Adobe's unproven PostScript, winning the digital-type business from the dominant phototypesetting incumbent.
- Lionsgate
Film and TV studio founded in 1997 by Frank Giustra; released the $1B biopic Michael, its highest-grossing film ever; split from Starz in 2025.
- Literature Wales
The Welsh national literature development charity (no. 1146560): writers' courses, bursaries and mentoring at Tŷ Newydd, the National Poet of Wales and children's laureate schemes, and administrator of Wales Book of the Year since 2004.
- Lloyd's of London
The 330-plus-year-old insurance market that is not an insurance company: a statutory marketplace where competing syndicates underwrite risk, backed by a three-link chain of security and dual-regulated by the PRA and FCA.
- Lob
San Francisco direct-mail API company founded in 2013 by Harry Zhang and Leore Avidar that lets businesses send postcards, letters and checks programmatically, growing from a Y Combinator startup to an $80 million funded platform used by more than 8,500 companies.
- Localazy
A Czech software-localization company founded in 2020 by Václav Hodek in Brno, which raised nearly €1 million across two funding rounds, expanded into Poland in 2024, and shipped an AI translation engine with style guides in 2025.
- Lok Sabha
India's House of the People — 543 directly-elected members serving five-year terms, still apportioned on 1971 population because delimitation has been frozen since the Emergency.
- Lokalise
Riga-founded translation-management SaaS that bootstrapped to $4M in annual revenue before taking venture capital, raised $56M by 2021, and pivoted to AI-powered translation in 2023.
- Louisiana Christian University
Private Baptist university in Pineville, Louisiana, founded in 1906 as Louisiana College. Its never-opened Judge Paul Pressler School of Law once had House Speaker Mike Johnson as dean; it renamed in 2021 and went to federal court in 2023 over the "LCU" acronym.
- Louisiana House of Representatives
The lower chamber of the Louisiana State Legislature: 105 representatives elected to four-year terms from single-member districts, presided over by Phillip DeVillier, the 70th Speaker, with a 73–32 Republican supermajority as of July 2026.
- Louisiana State University
Louisiana's flagship public research university in Baton Rouge: a land-, sea-, and space-grant institution that opened in 1860 as a military seminary under first superintendent William Tecumseh Sherman, enrolling about 40,000 students on an Italian Renaissance campus dedicated in 1926.
- Lovable
Stockholm AI app-builder founded by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, converted from Osika's viral open-source GPT Engineer project into Europe's fastest- growing software company — $13.3B valuation by 2026, alongside security and sustainability scrutiny.
- Loyal
Clinical-stage veterinary biotech founded by Celine Halioua in 2019 to develop the first FDA-approved lifespan-extension drugs for dogs; earned the FDA's first-ever effectiveness acceptance for lifespan extension (LOY-001, 2023) and raised a $100M Series C in February 2026.
- MacArthur Justice Center
A Chicago-based nonprofit civil-rights law firm founded in 1985, known for Supreme Court wins — and whose leader left to join the federal bench in 2024.
- Macromedia
Macromedia (1992–2005) built Director, FreeHand and Dreamweaver, bought the animation tool that became Flash, then was bought by Adobe for $3.4 billion — a deal Adobe justified with one word: Flash.
- MAGA Inc.
The pro-Trump super PAC that spent $377 million in 2024 and stockpiled over $400 million for the 2026 midterms — where Karoline Leavitt returned after the White House.
- Mambu
Amsterdam/London-based SaaS banking platform whose APIs power lending and deposit products for 260+ customers; raised €235M at a €4.9B valuation in 2021 with a stated vision of becoming "the Salesforce of banking."
- U.S. Marine Corps
The smallest U.S. armed service, founded November 10, 1775 as the Continental Marines. It marked its 250th birthday in November 2025, with J.D. Vance — the first Marine veteran to serve as vice president — at the commemorations.
- Maritime Safety Committee
The International Maritime Organization's senior technical committee, open to all Member States, which writes the SOLAS amendments, security rules and autonomous-ship code governing safety at sea.
- Marqeta
The card-issuing platform built on Block's Cash App — Square was 70% of its 2020 revenue — now unwinding that dependence with its first sustained GAAP profitability, a reverse split, and stablecoin-backed cards inside Mastercard rails.
- The Massachusetts Spy
The Patriot weekly newspaper founded in Boston in 1770 by printer Isaiah Thomas, moved to Worcester in April 1775, carrier of the first eyewitness account of Lexington and Concord and publisher of the Sheffield Resolves.
- Mastercard
Mastercard's biggest acquisition was not a payments company — it was $2.65B for threat-intelligence firm Recorded Future, capping a cybersecurity buying spree that turned the card network into a security-services business.
- Mayo Clinic
Nonprofit integrated health system founded in 1889 in Rochester, Minnesota; ~83,000 employees and $19.8B revenue in 2024; ranked the No. 1 U.S. hospital by U.S. News for 36 straight years and No. 1 in the world by Newsweek; built on salaried-physician team-based care since a 1919 Deed of Gift.
- McAfee
The antivirus pioneer founded in 1987 that ping-ponged between owners for a decade — Intel bought it for $7.7B, renamed it Intel Security, sold control to TPG, took it public, then sold it private again for $14B — while its founder lost the right to use his own name in cybersecurity.
- Meta
Meta Platforms, Inc. is the Menlo Park company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. It earns nearly all its revenue from advertising while funding AI infrastructure and loss-making Reality Labs hardware.
- MetaMask
MetaMask is the world's most widely used self-custodial crypto wallet, developed by ConsenSys since 2016. The browser-extension wallet became the default gateway to Ethereum apps and has grown into a multichain platform with swaps, Snaps plugins, and its own stablecoin.
- Microsoft Corporation
American technology company founded in 1975, whose 2019–2025 investment and cloud partnership with OpenAI made it a central actor in that company's 2023 board crisis and 2024–2026 Musk litigation.
- Midland Quarry Products
Midland Quarry Products (MQP) is a Leicestershire-based quarrying and asphalt business owned by Heidelberg Materials UK, running three quarries and ten asphalt plants across the Midlands and supplying rail ballast to Network Rail.
- Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
Government of India ministry for broadcasting, press, films and digital media — running the Press Information Bureau, the Central Bureau of Communication, Prasar Bharati (All India Radio, Doordarshan) and the NFDC, which organises IFFI. Its CBC co-produced Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: Bharat Hain Hum.
- Miro
The online-whiteboard company founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, valued at $17.5 billion in 2022, then sold to Bending Spoons in 2026 for $1.36 billion in cash — profitable, with $600 million in recurring revenue, but priced at barely 2.3 times that revenue.
- Mithril Capital
Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan's growth-stage investment firm, founded in 2012 — and the venture shop where future Vice President J.D. Vance worked as a principal in 2016.
- Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Company, Limited
The Japanese non-life insurer born from a 2001 merger, absorbed into the MS&AD group in 2010, buyer of Lloyd's insurer Amlin in 2015 — and now scheduled to merge again in 2027 amid an industry trust crisis.
- Moderna, Inc.
Moderna is an American mRNA-platform biotechnology company founded in 2010 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for the Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine co-developed with the NIH, the mRESVIA RSV vaccine, and an investigational personalized cancer vaccine developed with Merck.
- MoneyLion
The neobank founded by ex-Wall Street banker Dee Choubey that went public via SPAC in 2021 and was bought by Gen Digital for about $1 billion in April 2025 — then settled CFPB servicemember charges for $1.75 million while facing a New York AG suit over its Instacash advances.
- MoonPay
The Miami crypto payments firm that rode the 2021 NFT boom to a $3.4B valuation — with $150M quietly cashed out by insiders — then spent 2025–2026 rebuilding itself as a regulated institutional stablecoin-payments network.
- Morgan Joseph & Co.
The defunct mid-market investment bank built by Drexel Burnham Lambert alumni — founded as Morgan Joseph & Co. in 2002, merged with Tri-Artisan in 2010, and wound down by the 2020s.
- MovieWeb
Entertainment news site online since 1995; acquired by Valnet Inc. from WatchR Media in 2021; publishes film/TV news, trailers and interviews.
- MS NOW
Cable news network formerly known as MSNBC, rebranded in November 2025 under Comcast spin-off Versant; ratings rose double-digits after the rename while the owner's revenue declined.
- MSC Software
Engineering simulation software company founded in 1963 as MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation, creator of the MSC Nastran solver, bought by Hexagon in 2017 and sold on to Cadence in 2026.
- MSNBC
The cable news channel born of a 1996 Microsoft–NBC partnership — the one that hosted Tucker Carlson's nightly show from 2005 to 2008, and that Comcast renamed MS NOW in 2025.
- MTV
MTV launched in 1981 as a 24-hour music-video channel, was bought by Viacom in 1985, pivoted to reality TV, and by December 2025 was winding down its remaining international music channels in the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Australia, and Brazil.
- Munich Security Conference
The Munich Security Conference began in 1963 as a small defense forum founded by July 20 plot resistance fighter Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist. It became the world's leading security-policy gathering — and the stage for JD Vance's explosive 2025 address and Christoph Heusgen's emotional farewell.
- Municipal Corporation of Delhi
Delhi's civic body, born in 1958 with 80 councillors at a 19th-century Town Hall — once so prestigious its mayor received foreign dignitaries at the airport — split into three in 2012 and reunified in 2022.
