My thoughts

Before reading this I had a vague idea of who Koch Industries was, what they did, and ever less about who the Koch family was.

The book can be split into 3 parts:

• The first chapters touch on the history of the Koch family and how Charles, the father, got this empire started.
• In the second part we get to see the interaction and relationship between the 4 brothers, including all the legal arguments around money. It gets nuts, you can expect that only from people with a “fuck you” amount of money.
• The last part is more focused on how they became involved in politics, try to influence results for the 2012 US elections, and pushing libertarianism to the masses and into the mainstream.

During the first part I got the impression, more than once, that this book might’ve been paid and published on demand as a piece of advertising. The tone was very sanitized toward the Koch family.

That’s not the case - it is an interesting read to get an idea about the second largest privately held company in the US¹ and the life of the people behind it. This is not a business book.

The second part is filled with lawsuits, bad blood between brothers that can all be tracked down to family dynamics between members from a very young age.

While all this was happening, they inherited the views from their father regarding libertarianism, but I’m not sure it was in a philosophical way. The accent was placed on the “state” and how it shouldn’t mingle in private affairs. The bottom line was about less taxes to be paid.

The book ends with the 2012 US elections, where the Koch brothers, through Americans for Prosperity, spent around $122 millions in 2012² to defeat Obama and the Democrats. This last part is a bit of a scary read, seeing the amount of money someone can have at their disposal in order to try and influence the election.