Who is Charles Koch?
Who Is?
iHeartRadio + NowThis
4.1 • 803 Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2020
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
A billionaire among billionaires, Charles Koch is one of the most powerful men in the world. By all accounts a brilliant businessman, Charles inherited his father’s company when Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House, and, over decades, has transformed privately held Koch Industries into a massive multinational conglomerate with annual revenues of well over a hundred billion dollars. Since the 1970s, he’s not only reinvested that money in his company, but funneled it into American politics, financing ideas, organizations, and politicians, which together present a carefully engineered attempt to dismantle the regulatory state, and perhaps government itself. And he’s been very successful: Charles Koch, more than anyone else, may epitomize the pervasive influence of money on American democracy. On the final episode of the first season of Who Is, Sean Morrow explores the biography of Charles Koch, and the history of the Koch Network, for a look at how the very, very wealthy seek to control the political process, and what the rest of us can do about it.
- Amy Goodman, Host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now!
- Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His most recent book is State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States -- and the Nation
- Christopher Leonard, Author of Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Nothing is more powerful for improving yourself than reading, and few things are more enjoyable. |
| 0:06.9 | Besides the information you gain from reading a good book, you are without even knowing it, |
| 0:13.4 | building the capability to express yourself. |
| 0:16.9 | That is not Mr. Rogers, but rather a secretive megabillionaire named Charles Koch, doing |
| 0:25.4 | an advertisement for reading in 1995, a PSA for the Wichita Public Library. |
| 0:33.6 | But Charles is also the CEO of a privately held company with annual revenues of over $100 billion. |
| 0:41.0 | Charles Coke is an oil and gas magnate, a billionaire who has used his wealth to threaten democracy. |
| 0:49.3 | He is an incredibly effective, both businessman and political leader who's had a significant |
| 0:55.4 | effect on politics in this country. |
| 0:58.5 | Charles Koch is one of the most important business figures of our time because of the size |
| 1:08.6 | of what he's created economically and politically and the influence he's had. |
| 1:12.7 | A secret of billionaire using his wealth to influence American democracy, |
| 1:17.1 | overseeing a massive network of other billionaire political spending, |
| 1:20.6 | with connections to almost every other person we've covered on this show, |
| 1:24.7 | sounds like a great season finale. |
| 1:27.9 | So, who is Charles Koch? |
| 1:35.5 | I'm Sean Morrow, and this is Who Is? |
| 1:38.9 | The podcast from Now This, where we examine power by telling the stories of people who have it. |
| 1:46.0 | This week, Charles Koch, CEO of Coke Industries, the second largest privately held company in America, |
| 1:53.3 | and the mastermind behind the Coke network. |
| 1:57.6 | In American politics, the name Coke means power, means money, means influence. But, while |
| 2:05.6 | some people are born into immense wealth, that doesn't always translate into immense power. |
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