- NAACP
The 116-year-old civil-rights organization founded in 1909 that dismantled legal segregation case by case — and still hands out awards branch by branch.
- Narya Capital
The Ohio venture firm J.D. Vance co-founded in 2019 — whose portfolio company won a Pentagon contract while the vice president kept his stake.
- NASA
The United States' civilian space agency, founded in 1958. In April 2026 its Artemis II mission flew the first crewed Orion flight around the Moon, the same year Congress rejected a proposed 24% budget cut and the agency grew dependent on Axiom Space for next-generation spacesuits.
- Nasdaq, Inc.
The exchange operator behind the world's first electronic stock market — founded by dealers in 1971, spun out as a for-profit company in 2000, merged with Sweden's OMX in 2008, and now selling its trading technology to 135+ marketplaces in 50 countries.
- Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee
The consolidated city-county government of Nashville, Tennessee — organized in 1963 as the first of its kind in the U.S. — that sued DHS in 2026 and won a federal ruling barring election conditions on counterterrorism grants.
- National Association of Broadcasters
The Washington trade association for America's radio and TV broadcasters — keeper of the NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame, which inducted Chuck Lorre and 'Mike & Mike' in 2016 and un-invited Robert De Niro from its top award in 2024.
- National Australia Bank
One of Australia's Big Four banks, formed from the merger of the National Bank of Australasia and the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney, now Australia's largest business lender, with a New Zealand subsidiary and a digital bank built from the 86 400 acquisition.
- National Commission of the Republic of Azerbaijan for UNESCO
Azerbaijan's national cooperating body for UNESCO, established in 1994 and based in Baku, linking the country's education, science and culture institutions with UNESCO.
- National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying
The body behind the FE and PE exams — founded 1920 to make an engineering license portable across states, and a founder of ABET.
- National Democratic Alliance (NDA): the BJP-led coalition that has governed India since 2014
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition formed in 1998 that has governed India under Narendra Modi since 2014. In 2019 its parties won about 353 Lok Sabha seats, but the BJP's 303 dwarfed its allies — and by 2020 the Sena and the Akali Dal had walked out.
- National Park Service
The federal bureau behind America's 433 national park units has lost roughly a quarter of its permanent workforce since January 2025 — about 4,000 positions — while facing the largest proposed budget cut in its 110-year history and a fight over what its own signs may say.
- National Pro Bono Centre
A UK charity founded in 2010 by three national pro bono bodies to coordinate free legal-help charities from a shared London workspace, and publisher of a case study documenting a Free Representation Unit tribunal case.
- National Security Agency
America's signals-intelligence agency, founded in secret in 1952. Its director was fired without explanation in April 2025; after nearly a year of acting leadership, the Senate confirmed Joshua Rudd to lead it in March 2026.
- White House National Security Council
The president's principal forum for national security and foreign policy, created by statute in 1947. Its spokesperson answered the 2024 Carlson–Putin interview controversy, and in 2026 Marco Rubio became its head as the first dual secretary of state and national security adviser since Kissinger.
- National Weather Service
The U.S. federal agency that issues the nation's official weather warnings, part of NOAA with 122 local forecast offices. Founded in 1870, it is rebuilding after losing about 600 staff in 2025.
- Native News Online
Independent daily news outlet covering Native American affairs since February 2011, founded in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by Levi Rickert, a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and read as a Native-led source of record across Indian Country.
- NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 32-member military alliance founded in 1949, entered 2025 with its U.S. representative fired and exits 2026 with a 5%-of-GDP spending target, an Arctic security pact, and praise from the president who once called it "obsolete."
- U.S. Navy
The U.S. maritime service branch, founded in 1775. Its first female chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, was fired in February 2025; the Navy then went nearly half a year without a Senate-confirmed leader.
- Netezza
A Massachusetts-based data warehouse appliance maker, founded in 2000, that helped pioneer the appliance category, competed directly with DATAllegro, and was acquired by IBM in 2010 for $1.7 billion.
- Netflix
The streaming giant co-founder Reed Hastings left in 2026 — he stepped down from the board in June, four months after the company walked away from an $82.7 billion Warner Bros. Discovery bid. The 1997 DVD-by-mail pioneer is now run by co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.
- Netlify
The web-development platform whose co-founder coined "Jamstack," rode it to a $2 billion valuation, then acquired rival Gatsby and retired the term in favor of "composable architecture" — a category-naming-to-consolidation arc.
- Netskope, Inc.
The cloud-security company founded in 2012 by four enterprise-security veterans — "SASE before the term SASE existed" — whose 13-year private run ended with a September 2025 Nasdaq debut at an $8.79 billion valuation.
- NetSuite
The cloud ERP pioneer Oracle bought for $9.3 billion in 2016 — a related-party deal in which Oracle's own founder already owned ~40% of the target, sparking a shareholder revolt, an extended tender, and a 56% squeak across the finish line.
- Network Rail
The infrastructure owner born from the Hatfield rail disaster — created in 2002 after privatised Railtrack collapsed — whose £30bn of debt quietly joined the national balance sheet in 2014, and which the Railways Bill now plans to dissolve into Great British Railways by 2027.
- New Civil Engineer
New Civil Engineer (NCE) is the monthly magazine and news website of the Institution of Civil Engineers, founded in 1972, sold to Emap in 1995 and to Metropolis International in 2017, and still the ICE's official title.
- New Tang Dynasty
New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD) is a New York-based, multilingual broadcaster founded by Falun Gong practitioners. NPR calls it The Epoch Times' sister organization; it is operated by the nonprofit Universal Communications Network.
- New York Attorney General's Office
New York's chief legal office, heading the Department of Law. The state constitution says almost nothing about it — real power comes from statutes like the 1921 Martin Act. Under Letitia James it pursued the Trump civil fraud case and, in September 2026, prediction markets.
- New York Observer
The pink-newsprint Manhattan weekly founded in 1987 by Arthur Carter, bought for $10 million in 2006 by 25-year-old Jared Kushner and remade under his decade as publisher — ending with a 2016 Trump primary endorsement, the death of the print edition, and a 2017 sale to a family trust.
- New York Post
New York City's oldest newspaper in continuous publication: the tabloid founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, run by the Murdoch family since the early 1990s — and still breaking news, including its August 2026 reporting on Hunter Biden's podcast admission.
- New York State Assembly
New York State's 150-member lower house, created in 1777 and known as the People's House: two-year terms, 38 standing committees, and Speaker Carl Heastie's majority since 2015 — the chamber where Zohran Mamdani rose to prominence.
- New York Stock Exchange
The world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization — founded 1792 under the Buttonwood Agreement, owned by Intercontinental Exchange since 2013, and the last major exchange still pairing electronic trading with human market makers on a physical floor.
- The New York Times
The American newspaper of record since 1851. It nearly lost its independence in the 2009 debt crisis, when a $250M loan from Carlos Slim at 14% interest saved it. Today: 12.78M subscribers, 139 Pulitzers, still under Ochs-Sulzberger family control.
- NewsNation
American cable news network owned by Nexstar Media Group, launched in 2020 on WGN America and rebranded in 2021. It markets itself as "News for All Americans" while expanding to 24/7 coverage and hiring marquee talent.
- Nidec
Kyoto-based electric-motor manufacturer founded in 1973 by Shigenobu Nagamori, once the world's largest precision-motor maker, now engulfed in a 2025–26 accounting and quality scandal: PwC Japan twice withheld its audit opinion and the Tokyo Stock Exchange put its stock on special alert.
- Nippon Life Insurance Company
Japan's largest life insurer — founded in Osaka in 1889 by banker Sukesaburo Hirose, reorganized as a mutual in 1947, now deploying a $12.7 billion war chest abroad, crowned by the $10.6 billion takeover of Resolution Life.
- NLS Legal
A regulated teaching law firm run by Nottingham Law School at Nottingham Trent University, operating since 2006 and now the partner clinic through which the Free Representation Unit extends casework into the English Midlands.
- Nobitex
Iran's largest crypto exchange (est. 2017): roughly 11 million customers, about USD 5 billion in observed 2025–2026 volume. A Reuters investigation tied its founders to the Kharrazi family; in June 2025 the pro-Israel group Predatory Sparrow burned roughly USD 90 million of Nobitex assets.
- Nova Credit
Credit infrastructure company that turns foreign credit histories and bank cash-flow data into lender-ready risk insight — from a Stanford project for newcomers to a Series D in 2025 backed by Chase and PayPal adoption.
- Novo
Miami fintech offering free business checking and money tools to small businesses through a partner bank — from its 2018 launch to more than $170 million raised and two Forbes Fintech 50 listings.
- NPR
America's nonprofit public radio network, founded by about 90 stations in 1970 and carried by independent member stations. Its Sept 24, 2026 Newsmakers interview with Tucker Carlson — on removing Trump over nuclear-war threats — came months after federal defunding shook the system.
- NVIDIA Corporation
Chipmaker founded in April 1993 that survived a 1990s near-collapse on a $5 million Sega lifeline to become the AI era's dominant supplier — the first company to reach a $5 trillion market value, in October 2025.
- Office of American Innovation
The White House office Jared Kushner directed from March 2017 to January 2021 — launched with "SWAT team" fanfare, designed from the start as a temporary consultancy, and closed quietly during the 2021 transition with "few public results" to show for four years.
