Megacorporation

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"Octan, they make good stuff: Dairy products, TV shows, coffee, surveillance cameras, all history books, voting machines... wait a minute."

– The LEGO Movie

A Megacorporation (aka Mega-corporation, Megacorp, etc) is a very large powerful corporation with a lot of wealth, resources and power. A Foundational pillar of the Cyberpunk genre in particular and often a staple of science fiction in general. A company gets an advantage, buys out the competition and continues to grow unchecked. Hyper Capitalism run amok is a prime motivation for villainy.

Things a Megacorp will have[edit | edit source]

Logos: Megacorps will slap their Logos and various other insignia where-ever they can, be it on the highest of executive offices to nutrient bars fed to low level workers.
Private Armies: Large numbers of armed goons and mercenaries. These guys typically get roflstomped by whatever hero happens to be around at the given moment. May go be the names “Private Military Company” or “Private Security Company”; the former implies that the company are outright mercenaries for hire, something that most governments tend to discourage, but the latter is used more often to suggest that the company is just a bunch of fancy rent-a-cops for when you need protection for particularly sensitive operations or you need to do business in a chaotic environment.
Company Towns: A town where everything is owned by a company. You not only work for the company here, but you also live in company housing, eat at a company canteen, drink at the company bar, shop at a company store, send your kids to a company school, etc. It’s similar to some Big Tech setups in Silicon Valley (like Google or Apple campuses) but darker and more expansive. Usually, you're paid in company scrip (coupons, credit, or vouchers that are only good at company facilities) and the prices are high. Company towns are most commonly set up at resource extraction sites (ie mines, oilfields, etc) that are far away from existing towns. One of the big flaws of company towns is if they're a recession, employees who are laid off or have their hours cut won't be able to afford continuing to live in the town, which can create many problems such as strikes, or having the whole town turn from an extra source of revenue to a massive money pit as what happened to the Pullman Community. Same thing can apply with whole districts (think Special Economic Zones) or colonies (like the old Charter Colonies) and possibly even planets. Extraterritorial jurisdiction is also a possibility where company law, currency, or citizenship is equal to or greater than national equivalents.
Sub-Divisions: A Megacorp will have its fingers in a lot of pies. Often it will try to control as much as its supply chain as possible to reduce costs and it will acquire things it deems useful and are available for buy-out. For example, owning your own logistics company is very useful if you're heavily involved in any sort of commodity or mass manufacturing.
Fixers: People who can sort out issues for a Megacorp that they'd rather not do overtly. This ranges from spying to engineering scandals for their rivals to assassination in the form of wetworks. Usually these are independent contractors and as such deniable assets and employ even more deniable and disposable muscle.
Holding Company: a company whose primary existence is to own stock, but does little actual economic activity on its own. Similar to real-life shell companies, Holding Companies as business entities enable their parent corporation to own a huge variety of different smaller companies, usually by gobbling them up through mergers and acquisitions. If a Megacorp is structured as a pyramid with all the individual businesses at the bottom, the holding company would be at the top. Because of just how monolithic and entangled the chain of business hierarchy can get, it may actually be difficult to find out who owns what or who’s actually in charge - which may be by design as it enables plausible deniability if any wrongdoing is exposed.
Monopoly: what happens when a Megacorp acquires effective control over an entire industry. This is usually bad since no competition means the corporation has no incentive to put out a better product; they’ve captured the market and can do whatever they want with near-impunity. A near-monopoly can exist if only a handful competitors exist but they all agree to coordinate their actions, controlling the market for themselves and keeping any newcomers out, effectively creating an Oligopoly instead.
Lawfare: the MegaCorp’s most common tactic for getting people to do what they want. Lawyers are too expensive for the average person, so they’ll use their own lawyers to threaten you with cease and desist letters / get you to sign a contract full of obscure legalese / force you into a hostile takeover / sue your ass into oblivion, and most people will fold under pressure even if they’re in the right.
