In this article we will see 2 different answers from 2 different people so you can understand better.
1-The largest company owned by one person in the world is Dyson.
Sir James Dyson owns 100% of Dyson.
In 2017 its revenue is $3.12b a year, however its profit is more than $900m.
Dyson has 7,000 + employees
A company’s size, market cap or value is not about much revenue it makes, the most important is:
a) How much profit is makes.
b) What assets is owns and what they are worth, (land, factories, intellectual property, cash, etc.)
By every measure, revenue, profit, asset value, Dyson is the largest 100% owned private company.
![](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b8808ac45e9d55abe980b96107b8abd8.webp)
Above: Here he is with some of his inventions.
![](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-1bba83aef507d05ad65bb3cfa038f79a.webp)
Above: Here he is with the Queen.
![](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9e679182d2dec30b292f233cc0d0ba98.webp)
Above: One of his houses
![](https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0e7f2b6525be9bba7b3d59b05d80241a.webp)
Above: Another one of his houses
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2-It’s hard to say the largest companies that are actually owned by one person because once companies get to a decent scale there’s almost certainly going to be equity given to (or technically bought for tax purposes) by key employees. I used to work in private equity primarily acquiring lower middle market closely held business (EV’s from $100–500MM), either from entrepreneurs who wanted an exit or from second and third generations of families where no one wanted to run it, and even drawing from the entrepreneur started businesses (and we didn’t do much tech so we’re not talking VC backed) I can’t really think of more than a handful of companies that I looked at over the years that had one single owner. And while I didn’t do this many deals I must have looked at over 1000. Most of the time as you’re growing a company to that scale the capital structure on the equity side will have people slide into it.
The largest company that’s kind of owned by almost one person (like the precision of that sentence?) is Koch Industries. It’s owned by the Koch brothers so it’s not exactly one person, but it almost is, and I think they hold something like 80%-90%. Most larger companies, and not even to the scale of the Kochs, are going to end up passing to heirs because it takes a long time to build a non-tech company to a large scale and that means that founder, even if he/she keeps 100% equity, will end up passing on and leaving it to others and since most people have more than one child, there’s more than one owner.
I know of a lot of wealthy people who own 100% of an entity that invests in multiple holdings so technically they own 100% of the topco and that can be worth a lot in value, but they’ll have dozens of holdings below that where they’re minority investors.
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