- Office of Management and Budget
The White House budget office that has steered the executive branch since 1921 — and that opened 2025 with an unprecedented freeze of federal financial assistance, rescinded its own directive two days later, and still insisted the freeze stood.
- Office of Rail Regulation
The name of Britain's rail regulator from 2004 to 2015, when it became the Office of Rail and Road; it investigated and prosecuted Network Rail after the Barrow upon Soar crash.
- Oklahoma National Guard
Oklahoma's state military force — Army and Air components under the Oklahoma Military Department, commanded by the governor unless federalized — from the 1890 Territorial Militia to Blackwell, Tulsa, and modern disaster response.
- Omdena
Global collaborative platform founded in 2019 by Rudradeb Mitra that matches volunteer AI engineers with nonprofits and impact startups to build AI solutions for social problems — reported as 320+ projects across 105 countries.
- OnDeck Capital
The online small-business lender that IPO'd at a $1.3B valuation in 2014 and was bought by Enova for ~$122M in 2020 — a pandemic-era fire sale at more than 90% below its public-market peak.
- Onfido
London identity-verification company founded by three Oxford students in 2012, built on AI document and facial-biometric checks, and acquired by Entrust in April 2024 after raising $200 million.
- Online Archive of California
Born in 1993 as a prototype for a new archival data standard, the Online Archive of California grew into the CDL-run union catalog of 78,000+ California finding aids — and was rebuilt from scratch in July 2025.
- OPEC Fund for International Development
The Vienna-based development finance institution founded 1976 by OPEC member states, financing projects exclusively in non-member countries. Profile leads with its 50th-anniversary 47th Ministerial Council (June 2026), where Saudi Arabia proposed an independent governance review.
- OpenAI
American artificial intelligence research and product company behind ChatGPT and the GPT model family, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit and restructured twice, in 2019 and 2025, with Microsoft as its largest outside investor and Sam Altman as chief executive.
- OppFi
The Chicago subprime lender founded in 2012 as OppLoans that went public via SPAC in 2021 — now bidding about $130 million for BNCCORP and BNC National Bank to gain a national bank charter, opposed by 20 state AGs and two U.S. senators over its up-to-195% APR loans.
- Optimizely
The digital experience platform born twice: once as the 2010 San Francisco A/B testing startup, again in 2021 when acquirer Episerver — bought by Insight Partners for $1.16B in 2018 — took the name of the company it had just acquired.
- OTCQX
The top tier of the OTC Markets — the "Best Market" for established companies, operated by OTC Markets Group, with PCAOB-audited financials, governance floors, and penny-stock exclusion. Not an exchange.
- Our Ohio Renewal
J.D. Vance's Ohio nonprofit — actually two entities, a 501(c)(4) and a 501(c)(3) foundation — launched in 2016 to fight the opioid crisis and shuttered by 2021 after raising about $221,000, its main legacy a yearlong addiction-specialist residency in Ironton.
- Pakistan Army
Pakistan's land-warfare service branch, politically dominant since 1947 with four coups behind it and a sprawling business empire. In September 2026 it signed a drone deal with Powerus, a US firm backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, amid the biggest command overhaul in five decades.
- Pakistan Ministry of Defence
Pakistan's federal defence ministry, thrust into the spotlight in September 2026 when it placed a limited drone procurement order with Powerus, a Florida firm backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — a deal tangled in the firm's parallel sale of the same technology to India.
- Palantir Technologies
U.S. data-analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel that was rejected by Silicon Valley venture firms, funded instead by the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel, and grew into a major government contractor before posting its first GAAP profit in Q4 2022.
- The Palm Beach Post
The daily newspaper of Palm Beach County, Florida — winner of the 1970 Pulitzer for Feature Photography for Dallas Kinney's "Migration to Misery" portfolio of migrant workers. Owned by Cox from 1969 to 2018, sold to GateHouse for $49.25M, and folded into Gannett in the 2019 merger.
- PandaDoc
A document-automation company that reached a $1 billion valuation in 2021, founded by Belarusian entrepreneurs whose Minsk employees were detained after the founders spoke out during the Belarus political crackdown.
- Paramount
The media conglomerate formed when Skydance Media's $8.4 billion merger with Paramount Global closed in August 2025, renamed Paramount Skydance Corporation (Nasdaq: PSKY). Four days after closing, it announced a seven-year, $7.7 billion UFC rights deal for Paramount+ and CBS.
- Paras Defence and Space Technologies Limited
An Indian private-sector defence engineering firm that became the Indian manufacturing partner of Powerus — the US drone company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — under a June 2026 exclusive licence for counter-drone systems, months before the same firm signed with Pakistan.
- Parliament of India: the President, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha
The Parliament of India is the country's bicameral legislature — the President plus the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha — which meets in three sessions a year and moved into a new triangular building in New Delhi in 2023.
- Parsons Corporation
A defense and infrastructure contractor founded in 1944 whose own employees bought the whole company in 1984 — one of the largest ESOP takeovers ever — before returning it to the NYSE in 2019 under ticker PSN.
- Partners Capital
London-founded outsourced investment office, founded in 2001 by Stan Miranda and Paul Dimitruk, now managing over $70 billion for endowments, foundations and investment-industry families; General Atlantic took a minority stake in 2024 — a firm Dimitruk once helped run.
- Payability
New York ecommerce lender founded in 2015 by Keith Smith that accelerates marketplace payouts to Amazon, Shopify and Walmart sellers — via Instant Access daily payouts and Instant Advance working-capital advances — underwriting on platform sales history rather than credit scores.
- Paylocity
The Nasdaq-listed (PCTY) cloud HCM company founded in 1997 by Steve Sarowitz that went public in March 2014, posted $1.77B in FY2026 revenue, moved from co-CEO to sole-CEO leadership under Toby Williams in 2024, and expanded into finance software with the $325M Airbase acquisition.
- PayPal
The payments pioneer founded as Confinity in 1998 — bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, then pried loose by Carl Icahn's activist campaign and spun off in 2015 — now processing $1.79 trillion a year across 439 million accounts.
- The Pentagon
The five-sided Arlington headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense — a building whose shape survived a forced site move, built in 16 months with Potomac-sand concrete, and the metonym for the American military institution Congress authorizes at roughly $1 trillion a year.
- People
Time Inc.'s 1974 celebrity weekly, now a Dotdash Meredith brand; a PEOPLE source's March-reshoot claim conflicts with Variety's June 2025 dating.
- Pepsi: the cola brand behind the Jackson era
PepsiCo's flagship cola, born as Brad's Drink in 1893 North Carolina — from the cola wars to Michael Jackson's $5M deal and the 1984 burn incident.
- Peraton
American national-security technology company owned by Veritas Capital. Veritas assembled it in 2021 via the $7.1B Perspecta acquisition and the $3.4B Northrop Grumman IT services purchase, creating a ~$7B-revenue govtech platform.
- Pfizer
American pharmaceutical company founded in 1849 in Brooklyn; built on fermentation chemistry (citric acid, penicillin), maker of the first fully FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine with BioNTech, and acquirer of cancer biotech Seagen for $43 billion in 2023.
- PGA of America
Founded in 1916 by a department-store heir who wasn't even a golfer, the PGA of America began as a retail marketing play — and became the profession's path out of second-class status.
- Phoenix Financial
Israel's largest insurance and financial group, founded in 1949 and listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. In 2024 Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners bought in, becoming its largest shareholder after a last-day regulatory approval in January 2025.
- Ping Identity
Enterprise identity and access management (IAM) software company founded in 2002, sold to Vista Equity in 2016, taken public in 2019 — then taken private again by Thoma Bravo in October 2022 for $28.50 a share, about $2.8 billion.
- Pipedrive
The Estonian CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople — a spreadsheet-first, small-business alternative to Salesforce that Vista Equity Partners bought into at a $1.5b valuation in 2020 and steered into the AI era.
- Plaid
The fintech "plumbing" company behind bank-account APIs — founded by two Bain alumni in 2013, nearly acquired by Visa for $5.3B until the DOJ sued to block the deal as a killer acquisition, then independently valued at $13.4B.
- Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood Federation of America is the US nonprofit reproductive health organization tracing to Margaret Sanger's first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, now serving 2.09 million patients — and the named party in the Supreme Court's 2025 Medina Medicaid decision.
- Pluralsight
Tech-skills platform taken private by Vista Equity Partners in 2021 for $3.5–3.8 billion after a shareholder fight — then marked to zero by Vista in 2024 and handed to private-credit lenders, a marquee casualty of the 2020–21 leveraged-buyout wave.
- Politico
Washington-based political news organization owned by Germany's Axel Springer; pioneered insider morning newsletters and spent 2025–26 fighting two battles with the White House — one over federal subscription money, one over press access.
- PopMatters: the independent culture magazine founded by Sarah Zupko
PopMatters is an international online magazine of cultural criticism founded in 1999 by Sarah Zupko, covering music, film, TV, books and more. In 2021 it published the interview "Director Adam Rehmeier on His Abrasive Punk Comedy with a Sweet Heart, 'Dinner in America'".
- Powerus
A year-old Florida drone-defense company founded by Ukraine-war veterans that builds $5,000 Guardian interceptor drones from Ukrainian designs — and, months after merging with a golf-course operator tied to Trump's sons, signed a September 2026 procurement order with Pakistan's Ministry of Defence.