Corporate Speak: A Megacorp that's trying to bamboozle the general public/investigators/investors/its own employees will do everything it can to present the image it wants to project, or at the very least, hide its dirty laundry as much as possible. They tend to do this with obfuscating language and meaningless jargon called legalese (which is so mind numbing, you’re better getting a lawyer or political secretary to dissect it for the average joe). Expect any press release to be full of half-truths, buzzwords, and lofty but vague language. This also extends to any creative pursuits, which end up being as inoffensive and soulless as possible.
- In the real world, corporate speak is merely just a way for companies to sound inoffensive so they don't lose customers, because customers are really hard to earn back. It doesn't stop it from sounding annoying and disengenuous though.
Illegal science projects: Megacorp are the future, and thus they will always be making the first step for humanity through the forbidden field of science and technology, without giving a single fuck about human decency and moral compass. To research anything can be costly and time consuming. To please the greedy yet impatient executives and CEO, they would only researching and experimenting if it could results in advancing their products, helping them making more money. However if the person in charge has hobby for science or is a mad scientist, they could treat it as some sort of pet project. The research subjects they've obtained can be illegal as fuck (not that mattered to them since Megacorp are above the law) in order to make some good and fast results at the expense of their humanity (again, they've sold their soul for profit already). With some good connections, they could acquire top tier scientists for their project. No, that's what they WANT you to believe. What megacorp would do instead is to search for those shady backwater science experts who had sold their souls to perfect their crafts and were discharged from many research centers, hospitals and academy for bad conducts. Why the Megacorp would do such thing is that these scientists are in fact genius compared to those aforementioned top graduated snob scientist, who would determined to traverse the forbidden boundaries to seek actual results. The other is that they are considered nobodies in society, and thus nobody would notice them if they've died, and are easy to cover up. Let's not forgetting the fact that the Megacorp were already doing illegal activities to began with, so heads will be popping after the results shown, the less people knew the better. For examples of subjects they could research on, it could be anything from medical (which they do away using human experiments to produce new types of drug, if not to play gods and evolve humanity. See Resident Evil), food (which they would engineer new unhealthy artificial ingredients like corn starch then sold them on market for massive profit), even illegal subjects like weapons (making big money by selling them to war torn countries and the military, or given to their private military for further testing), cloning (fear of salmon extinct so you can't taste them anymore? there's now more of them! but they don't taste the same anymore...).
Lobbyists/Special Interest Groups: Every Megacorp needs its political stooges to give them legitimacy and legal impunity to enact their grand designs. This starts with bypassing laws that are inconvient and ends with corpocratic dominance of government.
Corpos (aka Company Men/Women): Employees who not only work for a company, but are hell-bent on rising through the ranks up the corporate ladder. Some of them are simply skilled, hard working and diligent, others are ruthlessly ambitious, others are workaholics and some have High-RWA personalities who are highly submissive to authority, conventionalist, aggressive and loyal to their faction. Regardless, Corpos make up the middle and much of the upper strata of a megacorps and are highly competitive and dedicated to the cause of their Corporate Overlords. At the very least they have a position of prominence in the Megacorporate hierarchy that is not worth casually discarding and many of them have actual loyalty. Everything from working long hours and meeting targets on time and under budget to proper dress, regular ass-kissing and snitching out dissent is a tool to those ends. Needless to say, there is often attrition. Some don't meet their target figures. Some are the losers in the internal power struggles. Some are fall guys. Others are eliminated on the whims of the executives because the growth in third-quarter was 20% lower than expected. Either way, new Corpos can be recruited to replace them.

