Publix is an American supermarket chain that was founded in 1930 by George W. Jenkins. The founder named his new company after a cinema chain named Publix Theatres Corporation that was in the process of shutting down. The first Publix supermarket opened in Winter Haven, Florida, with another following suit in 1935. Despite the Great Depression, Jenkins’s stores were financially successful. One particular Publix store also had the distinction of being the first to be fully air-conditioned, while others pioneered the use of so-called “electric-eye” automatic doors which were considered revolutionary in the 1940s. The chain is one of only a few to operate more than 1,000 stores in the United States and employs approximately 227,000 people across the southeast of the country. Publix also has a rather unique ownership structure.
Employee ownership
Publix is now the largest employee-owned grocery store chain in the United States, with employees owning about 80% of the company.
This arrangement harks back to the founding days of the company when Jenkins established an employee ownership and profit-sharing scheme.
Such was his reverence that before his death in 1996, employees affectionally referred to him as “Mr. George”.
While shares in the company do exist, they are only available for purchase by employees, board members, and individuals in the Jenkins family.
Publix is a private company and does not disclose how much its employees hold.
Publix employees tend to be paid less than their counterparts at Walmart or Costco, but the company has a strong corporate culture because most are happy to work toward the success of the company and be compensated in shares and quarterly dividends.
To that end, the company sets the share price each quarter and requires employees to sell back issued shares if they want to cash out.
Publix is an American supermarket chain that was founded in 1930 by George W. Jenkins. The company has a rather unique ownership structure where employees are the majority shareholders.
Publix is now the largest employee-owned grocery store chain in the United States, with employees owning about 80% of the company. Publix is a private company that sets a share price and pays dividends to employees every quarter. Exact figures are not disclosed, but some long-term employees are likely to be millionaires on paper.
The Jenkins Family owns the remaining 20% of the company, with many occupying senior management roles at one time or another. Like his employees, CEO Todd Jones earns a salary that might be considered meager by his peers but the company is no doubt better off as a result.
The most prominent institutional shareholders are mutual funds BlackRock and The Vanguard Group, with 2.7% and 3.1%, respectively. Larry Page and Sergey Brin together have 51% of the voting power. Other individual shareholders comprise John Doerr (1.5%), venture capitalist and early investor in Google, and CEO, Sundar Pichai. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has 4.2% voting power.
Mark Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder of the company. Zuckerberg retains ownership and control of the company. Like Google, Facebook has issued two common stocks, Class A and Class B. The holders of Class B common stocks are entitled to ten votes per share, and holders of our Class A common stocks are entitled to one vote per share. Mark Zuckerberg has a voting power of 56.9%; he’s the main decision-maker.
As of 2021, major Apple shareholders comprised Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway with 5.56% of the company’s stock. Followed by other individual shareholders like Tim Cook, CEO of Apple with over 3.3 million shares, Artur Levinson, chairman of Apple, with over 4.5 million shares, and others.
With 64,588,418 shares, Jeff Bezos is the major individual investor. Owning 12.7% of the company. Other top individual investors comprise Amazon’s CEO Andy Jessy, with 94,729 shares. Top institutional investors comprise mutual funds like The Vanguard Group (6.6% ownership) and BlackRock (5.7% ownership).
Major shareholders comprise co-founder Bill Gates, who stepped down from the company’s board in 2020, which is why these shares are no longer publicly reported. In 2019, Gates still owned a stake of 103 million stocks, which accounted for 1.34% of the company’s ownership (worth over $23 billion in September 2022). Other individual shareholders comprise Satya Nadella, the company’s CEO, Brad Smith (former president), Jean-Philippe Courtois (EVP), and Amy Hood (former CFO).
By 2022, most of Tesla’s shares are still owned by Elon Musk, among the company’s co-founders and the CEO. Elon Musk is the top individual investor, with a 23.5% stake in the company, equivalent to over 244 million shares. Musk is followed by Lawrence Ellison (founder of Oracle), with a 1.5% company stake. Ellison also sits on Tesla’s board. And Antonio Gracias, among the company’s first investors, has over 1.6 million shares. Other institutional investors and mutual funds like The Vanguard Group (6%), Blackrock (5.1%), and Capital Ventures International also have a good chunk of the company’s stocks.
PayPal was first founded in 1998; it was called Confinity (among its founders was Peter Thiel); later, it merged with X.com, its major competitor, founded by Elon Musk (which would become known for other companies like Tesla and SpaceX). From this merger, PayPal was born. In 2002, PayPal was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion. eBay spun off PayPal in 2015, which would be listed as an independent entity. Today PayPal owns brands like Braintree, Venmo, Xoom, and iZettle.