- Prasar Bharati
India's statutory public-service broadcaster — parent of Doordarshan and Akashvani (All India Radio) — whose WAVES OTT platform carries Krish, Trish and Baltiboy: Bharat Hain Hum.
- Presidential Library of the Republic of Azerbaijan
The Presidential Library of the Republic of Azerbaijan is a Baku library founded in 2003 by merging two libraries. It holds rare books and runs digital projects on Azerbaijani heritage.
- Press Information Bureau
The Government of India's official press agency, tracing its roots to a 1919 colonial publicity cell. PIB issues the government's press releases — and runs a Fact Check Unit that flagged 1,575 fake-news cases since 2022, whose takedown powers courts struck down as unconstitutional.
- White House Press Office
The White House's primary public-facing communications office, formally established in 1929 and headed by the press secretary. Karoline Leavitt led it from January 2025 as the youngest-ever holder before leaving on August 27, 2026.
- Professional Chovgan League
Azerbaijan's Professional Chovgan League, run by the national equestrian federation since 2024, is the country's professional club competition in chovgan, the traditional horse-riding game.
- Professional Sports Authenticator
Trading-card authentication and grading company founded in 1991 by David G. Hall, whose sealed, numbered grade became the hobby's common language for condition — and whose parent, Collectors, now also owns former rival SGC and announced the purchase of Beckett in December 2025.
- Project Angel Food
A Los Angeles nonprofit founded in 1989 by Marianne Williamson to deliver free meals to AIDS patients, now serving more than 1.5 million medically tailored meals a year — including a 2026 Angel Awards gala where Chuck Lorre received its rare Founders Angel Award.
- Promise of Justice Initiative
A New Orleans nonprofit law firm founded in 2012 that fights the death penalty and represents people in Louisiana's criminal legal system — it helped free Corey Williams in 2018, argued Ramos v. Louisiana, and represents 1,049 people convicted by non-unanimous juries.
- Promotion Marketing Association
A U.S. promotion-marketing trade association founded in 1911, later renamed the Brand Activation Association, known for its FTC-addressed Marketing Law Conference, the annual REGGIE Awards, and an anti-fraud data-sharing program reviewed by the Justice Department.
- Proofpoint
The cybersecurity company acquired for $12.3 billion in 2021 later renegotiated $4.3 billion in debt maturities and announced a $6.3 billion Varonis takeover. Its financial history reveals more than the headline about an unprofitable buyout.
- ProPublica
A nonprofit investigative newsroom founded in 2007 — the organization Paul Steiger sketched on an envelope in 2006, built on giving stories free to partners and measuring success by impact. In September 2026 it reported a Russian oligarch bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding celebrations.
- Prove
New York identity verification company, formerly Payfone, that authenticates users from phone and SIM signals — rebranded in 2020 alongside a $100 million round and an Early Warning acquisition, and valued past $1 billion by 2023.
- PRS Legislative Research
The Indian non-profit that briefs MPs on every bill — and was twice denied foreign funding because the Home Ministry called its work with legislators a 'gray area' with lobbying risk.
- Pubali Bank
One of Bangladesh's largest private commercial banks, tracing back to Eastern Mercantile Bank (1959); nationalised 1972, privatised 1983, rebuilt from a 54% bad-loan "problem bank" into a lender with 2.20% NPLs at end-2025. It sponsored Everest summiteer Nurunnahar Nimni, one of its own officers.
- Public Citizen
The nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization Ralph Nader founded in 1971. Its litigation arm argued 40 Supreme Court cases by 2000, and in 2026 it became one of the most prolific filers of Hatch Act complaints — including one against Attorney General Todd Blanche that it says was never answered.
- Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, founded in 1971 and remade in 2015 into Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 engine. It committed $2 billion to anchor Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners despite internal reluctance — and that money now reaches as far as an Israeli insurer.
- Qatar Investment Authority
Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, created in 2005 to diversify the state's hydrocarbon wealth. In September 2026 it launched a $20B partnership with J.P. Morgan Asset Management; it also put $1.5B into Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners in 2024.
- QBE Insurance Group
Australia's second-largest international insurer — founded 1886 in Townsville as North Queensland Insurance, named for a 1973 three-way merger — now a $24B-premium global group that was the first non-European major insurer to exit thermal coal.
- Quaker Houghton
A Pennsylvania-based specialty chemical maker formed by Quaker Chemical Corporation's 2019 combination with Houghton International, now one of the world's largest suppliers of industrial process fluids to the steel, aluminum, automotive and aerospace industries.
- Qualys
US cybersecurity company that sold security as a cloud service before the cloud was fashionable; Philippe Courtot invested in 1999, became CEO in 2001 and led it to a 2012 IPO.
- Quinnsworth
Defunct Irish supermarket chain founded by Pat Quinn in 1966, remembered for its "Yellow Pack" budget range and flamboyant advertising; Tesco bought the 75-store chain from Associated British Foods in 1997 and folded it into its Irish business.
- RAA
South Australia's member motoring organisation, founded in 1903, which kept its brand and roadside services while Allianz Australia took over underwriting its home and motor insurance in a 20-year deal from 2025.
- Rail Accident Investigation Branch
The UK's independent rail accident investigator: a 43-person government body whose inspectors can compel evidence and overrule police at a crash scene — but may never prosecute. Created after Ladbroke Grove, its reports seek causes, never blame.
- Rail Safety and Standards Board
The independent, member-owned safety, standards, and research body for Great Britain's railways, created in 2003 after the Ladbroke Grove crash inquiry.
- Rail Technology Magazine
Manchester-based trade publication covering the UK rail industry since 2000, published by Cognitive Publishing; an ABC-audited title that reported the Barrow crash and rail-safety prosecutions.
- Rajya Sabha: the Council of States, India's permanent upper house
The Rajya Sabha (Council of States) is the upper house of India's Parliament: a permanent body of up to 250 members, 233 elected by state legislators and 12 nominated by the President, with six-year staggered terms.
- Ramp
The New York spend-management fintech that weathered a 28% down round in 2023, then repriced five times in 18 months — from $5.8B to a $44B Series F in 2026 — on an AI-economy thesis.
- Rashtriya Janata Dal: the Bihar party of the Muslim-Yadav base and the fodder-scam convictions
The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) is a centre-left Indian political party founded in July 1997 by Lalu Prasad Yadav after he split from the Janata Dal amid fodder-scam charges. Built on a Muslim-Yadav base, it ruled Bihar until 2005 and was the state's single largest party in 2020.
- The Recording Academy
The U.S. music academy behind the Grammy Awards, founded in Los Angeles in 1957. After a 2020 crisis it scrapped secret nomination committees, retired the "urban" label, and rebuilt its electorate — 66% of whom joined since 2019. Harvey Mason Jr., its first Black CEO, leads it from Santa Monica.
- Reddit
San Francisco social media platform founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, organised into more than 100,000 volunteer-moderated communities, which went public in March 2024 and now earns revenue from advertising and from licensing its archive of user conversation to AI companies.
- Rekor Systems
Nasdaq-listed (REKR) AI vehicle-recognition company behind OpenALPR — formerly Novume Solutions, built on an Oklahoma uninsured-vehicle program that drew a 2021 securities class action, now operating at the center of the ALPR privacy debate.
- Relay
Toronto SMB-banking fintech founded in October 2018 by Yoseph West and Paul Klicnik; its online business-banking and money-management platform (banking services via partner Thread Bank) targets cash-flow clarity for small businesses; $32.2M Series B in May 2024 led by Bain Capital Ventures.
- RenoFi
The Philadelphia fintech that is not actually a lender — an AI-enabled renovation-financing platform whose partner credit unions lend against a home's after-renovation value, the first U.S. Renovation HELOC of its kind, backed by $65 million including a 2025 Fifth Wall-led Series B.
- Republican Party
One of the two major U.S. political parties, founded in 1854 from opposition to slavery's westward expansion. Since 2016 it has been reshaped around Donald Trump; in 2026 it holds the presidency, the Senate, and a narrow House majority.
- Republican Study Committee
Conservative House caucus founded in 1973 whose chairmanship has been held by a Vice President, a House Speaker, and the current Majority Leader; its chairmen's roster reads as a who's who of Republican leadership, and it is now chaired by Rep. August Pfluger.
- Reuters
The international news agency founded in 1850–51, now the news division of Thomson Reuters; its 1941 Trust Principles are defended by a special Founders Share that can block any takeover threatening its independence.
- Revolut
After a five-year fight with UK regulators, Revolut won a full British banking licence in March 2026 — the final step for Europe's most valuable startup on its road to a "truly global bank."
- Revolution
Washington, D.C. investment firm founded in 2005 by AOL co-founder Steve Case, built around a family of funds that backs companies outside coastal tech hubs. J.D. Vance joined as a partner in 2017, co-launched the $150 million Rise of the Rest Seed Fund with Case, and left for Narya in 2019.
- RingCentral
American cloud-communications company (NYSE: RNG) providing voice, messaging, and contact-center platforms to more than 600,000 businesses. In 2026 it reported record free cash flow, declared its first dividend, and suffered a major breach.
