Javier Blas, Columnist

Peek Inside America’s Largest Privately Owned Company

Cargill’s business model has worked for 158 years. Follow the money and you’ll see it ain’t broken yet.

September 19, 2023 at 11:00 AM UTC

Javier Blas is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He is coauthor of “The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources.”

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They’re one of America’s richest but least known corporate dynasties: the Cargill-MacMillan family. The source of their billions, the commodity trading giant Cargill Inc., is the largest privately held company in the US by revenue. Quietly, both the company and its owners are enjoying some of their best times ever.

That’s rather counterintuitive. Pandemics, wars, inflation and geopolitical chaos don’t typically make for a good business backdrop. But it’s precisely the treacherous conditions of 2020 to 2023, including supply-chain mayhem and wild price gyrations, that are driving the profitability of the commodity trading industry.