IRL Megacorporations[edit | edit source]

The East India Company (EIC): One of the early waves of corporations founded in 1600 to trade with India, the EIC gradually took over the entire Indian Subcontinent until 1858. Of all the IRL example's the EIC is the closest to a fictional megacorp by dint of have a foreign policy of a sort and its own standing army. The East India Company actually had more soldiers than the British Army did. Yes, they're the antagonists for some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
The Railway Giants: Rail travel started in the United States around 1830 with small lines here and there, first going from town to town and then branching out to multiple towns. In order to encourage the buildout, the federal government would grant land adjacent to newly laid rails to the railroads to sell; many towns grew mere from railroad water stops. Gradually the smaller players were bought up by the most successful ones (in particular there was Cornelius Vanderbilt), which had a domino effect. Linking up the networks meant they could not only send goods farther, but cheaper than a mess of little companies could manage. They made a lot of money and had a lot of sway due to how essential they became for trade. Since they also had telegraph lines, they could manage affairs from Maine to Miami to San Diego to Portland.
Standard Oil: Probably the first monopoly that you can name, even if you lived under a rock. Came to dominate the American Petroleum industry under J.D. Rockefeller. Eventually got broken up later in the 20th century when the federal government realized it didn't like corporations having too much power.
Bell Telephone: An ideal example of a natural monopoly, the Bell system was THE telephone company for over a hundred years, as the limitations of technology meant competition was almost impossible until modern computers came along; which they had a hand in creating. In the 1980's, Bell was broken into 8 pieces... which have largely merged back together like a self-repairing machine.
United Fruit Company: Ever wondered how the term "banana republic" came to be? For the first half of the 20th century, one single company dominated the Caribbean and some parts of Latin America to the point of staging coup d'états against the governments which tried to resist their iron grip. Oh, and those insurgents were openly backed up by the CIA and US Navy/Air Force. You know Chiquita brand bananas? Yeah, it's those guys now after some rebranding.
IG Farben: The Megacorp that sided with the Nazis. A chemical company that fueled the Wehrmacht by turning coal into rubber and fuel, as well providing the gas used in the Death Camps, as well as working to death thousands more at their Auschwitz III Chemical Plant.
Disney: Skub depending on who you ask, but Disney is without a doubt one of the largest companies on Earth with wide financial assets. Started as a humble animation studio under an ambitious man, that has evolved in a corporate media giant. Owns one-fifth of the media outlets in the United States.
Vivendi: The second biggest media empire in the world, owns a lot more shit than you think and have sabotaged many of the companies and licenses they bought. You want to know how evil they are? Activision and EA obeys them. Owned by right-wingnut lunatic and complete nepobaby moron Vincent Bolloré, who was humiliated multiple times in the past that he now primarily focuses on his political ventures in France, in which he supports the Far Right and controls a large portion of the media. He tried to sway Valve into completely succumbing into being owned by Vivendi, which backfired spectacularly, meaning they literally have left Steam escape their greedy, greasy hands.
Nestlé: Swiss nutrionist and researcher opens a company to sell his foods and goods... Turns into the single most evil company that ever was. Willingly sabotages their own products, disowns and actively protests against making the access to drinkable water a human right (to which they have succeeded), a board of directors that is so openly racist they make /pol/ cringe, and are essentially the single biggest monopoly on the distribution of sweets, water, milk, and other produce. They're fucking everywhere.
Amazon: Not as skub as Disney. Amazon started as a book delivery service that eventually evolved into general merchandise delivery and has even created a niche as a media provider, having acquired MGM and adapted The Boys and Man in the High Castle into shows. Infamous for their quick delivery times, terrible worker conditions, and are currently under investigation from the state of Illinois for possibly cutting corners on warehouse safety that resulted in a high number of deaths. Also tied for leading provider of fandom lore rape with Disney due to The Rings of Power, and now considered a potential threat to Warhammer 40,000 since they're the one bankrolling Cavill's pet-project.
Walmart: The brick & mortar version of Amazon; currently the largest non-government employer in the world. The embodiment of naked capitalism, sometimes with actual naked people. Like Amazon, they're notorious for strong-arming their suppliers and mistreating their employees. Unlike Amazon they also sell groceries, meaning they can neglect their perishables as well.
Japanese Zaibatsus/Keiretsus and Korean Chaebols: The most prominent examples of Asian megacorps, being vast networks of companies headed by single families or a cliques thereof rather than any board of directors. Name any major Japanese or Korean brand (Mitsubishi, Toyota, Samsung, Hyundai, etc) that has international fame, and it’s most likely one of these. Fun fact: Mitsubish, Mitsui, and Sumitomo grew out of former Samurai clans, surviving the Meiji reformation due to their connections as military suppliers. The Allied occupation wanted to dismantle them but with the cold war starting they proved too damn useful to get rid of.
The Tech Giants:
The Military Industrial Complex:
ITV: One of the most well known companies in Britain, they have gained acclaim for beloved programmes having cult followings, and being behind great TV dramas. However, in recent times, they acquired minority stakes in independent production companies effectively owning them, strongarming television channels to screw over other programmes that effectively NOT made by them. The Balearic island of Mallorca got tourism rates rivalling Ibiza thanks to another one of their popular shows, the bad news is that it were unsustainable. There were talks of a tourist tax, but that meant upsetting the fanbase. Even the BBC, their main competition, has their hands tied considering they got no choice in the matter as they would anger the public, and not for the first time. The fact that they also use philanthropy as a weapon is pretty insidious if you think about it. What makes them stand out is their focus on quality over quantity for the dramas and rewarding their followings of entertainment and reality shows for their loyalty, making them terrifying to face head on.

And despite what memes say and Games Workshop wants, GW isn't a Megacorp... Yet.