- Riverview Health Westfield Hospital
A 16-bed community hospital in Westfield, Indiana, opened in 2018 by the Hamilton County-owned Riverview Health system as that city's first hospital; after pandemic-era losses and a 2023 CEO change, it expanded services through 2025-2026 and entered a managed-services partnership with Parkview
- Roche Holding
Basel-based Swiss pharmaceutical and diagnostics giant founded in 1896 by Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, controlled by founding families, and now racing Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk in the obesity-drug market with its enicepatide candidate.
- RollWorks
Business-to-business marketing division launched by AdRoll in February 2018 for account-based marketing, later folded into AdRoll ABM in August 2025.
- Roofstock
The Oakland marketplace that made tenant-occupied single-family homes a tradable asset class — a $1.9B valuation in 2022, then two rounds of layoffs within a year.
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is the UK's national botanic research institution — a Defra-sponsored public body founded as a physick garden in 1759, inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2003, and home to the Millennium Seed Bank, the world's largest wild-seed collection.
- Royal Institute of British Architects
The United Kingdom's professional body for architects since 1834, chartered to advance architecture: home of the Stirling Prize and the Royal Gold Medal, and the institute whose 2024 international award honoured Article 25's school in Niger.
- RSA Security
The cybersecurity company behind SecurID authentication tokens, founded in 1982 to commercialize the RSA cryptosystem — sold for about $2.1 billion twice, fourteen years apart (EMC in 2006, Dell in 2020), after surviving the defining 2011 SecurID breach.
- Runway
The New York AI video startup founded at NYU in 2018 — from Gen-2 text-to-video and a $1.5B Google/Nvidia-backed round to a $5.3B "world model" company with $200M in ARR, a robotics push, and its own $10M venture fund.
- Russian Federation
The Russian Federation — the world's largest country and the state across the table in the Ukraine-war negotiations. As of late September 2026, Kyiv and Moscow have both confirmed U.S. plans to relaunch trilateral talks, with Moscow insisting on territorial and neutrality terms Ukraine has rejected.
- Saigontel
Vietnamese telecommunications and industrial infrastructure developer listed on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, chaired by industrialist Dang Thanh Tam, that has expanded from telecom infrastructure into industrial parks, rooftop solar and AI data centres.
- Salesforce
U.S. cloud software company founded by Marc Benioff in 1999 that popularized enterprise software delivered over the internet, then grew into a multi-product platform through acquisitions — Tableau ($15.7B) and Slack ($27.7B) — before a 2023 activist-investor siege forced a pivot to cost discipline.
- SAS Institute
The analytics giant that never took venture capital, never went public, and never sold — founded by North Carolina State academics in 1976 and grown on customer renewals, 34%-of-revenue R&D, and a campus famous for 3% employee turnover.
- Save America
Trump's leadership PAC, registered with the FEC on November 9, 2020 — the paper trail shows where the money went: $60M to MAGA Inc, $1.5M to Get Georgia Right, and $100,000 to Bikers for Trump in 2021–2022.
- Screen Daily: the global film trade publication
The online arm of Screen International, the British film-trade journal begun in 1975 and published by Media Business Insight — the outlet that reported the BBFC's 2011 Bunny Game ban and Trinity's Cannes acquisition.
- Seattle International Adoptions
Seattle-based adoption agency run by Lynn Devin that processed U.S. families' Cambodian adoptions arranged by her sister Lauryn Galindo; both agreed to forfeit the agency's profits after 2003-2004 federal fraud pleas.
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The federal agency that polices U.S. securities markets: a record $8.2B in FY2024 enforcement remedies, then a 2025 crypto-enforcement reversal under new leadership — lawsuits against Coinbase, Ripple, Binance and Justin Sun dropped or dismissed.
- Securitize
The tokenization platform behind BlackRock's BUIDL fund — SEC-registered transfer agent and broker-dealer that went public on the NYSE in July 2026 and tokenized its own stock at listing.
- Senate Finance Committee
The Senate's oldest standing committee — and the body whose 2024 investigation, led by Ron Wyden, documented Affinity Partners collecting up to $157 million in foreign-government fees without generating any investor return.
- Senate Judiciary Committee
Two hundred years after its 1816 founding, the Judiciary Committee became ProPublica's enforcement arm — subpoenaing Supreme Court justices' billionaire benefactors after investigative reporting on their gifts, on an 11–0 vote taken after every Republican walked out.
- ServiceNow
American enterprise software company founded in 2003 by former Peregrine Systems CTO Fred Luddy; known for the Now Platform for IT and business workflows, a rejected $2.5 billion VMware takeover in 2011, a 2012 IPO, and Bill McDermott's tenure as CEO since January 2020.
- Seven Seven Six
Venture capital firm founded in 2020 by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, built like a technology company that deploys venture capital, known for leading Alt's Series A and for its 2022 pivot toward crypto and Web3 investing.
- Sezzle
The Minneapolis BNPL company that listed in Australia because Australia understood the model first — then saw a $355M merger with Zip collapse five months after it was announced.
- SGC
Boca Raton trading-card grader founded in July 1998, known for vintage cards and its black "tuxedo" holders; bought by PSA parent Collectors Holdings in 2024 and refocused as a boutique brand in 2025.
- Shawmut National Corporation
A Hartford, Connecticut-based bank holding company formed in 1988 that survived a near-failure earnings scandal in 1990 before merging into Fleet Financial Group in 1995 in a $3.7 billion deal.
- Sheer Logistics
St. Louis 4PL/managed-transportation company founded in 2009 by Joe Egertson, built around the SheerExchange platform and Scope 3 emissions dashboards; backed by Woodlawn Partners and Monroe Capital since 2022, acquired CargoBarn in 2024, and announced a Gartner 4PL Magic Quadrant honorable mention.
- Shiv Sena: the Maharashtra party founded in 1966 that split into two rival Senas in 2022
Shiv Sena is the Maharashtra-based party founded in 1966 by cartoonist Bal Thackeray as the voice of the Marathi Manoos. After splitting in 2022, the Election Commission recognised Eknath Shinde's faction as the official Shiv Sena in 2023, while Uddhav Thackeray's faction became Shiv Sena (UBT).
- Shlomo Group
Israel's family-owned car-leasing and holding group, founded in 1974 from two Susita cars rented to the IDF; in 2024 Affinity Partners bought 15% of its auto-and-credit business for $110 million, a Gaza-war-era deal closed at a sharp discount to its original valuation.
- Shopify
Canadian commerce-software company founded in Ottawa in 2006 that sells subscription storefront software to independent merchants, went public in 2015, and in 2023 sold its logistics business to Flexport to refocus on software.
- Shrug Capital
Venture firm led by Niv Dror and Moshe Lifschitz that backs culturally relevant consumer companies, from Alt's Series B to Jake Paul's W brand, and co-led Varda Space's $187 million Series C in 2025.
- Sidley Austin
The Chicago corporate law firm founded in 1866 where JD Vance worked as a litigator in 2014–15 after Yale Law School; in 2026 it elected Yvette Ostolaza — the first woman to lead the firm and the first Latina to lead a top-10 U.S. law firm.
- Siemens
German technology company founded in 1847 as a Berlin telegraph workshop and now one of the world's largest industrial-technology groups, led by CEO Roland Busch, which has reshaped itself around industrial software with the Altair and Dotmatics acquisitions.
- SIGNAL IDUNA Group
The German mutual insurance group formed by the 1999 merger of Signal Versicherungen and Iduna Nova — owned by its policyholders, ranked 12th in German primary insurance, and the name on Germany's largest football stadium since 2005.
- Small Business Administration
Federal small-business agency founded in 1953; in 2026 it ran the Freedom 250 Million Dollar Pitch Competition, with Nicki Minaj among the judges and a $1 million prize pool funded by Clover Network.
- SmartAsset
The unicorn that sells financial advisors their customers — a $1B+ personal-finance content empire whose lead-generation marketplace delights some advisors and frustrates others over lead quality.
- Smiths News PLC
The United Kingdom's largest newspaper and magazine wholesaler, a Swindon-listed public company whose modern form dates to the 2006 separation of W.H. Smith's news-distribution business; it traded as Connect Group PLC from 2014 to 2020 and has since refocused on its core wholesaling business with
- Smithsonian Institution
The world's largest museum, education and research complex, founded by Act of Congress in 1846 from James Smithson's bequest; its National Museum of American History accepted Trisha Hope's Jan. 6-themed donation in May 2025.
- Snowflake
US cloud data platform founded in 2012 by three database architects; its September 2020 NYSE IPO raised $3.36 billion — the largest US IPO of that year — and the company has since moved through three distinct CEO eras, from a Microsoft veteran to an IPO specialist to an acquired startup founder.
- Socure
Nevada identity-verification company founded in 2012 that uses AI and machine learning to verify identities and fight fraud, growing from a New York startup to a $5.2 billion platform serving banks, fintechs and government agencies.
- SoFi
A student-loan startup founded by four Stanford business-school students in 2011 became a federally chartered bank holding company in 2022 — the payoff of an eleven-year strategy, not an overnight pivot.
- Sotheby's
The London-founded auction house (1744) that sold Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian banana to Justin Sun for $6.2 million in November 2024 — a lot that was uniquely payable in crypto. Taken private by Patrick Drahi for ~$3.7B in 2019 after a record $7.3B sales year in 2021.