Netflix’s largest individual shareholder is Reed Hastings, co-founder, and CEO of the company, with a 1.7% stake, valued at over $1.8 billion in 2022. Netflix runs a subscription-based business model that generated $29.6 billion in revenues, and it had over 221 million global members in 2021. Netflix’s business model runs only premium content on its platform, driven by its Netflix Originals shows. Netflix is also building an ad-supported version.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet technology company owning several content platforms worldwide (Douyin, Toutiao, Xigua Video, Helo, Lark, Babe). Bytedance passed the $300 billion private market valuation by 2022, making around $58 billion in revenue in 2022, over $4 billion from TikTok.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory that transitioned into a for-profit organization in 2019, which comprised an entity called OpenAI LP and the non-profit parent foundation OpenAI. The lab, which was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and various others, has a core focus on the development of friendly AI that benefits society as a whole. Yet now has primarily evolved as a capped-for-profit entity with an exclusive commercial license to Microsoft.
Balenciaga is a Spanish luxury fashion house that was founded in 1917 by designer Cristóbal Balenciaga. The company was initially located in the Basque region of Spain before the civil war in that country forced Balenciaga to move his operations to Paris in 1937. Kering acquired a 91% stake in Balenciaga in 2001 for an undisclosed sum. The French multinational then purchased the rights to the perfume brand which likely made them the sole owner.
Gucci is owned by the french holding Kering, which completed its buyout of Gucci in an $8.8 billion deal in 2004. Today Gucci is the group’s largest brand, generating over $9.7 billion in 2021 on a $17.64 billion group revenue. Thus representing over 55% of Kering’s Group revenues in 2021.
Louis Vuitton is owned by LVMH, among the largest luxury goods companies in the world. With over $53 billion in revenues by 2019. It owns 75 brands in six different sectors. Some of these brands comprise Louis Vuitton, Bulgari, Christian Dior, Fendi, Loro Piana, Celine, Givenchy, Kenzo, Berluti, and Rimowa. LVMH is owned by the Arnault family (Bernard Arnault, the CEO, is among the wealthiest men on earth) with a 47.44% ownership stake and over 63.5% of the voting power. Thus asserting a tight control over the Luxury Empire.
Adidas is a German multinational best known as a designer and manufacturer of sportswear and related accessories. It was founded in 1924 in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, Germany, and did not take on the Adidas name until 1949. The new company, known today as Adidas AG, is the holding company for the Adidas Group and the sole owner of Adidas. Some of the company’s largest shareholders include: Groupe Bruxelles Lambert SA (7.6%), Nassef Sawiris (3.3%), and Norges Bank Investment Management (2.8%).
Burger King is an American multinational chain of fast-food restaurants that is headquartered in Miami, Florida. The first Burger King restaurant, then known as Insta-Burger King, was opened in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1953 by Keith Cramer and his stepfather Matthew Burns. Burger King Worldwide merged with the Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons in 2014. This precipitated the formation of parent company Restaurant Brands International, which is part-owned by former Burger King owner 3G Capital.
Marvel, formerly known as Marvel Entertainment LLC, is an American entertainment company based in New York City that is best known for its comic books and film, TV, and video game franchises. The Marvel we know today is the result of a merger between toy subsidiary Toy Biz (now Marvel Toys) and Marvel Entertainment Group.
Yeezy was a fashion brand that arose from a collaboration between German sportswear company Adidas and entrepreneur and music artist Kanye West. While Yeezy inspired a multitude of other brands in the fashion industry and earned revenue in the billions, the collaboration between West and Adidas ended abruptly in October 2022.
Ferrari’s top individual shareholders include Exor (the Holding company of the Agnelli Family, also the owner of FIAT Chrysler) with 24% of its shares, Piero Ferrari (son of Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the company), and other institutional investors like BlackRock and T. Rowe Price Associates. Ferrari runs a car luxury business model famous for its iconic models, which in 2019 made over €3.7 billion in revenues ($4.3 billion) in sales.
The major shareholder for Volkswagen is Porsche Automobil Holding SE, a company investing in various automakers. This is the holding of the Porsche family, who is the primary shareholder of Volkswagen, with a 31.3% ownership stake in the company and a 53.1% voting power. Volkswagen is an automaker empire with brands that comprise Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Porsche, Bentley, and Ducati.
Lamborghini is an Italian luxury sports car manufacturer that was founded in 1963 by manufacturing magnate Ferruccio Lamborghini. Since that time, ownership of the firm has changed several times. Another financial crisis in the late 1990s saw Lamborghini sold to Volkswagen through its subsidiary Audi AG. The subsidiary remains the owner of Lamborghini today.
The iconic brand Bugatti, founded by Ettore Bugatti in 1909, is now owned by the German’s Volkswagen, one of the world’s largest automakers. Other brands in the Volkswagen family comprise Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bentley, and Ducati. As a high-performance car maker, Bugatti only sells a limited number of cars each year. Indeed, in 2019, Volkswagen sold 82 Bugatti, compared to 76 Bugatti in 2018.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