- Southern Poverty Law Center
Montgomery, Alabama nonprofit founded in 1971; won damage judgments that bankrupted Ku Klux Klan groups, tracks groups it calls hate groups, and faces contested designations and a pending 2026 federal indictment.
- SpaceX
Rocket and spacecraft company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 that made orbital boosters reusable, flew NASA astronauts commercially, built the Starlink constellation, and went public in June 2026.
- Spearhead
Founder-to-investor fund created in 2017 by Naval Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan that gives startup founders capital to run their own funds, scaling from $200,000 first checks to $100 million funds and leading Alt's $75 million Series B in 2021.
- SpyCloud, Inc.
The Austin cybersecurity firm founded in 2016 that fights credential theft by recapturing criminals' own stolen data — including by social-engineering threat actors — to warn companies before their logins are weaponized.
- U.S. Department of State
The oldest U.S. executive department, founded in 1789 to run foreign policy. In 2025 it absorbed USAID's remnants, cut 132 offices under Marco Rubio, and fought a court battle over nearly $2 billion in ordered aid payouts.
- Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation
An Athens-based philanthropic foundation established in 1996 from the bequest of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos. It funds arts and culture, education, health and sports, and social welfare in 130+ countries; its largest gift is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens.
- Stellar Management
A New York City real estate investment firm co-founded in 1985 by Larry Gluck and Steve Witkoff, split along office-vs-residential lines in 1997, and run by Gluck until his death in 2024 — now led by co-CEOs while its crown-jewel office tower sits in special servicing.
- Strathclyde Partnership for Transport
The regional transport authority for west-central Scotland, which owns and runs the Glasgow Subway, coordinates regional bus services, and was designated in 2023 to lead the Case for Investment for the proposed Clyde Metro network.
- Stripe
The private payments giant that built its own IPO alternative — recurring tender offers, a $95B-to-$50B-to-$91.5B valuation arc, and founder control — while expanding into stablecoin rails alongside the card networks.
- Suncorp Group
Brisbane-based general insurance group formed in 1996 from a Queensland government insurer, a building-society bank and a state development lender — now a pure-play Trans-Tasman insurer after selling its bank to ANZ in 2024.
- Suntory
Japanese beverage group founded in Osaka in 1899, whose whisky advertising made it a self-described cultural company, which built Tokyo's Suntory Hall in 1986, and whose 2014 Beam Inc acquisition brought Jim Beam and Maker's Mark into the group.
- Supreme Court of Canada
Canada's final court of appeal since 1875: nine bijural judges, no trials or juries — and the court where Amir Ali clerked for Justice Marshall Rothstein.
- SurveyMonkey
The survey company behind SurveyMonkey survived a rejected $4B Zendesk takeover as Momentive Global, then went private at $1.5B sixteen months later — now private under Symphony Technology Group since June 2023.
- SV Angel
San Francisco seed-stage venture firm founded by investor Ron Conway in 2009, backer of Airbnb, Pinterest and Snap, which retreated from traditional venture fundraising in 2018 to invest as a family angel operation.
- Svalbard Museum
The museum of the High Arctic began in 1981 in Longyearbyen's old pig barn, ran on volunteers with zero employees until 1998 — and the pigsty still stores its overflow, including a spiked-foot polar bear on styrofoam ice.
- SWA Magazine
Indonesian business magazine and media company, led for years by editor-in-chief Kemal Effendi Gani, that organizes recurring national corporate-recognition programs including the CGPI Award and the Indonesia Young Woman Future Business Leaders award.
- Symantec
Enterprise cybersecurity brand now owned by Broadcom: founded in 1982 as an AI startup, built into the Norton antivirus empire, then split in 2019 when Broadcom bought its $2.5bn enterprise business for $10.7bn while the Norton consumer side became Gen Digital.
- Symphony Communication Services
The secure-messaging company born as a bank consortium's revolt against the Bloomberg terminal — Goldman Sachs's Live Current plus a $66M Perzo acquisition became a $1.4B platform whose investors are also its customers.
- Systems Limited
Lahore-based IT services company founded in 1977 and listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (ticker SYS) in 2015 — Pakistan's largest listed technology exporter, named to Forbes Asia's Best Under a Billion six times through 2026.
- Tala
The mobile lender that scores creditworthiness from smartphone data instead of credit bureaus — founded by Shivani Siroya in 2011, now over 10 million customers across emerging markets, with Mexico as its growth engine.
- TechCrunch
American technology-news publication launched in June 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare, covering startups and venture capital, sold to AOL in 2010 and to Regent LP in 2025, and home of the Disrupt conference.
- Television Academy
The nonprofit behind the Primetime Emmys, founded in 1946 — and the Academy that inducted Chuck Lorre into its Hall of Fame in March 2012.
- Tencent
The Shenzhen conglomerate behind WeChat and QQ, the world's largest games publisher by revenue, and a sprawling portfolio of minority stakes — from Riot Games to a 5% holding in Afterpay.
- Tengo Project
Small development team within Natsume Atari, made up of veteran 1990s-era developers, known for restoring and remastering the studio's own classic games with redrawn pixel art and expanded rosters.
- Thales Group
Europe's largest defence-technology group — radars, missiles and avionics built by a €22B French conglomerate steered by two blocking shareholders: the French state and Dassault Aviation.
- The A.V. Club: the Onion-born culture site that outlived print
Culture publication born in The Onion's back pages in 1993 — a non-satirical home for film, TV, music, and book criticism — sold by G/O Media to Paste Media in 2024 after three decades online.
- The Epoch Times
Falun Gong-backed international newspaper that became a major pro-Trump publisher before its finances imploded: in 2026 its former CFO pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder about $67 million in fraud proceeds.
- The Estate of Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson's estate: $3.5B earned since 2009 through the $750M Sony/ATV and $600M Sony catalog sales — and co-producer of the 2026 biopic Michael.
- The Hill
The Washington political news outlet founded in 1994 by Jerry Finkelstein and founding publisher Martin Tolchin — a father-to-son family dynasty sold to Nexstar Media Group for $130 million in 2021, and the paper whose Capitol Hill reporting routinely moves Washington's news cycle.
- The White House
U.S. presidential residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., designed from a 1792 competition won by Irish-born architect James Hoban and occupied since John Adams in 1800; in September 2026 its revocation of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico press credentials was blocked by a federal judge.
- This Week (ABC)
ABC's Sunday-morning political affairs program since 1981; the March 2024 interview that triggered ABC's $16M Trump defamation settlement, anchored by George Stephanopoulos with Martha Raddatz and Jonathan Karl.
- ThreatLocker
The Orlando zero-trust security company built on a default-deny thesis — founded in 2017 after cyber threats hit the founders' children's school — that reached nearly $500 million in funding with a $190 million Series F in 2026.
- Thrive Capital
New York venture capital firm founded by Joshua Kushner, built on few, very large, concentrated bets — from Instagram and Stripe to leading OpenAI's $6.6 billion 2024 round — and a backer of Anysphere's Series C and Series D.
- TIME
American news magazine founded in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden; owned personally by Marc Benioff since 2018 and publisher of the annual Person of the Year, most recently naming the "Architects of AI" for 2025.
- TKO Group Holdings
Public sports-and-entertainment company (NYSE: TKO) formed September 12, 2023 by Endeavor's combination of UFC and WWE at a $21.4 billion enterprise value. It now also owns IMG, On Location, and PBR, and in 2025 signed landmark media-rights deals with Paramount ($1.1B/yr) and ESPN ($325M/yr).
- TOA Technologies
Field-service management SaaS founded in 2003, backed by Intel Capital and TCV, acquired by Oracle on July 31, 2014 for an undisclosed sum — a strike at Salesforce in the "battle for field service," with its dispatch algorithms folded into Oracle's cloud.
- Tornado Cash
Tornado Cash is a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer on Ethereum whose smart contracts were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2022 and removed from the sanctions list in March 2025, after a federal appeals court held that immutable smart contracts are not sanctionable "property."
- Tourism 4.0
A Slovenian tourism innovation initiative launched by the technology company Arctur in 2018, described by Slovenia's SPIRIT agency as the country's largest tourism research-and-development partnership.
- Trinity Films: the UK distributor behind Trinity X and The Bunny Game
Trinity Films, the UK independent distributor co-directed by Mark Sandell, launched the genre label Trinity X at Cannes 2011 — and saw its flagship acquisition, The Bunny Game, refused classification by the BBFC that October.
- TRON Foundation
Nonprofit steward of the TRON blockchain, one of the world's largest stablecoin networks; founder Justin Sun stepped away in December 2021, and the SEC dropped its fraud case against the foundation in March 2026.
- TRT (Turkish Radio and Television Corporation)
Turkey's national public broadcaster (est. 1964): roughly 18 TV channels in 41 languages, a U.S.-registered foreign agent since March 2020, and the producer of the 2010 documentary that made the Ayla story public.
- Trump International, Vietnam
A $1.5 billion luxury golf and residential complex under development in Hung Yen province, Vietnam, the Trump Organization's first branded project in the country, developed in partnership with Vietnamese entrepreneur Dang Thanh Tam's Kinh Bac City Development Holding Corporation.
- The Trump Organization
Family business conglomerate of Donald Trump, run since 2017 by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump; its income jumped 17-fold to $864 million in the first half of 2026 on crypto ventures, even as its civil-fraud penalty was vacated in 2025.
- Truth Social
Donald Trump's social platform (launched 2022) and the flagship product of Nasdaq-listed Trump Media — a company that pivoted into a bitcoin treasury strategy, a Crypto.com rewards alliance, and paid API access to Trump's own posts.
- Turkish Airlines
Turkey's flag carrier, founded in 1933, flies to more countries than any other airline. State-backed and state-linked, its airport moves, Oscar-campaign sponsorships, and dual Airbus–Boeing mega-orders make it an instrument of Turkish foreign policy as much as a commercial carrier.
- Turning Point USA
Conservative nonprofit founded in 2012 by 18-year-old Charlie Kirk and mentor Bill Montgomery to organize students on campuses. It became a national political network; after Kirk's 2025 assassination, his widow Erika Kirk became CEO.
- TV Guide
The listings magazine whose Fall Preview issues accidentally archived America's changing prejudices — from an all-white 1953 to 2014's Transparent — and which was sold for $1 in 2008 while its patents, the real value, stayed behind.
- Two Trees Management
A privately held, self-financed Brooklyn real-estate developer founded in 1968 by David Walentas, known for the decades-long redevelopment of DUMBO and the multibillion-dollar Domino Sugar Refinery redevelopment in Williamsburg — as well as a 421-a tax-abatement dispute at 125 Court Street and
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
The only federal appeals court where 'en banc' means eleven judges picked by lot — a lottery that once let a 7–4 minority uphold a Trump-era abortion rule, and once reversed a headline-grabbing order against the VA.
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
The largest of the thirteen federal courts of appeals, created by Congress in 1891 with 29 authorized judgeships today; the court where Amir Ali clerked for Judge Raymond C. Fisher in 2011–2012 before his Supreme Court of Canada clerkship.
- U.S. Cyber Command
America's digital combatant command ran a record 8,000 missions in 2025 — the same year its chief reportedly ordered a pause on offensive cyber operations against Russia, a contradiction no standard reference profile leads with.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The federal housing department, created September 9, 1965 by merging five agencies: its first chief, Robert Weaver, was the first African-American cabinet secretary in U.S. history; it has since insured over 44 million home mortgages.
- U.S. Department of the Treasury
The federal government's finance department, created by Congress in 1789 and first led by Alexander Hamilton: it collects federal taxes through the IRS, manages the national debt, and enforces economic sanctions through OFAC. Secretary Scott Bessent has led it since January 2025.
- U.S. Senate
The 100-member upper chamber of the U.S. Congress: two senators per state serving six-year staggered terms, with the powers to confirm nominees, ratify treaties, and try impeachments. Republicans hold the majority in the 119th Congress.
- U.S. Supreme Court
The nation's highest court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts; its October 2025 term struck down Trump's tariff regime and birthright-citizenship order while expanding presidential removal power, and its shadow docket has decided 32 emergency applications since January 2025.
- UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship)
The world's leading mixed martial arts promotion — founded in 1993, bought for $2M by the Fertittas and Dana White in 2001, sold for ~$4B in 2016, folded into TKO in 2023, and now streaming its full U.S. schedule on Paramount in a $7.7B deal.
- UK AI Security Institute
The UK government's AI evaluation body — founded in 2023 as the world's first AI Safety Institute, renamed in 2025, testing frontier models against cyber and national-security risks; its August 2026 report documented agents attempting real-world attacks during cyber tests.
- UK Parliament
The United Kingdom's bicameral legislature at Westminster, pairing the elected House of Commons with the appointed House of Lords. On January 20, 2026, U.S. Speaker Mike Johnson became the first sitting House Speaker to address it, pitching his visit as a mission to "calm the waters" with Europe.
- UN Security Council
The UN body with primary responsibility for international peace and security, and the only UN organ whose resolutions bind all member states. Its 15 members include five permanent veto holders. It held its first AI meeting in July 2023 and heard AI chief executives again in September 2026.
- UNESCO
UNESCO is the United Nations' agency for education, science, culture, communication and information, headquartered in Paris, best known for its World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage programmes.
- The United Methodist Church
More than 7,600 American congregations — a quarter of U.S. United Methodist churches — walked out between 2019 and 2023 over LGBTQ inclusion; the delegates who remained then voted overwhelmingly in May 2024 to repeal the church's half-century of bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriage.
- United Nations
International organization founded in 1945 with 193 Member States, headquartered in New York. In November 2025 a U.S.-hosted event on its premises saw Nicki Minaj speak on Nigerian Christians; in September 2026, UNGA week in New York framed the Abraham Accords' revival.
- United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nebraska
The federal bankruptcy court for the state of Nebraska, with courthouses in Lincoln and Omaha. Two authorized bankruptcy judgeships since 1986 — currently Chief Judge Thomas L. Saladino (Omaha) and Judge Brian S. Kruse (Lincoln). Its docket included the 2005 Acceptance Insurance group filings.
- United States Department of State
The oldest U.S. executive department, created in 1789 — once the office that ran the mint, issued patents and took the census, now the country's foreign ministry, undergoing its largest overhaul in decades under Secretary of State Marco Rubio in 2025.
- United States Department of the Interior
The U.S. federal department created in 1849 that manages most federal public lands, national parks, wildlife refuges and tribal trust responsibilities — now led by Doug Burgum and at the centre of the Greater Chaco leasing dispute.
- United States Golf Association
The USGA was founded in 1894 after a furious golfer denounced two rival 'national championships' — John Updike later quipped it was created, like the Church of England, to ease one man's dissatisfactions.
- UnitedHealth Group
The nation's largest health insurer: UnitedHealth Group prepaid AARP a $9.06 billion royalty advance in 2024 — about 31 times AARP's annual member dues — while facing unresolved DOJ criminal and civil probes of its Medicare billing.
- UnitedHealthcare
The insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group: 49.8 million members, $344.9 billion in 2025 revenue, and the underwriter behind every AARP-branded Medicare plan — sold under an exclusive license backed by a $9.06 billion advance.
- Universal Pictures
Film studio founded in 1912, flagship of NBCUniversal's film group; ran international distribution of the $1B Michael Jackson biopic in a record $5B year.
- Unusual Machines
Orlando-based maker of small-drone components, listed on NYSE American as UMAC. A Red Cat spinout that went public in February 2024, it named Donald Trump Jr. to its advisory board in November 2024 — then its CEO spent months insisting the company doesn't mix with the government.
- Upstart Holdings
An AI lending platform whose CEO-owned regulatory approval from the CFPB — terminated in 2022 at the company's own request — bookends a boom-and-bust arc from a $20 IPO to a roughly 90% stock collapse.
- USAID
U.S. foreign aid agency created in 1961 and made a separate statutory agency by Congress in 1998; in 2025 the Trump administration dismantled it, folding surviving programs into the State Department.
- USAuto Holdings
Privately held Delaware holding company for USAuto Insurance Company — a Tennessee-based non-standard auto insurer. Liberté Investors agreed to acquire it for $76 million cash plus stock in December 2003; the merger closed April 30, 2004, creating First Acceptance Corporation.
- USRowing
USRowing — the United States Rowing Association — is the national governing body for rowing in the U.S., heir to the country's first sports governing body, founded in 1872, and steward of Olympic crews that once won every men's eight final for 36 years.
- AS Valentigney
A French amateur football club founded by Peugeot factory workers in 1920 whose run to the 1926 Coupe de France final directly inspired the Peugeot family to found FC Sochaux — now a Ligue 1 club — two years later.
- Vanity Fair
Condé Nast's American culture-and-politics magazine, founded 1913, folded 1936, revived 1983. In Sept 2026 Chris Whipple's "God And Vance At Yale" carried Carlson's claim that Trump ordered the Epstein-files cover-up. Mark Guiducci became global editorial director in June 2025.
- Variety
Entertainment trade publication founded in 1905, owned by Penske Media since 2012 — and the originator of the Michael biopic's reshoot exclusive.
- Vayu Aerospace & Defence Review
Indian aerospace and defence journal founded by Pushpindar Singh Chopra in October 1974 as Vayuyan; inaugurated by India's Defence Minister on 7 November 1974, it has published bi-monthly from New Delhi for 50 years without missing an edition.
- Vegalta Sendai
Vegalta Sendai is a Japanese professional football club from Sendai in Japan's J2 League. Founded in 1988 as Tohoku Electric Power's company team, it became a national symbol of recovery after the 2011 earthquake, finished J1 runners-up in 2012, and reached the 2024 promotion playoff final.
- VentureBeat
American technology news site founded in 2006 by Matt Marshall after SiliconBeat, grown on events and advertising, and refocused on enterprise AI after spinning out GamesBeat in 2025.
- Verizon
One of America's largest telecom companies, formed in 2000 from the $60 billion Bell Atlantic–GTE merger; ranked second-lowest on Accountable.US's 2022 democracy scorecard, dropped from the Dow Jones in June 2026, and now refocusing on wireless and fiber under CEO Dan Schulman.
- Vibe Capital
Solo general-partner venture fund founded by Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal that backs pre-seed and seed founders, especially in emerging markets, raising $70 million before shrinking the fund by about 43% in 2023.
- Vimeo
The video platform founded in 2004 that won filmmakers with HD quality, pivoted to business video software, went public via an IAC spin-off in 2021 at about $8.5 billion — and was taken private by Bending Spoons for $1.38 billion in 2025.
- Virtustream
Enterprise cloud/IaaS company founded in 2009 by Rodney Rogers and Kevin Reid, acquired by EMC for $1.2 billion in July 2015 — then passed to Dell Technologies via the $67 billion Dell–EMC merger 14 months later, a company bought twice without moving.
- Visa
Visa is not a bank, issues no cards and lends no money — it is a toll road for global payments, in its own SEC filing's words. That network dominance is exactly what the DOJ attacked twice: the blocked $5.3B Plaid deal and the 2024 debit-monopolization suit.
- Viz.ai, Inc.
AI-powered disease detection and care-coordination company founded in 2016 whose Viz LVO stroke-triage software won the first FDA De Novo clearance for AI stroke triage in February 2018 and reached a $1.2 billion valuation in 2022.
- Vulcan Elements
North Carolina rare-earth magnet startup founded in 2023 whose $620 million Pentagon loan — the largest the Office of Strategic Capital ever made — drew scrutiny after ProPublica found White House aide Peter Navarro initiated the deal months after Donald Trump Jr.'s venture firm invested.
- Wales Book of the Year
An annual literary award run by Literature Wales since 2004, with twelve prizes across parallel English- and Welsh-language categories in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and children's writing, sharing a £14,000 prize fund.
- The Wall Street Journal
America's business paper of record since 1889: the $5 billion 2007 News Corp takeover, the 1996 hard paywall, the iconic hedcuts — and the paper that two heads of government tried to sue into silence (Najib Razak in 2015, Donald Trump in 2025–26) and stood by its reporting both times.
- Wallace and Gromit's Grand Appeal
Bristol Children's Hospital's charity since 1995, fronted by Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: it raised £12 million toward the new children's hospital, then around £90 million more, and its history carries one dark footnote — a £9,500 theft by a man who later stole far more from Article 25.
- Warner Bros.
The century-old Hollywood studio, founded by the Warner brothers in 1923, that in 2026 became the prize in one of the largest media mergers in history — Paramount Skydance's $110 billion takeover, approved in October 2026 after beating Netflix's bid.
- Warner Bros. Discovery
The American media company formed in 2022 from the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger; after a Netflix-vs-Paramount bidding war in late 2025, its board agreed in February 2026 to Paramount Skydance's $31-a-share offer, with Kushner-linked financing exiting the deal along the way.
- Warner Music Singapore
Singapore recorded-music arm of Warner Music Group, operating since 1978 (originally WEA Records); led by Gerald Ang since 2020, it signed a 2023 exclusive worldwide distribution pact with Cross Ratio Entertainment and sits inside Warner's ANZSEA/GLIIDE regional strategy.
- The Washington Post
Founded 1877, rescued from bankruptcy by Eugene Meyer in 1933, and the paper whose Watergate reporting forced Richard Nixon's resignation — now owned by Jeff Bezos and being downsized: in February 2026 it fired more than 300 journalists, leaving a newsroom smaller than the one Bezos bought in 2013.
- Well
WELL Health Technologies, the TSX-listed clinic consolidator, through the lens independent journalism actually covers it: a record M&A spree, a competition investigation into its AI-software deals, and a US billing probe.
- Westpac
Australia's oldest bank — founded in Sydney in 1817 as the Bank of New South Wales, renamed Westpac in the 1982 merger with the Commercial Bank of Australia, now the country's second-largest bank by assets and a big-four bank reshaped by the St George merger and a record AUSTRAC penalty.
- WeTransfer
The Amsterdam file-transfer service founded in 2009 that made sending big files as simple as sharing a link — bootstrapped, briefly IPO-bound, then sold to Bending Spoons in 2024, which cut about 75% of its staff.
- White House Correspondents' Association
The nonprofit representing the White House press corps since 1914; it condemned the 2018 suspension of Jim Acosta's press pass and lost its century-old control of the presidential press pool in February 2025.
- WilmerHale
Law firm formed by a 2004 Boston–D.C. merger that a March 2025 Trump executive order targeted over Robert Mueller's past employment; a federal judge permanently struck the order down, and Attorney General Todd Blanche once practiced there as a partner.
- The Witkoff Group
Real estate investment and development firm founded by Steve Witkoff in 1997, now led by his sons Alex (CEO) and Zach (EVP); owner of trophy assets including the Woolworth Building and the Park Lane Hotel, it drew divestment scrutiny after Witkoff became Trump's Middle East envoy.
- WME-IMG
The 2014–2017 name for the talent-and-sports conglomerate formed when William Morris Endeavor bought IMG for $2.4 billion; it led the roughly $4 billion UFC purchase in 2016, then rebranded as Endeavor in 2017.
- WNYC Studios
The podcast division of New York Public Radio, launched in 2015 and home to Radiolab, On the Media and Death, Sex & Money; its mini-podcast 10 Things That Scare Me captured Trisha Hope's fullest biographical account in February 2019.
- Workfront
The Utah enterprise work-management company — founded 2001 as AtTask, rebranded 2015 — that scaled to 3,000 customers and 1 million users before Adobe bought it for $1.5 billion in 2020 and folded it into Experience Cloud as Adobe Workfront.
- World Liberty Financial
The Trump-family DeFi venture that raised $550 million in non-tradeable tokens, then quietly concentrated control and 75% of revenues in the Trump family through a January 2025 fine-print change — and by 2026 was suing and being sued by its biggest backer.
- World Nuclear Transport Institute
London-based industry body for the transport of nuclear and radioactive materials, founded in 1998. It writes industry standards, represents members at the IMO and IAEA, and in 2025-26 stepped up with a new strategy, a first annual conference and a maritime-nuclear pact.
- World Trade Organization
Geneva-based body setting the rules of trade between 166 member states. Led by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, it administers trade agreements and settles disputes — though its appeals court has been frozen since 2019 — and in 2025 brought its first environmental deal, on fisheries subsidies, into force.
- WWE
The global leader in sports entertainment, based in Stamford, Connecticut — home of WrestleMania and weekly programming watched around the world. Since September 2023 it has been part of TKO Group Holdings alongside the UFC, ending the McMahon family's majority control.
- Wyoming Water Research Center
Wyoming's federal water-research institute from 1965 until its closure in 1998 — after which the state's NIWR program landed on federal probation and was rebuilt from scratch as the Wyoming Water Research Program.
- X
Social media platform bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded from Twitter to X in 2023; it became the home of Tucker Carlson's independent show after his Fox News departure, was acquired by xAI in 2025, and was folded into SpaceX's $1.25 trillion merger in 2026.
- Xerox
The American corporation founded as Haloid in 1906 whose 914 copier made "Xerox" a household word — and whose copier profits funded PARC, the lab whose inventions built Apple and Adobe.
- Xerox PARC
The Xerox research lab founded in Palo Alto in 1970 that invented the Alto, the graphical interface, the laser printer and Ethernet — and whose printing-language work became Adobe's PostScript.
- XTEND
Israeli drone company founded in 2018 that pivoted from VR gaming to defense after October 7, 2023; its human-guided XOS drone platform went public in September 2026 through a $1.5 billion merger backed by Eric Trump and Unusual Machines, the drone maker advised by Donald Trump Jr.
- Y Combinator
American startup accelerator founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris, known for its seed-funding model and Demo Day, and led since 2023 by CEO Garry Tan.
- Young Money Entertainment
The record label Lil Wayne founded as his own imprint under Cash Money Records, which signed Nicki Minaj in 2009 on an unusual deal letting her keep her 360 rights — and became the launchpad for two of the decade's biggest rap careers.
- Zabalaza Theatre Festival
An annual Cape Town theatre-development festival run by the Baxter Theatre Centre since 2011, developing community practitioners from the Western Cape through mini-festivals, skills workshops and mentorship, staging around 50 new works each March and awarding winning productions a professional
- ZACH Theatre
Austin's oldest theatre company, founded 1932; a year-round professional producing theatre staging regional premieres, family programming, and large-scale arts education.
- Zapier
The automation platform that reached a $5 billion valuation on just $1.2 million of venture funding — remote from day one, profitable since 2014, and valued through a secondary share sale that put no new cash in the company's own coffers.
- Zee News: Hindi news channel of Zee Media and the Essel Group
Zee News is a Hindi-language television news channel launched in 1999, owned by Zee Media Corporation of the Subhash Chandra family's Essel Group — a ratings leader in Hindi news whose record includes repeated broadcast-regulator findings against its coverage.
- Zip Co
Australian buy-now-pay-later company that reached the ASX via a 2009 reverse takeover before it was founded in 2013, and withdrew from New Zealand in 2026 to concentrate on Australia and the United States.
- Zscaler, Inc.
The zero-trust cloud-security company founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry — his fifth security startup — whose March 2018 Nasdaq debut at $16 popped 106% on day one.
- Zuffa, LLC
Zuffa, LLC is the Las Vegas holding company the Fertitta brothers formed in January 2001 to buy the UFC for $2 million; it survived the 2016 sale and the 2023 TKO merger as the legal entity now called TKO Operating Company, and its name was revived for TKO's 2025 boxing venture.
- Zurich Australia
The Australian arm of Swiss insurer Zurich, built into the country's largest retail life insurer through a 2016–2019 acquisition spree of bank-owned life assets — now pushing back into personal home insurance.