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"And when at last it is time for the transition from megacorporation to planetary government, from entrepreneur to emperor, it is then that the true genius of our strategy shall become apparent, for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called "The Power Company"; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning."
-CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Tak: All they see is another faceless corporation, not a plan for world conquest. Dib: Wait...is there really a difference? — Invader Zim
Speculative fiction, especially Dystopian and Cyberpunk fiction, tends toward massive corporations. These corporations are usually umbrella corporations, controlling dozens of smaller companies that manufacture everything from clothing to military hardware. They can even be the police.
Perhaps there is one company that produces *everything*. This goes beyond the definition of "monopoly."
The Megacorp is home to the Corrupt Corporate Executive, Bad Boss, Pointy Haired Boss, and Obstructive Bureaucrat, and usually has Amoral Attorneys on the payroll. Employees of darker Mega Corps are sometimes portrayed as oppressed, paid pitifully low wages (if at all), and treated as expendable. Megacorps are often Peace And Love Incorporated. The more dangerous or powerful Mega Corps may have Private Military Contractors or other Hired Guns (or even an entire country) at their disposal. A more benign version may be owned by a Rich Idiot With No Day Job.
In the United States, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was enacted to curb the growth and influence of cartels and monopolies. However, despite what The Other Wiki says, there are several Mega Corps in the real world, making this Truth In Television.
Examples
Anime
- Capsule Corp. from Dragonball produces everything from houses to cars, and then puts them in a small portable capsule. The Brief family is so rich that they build people space crafts for free.
- The Paradigm Corporation in TheBigO controls everything inside Paradigm City.
- Nergal from Martian Successor Nadesico is a somewhat more benign example, but keep in mind that it's a private company with enough resources to build and crew its own spaceship. Needless to say, everything on board is a Nergal product.
- Paradias in Yu-Gi-Oh!, which possessed shares in every company on the planet and even held sway over world governments in addition to being a front for the Cult and its Ancient Conspiracy
- Genom Corporation from Bubblegum Crisis is a sprawling global economic powerhouse which manufactures everything from toasters to military cyborgs (Boomers). It exerts tremendous influence on the world's governments and entertains plans for overt world domination through the use of the so-called Overmind Control System, which is presumably capable of remotely controlling all AIs on the planet.
- Daiwa Heavy Industries from Vexille succeed in assuming complete control of Japan, eradicating most of its population and turning the survivors into cyborg drones. They also have plans to do the same on a worldwide scale.
Comic Books
- LexCorp from The DCU, which employs roughly a third of the people in Metropolis, runs everything from the supermarket to the daily news, and exists primarily as a tool in its CEO's plan to destroy one single individual.
- Its current CEO is Lana Lang, who has recently had to explain to Superman that the structure of the company is such she can't stop it making Kryptonite weapons without laying off a lot of people.
- Wayne Enterprises is a rare example of a Mega Corp out to do good. Bruce Wayne took over his late father's corrupted company and turned it into a force against poverty, unemployment, and other societal ills he couldn't handle with a Batarang. Like Luthor's company, it controls most business in Gotham City. This probably explains why Gotham is still a bustling growth city considering the fact that people like Joker run amok on a nightly basis. It is usually second only to LexCorp in international clout, as well; similarly, Wayne is usually described as the second-wealthiest man in the world.
- The Marvel Universe counterpart to Wayne Enterprises is Stark Industries.
- Marvel's 2099 titles had the world run by megacorps.
- Veidt Enterprises, run by Adrian Veidt. Makes everything from hairspray to music television to tachyon particle emitters.
Film
- Weyland-Yutani, Alien franchise. Famously evil enough to sacrifice squads of colonial marines, entire colonies, and even the security of the Earth in its attempt to weaponize the titular alien critters...and ironically, eventually bought out by an even more evil rival, Wal-Mart.
- Omni Consumer Products, Robo Cop.
- The Trade Federation in the Star Wars prequel trilogy is wealthy and influential enough to maintain its own navy (albeit one composed of converted cargo ships) and blockade entire planets at a whim, as well as have its own seat in the Galactic Senate. Yeah, they were rich enough to explicitly buy political power.
- The presence of fellow Mega Corps the Techno Union and Banking Clan in the Separatist army seems to suggest that maintaining a giant army of killer Deathbots is a standard business practice in the Star Wars galaxy.
- It was until (explained in the Expanded Universe) the Galactic Empire outlawed military droids.
- Also from the Expanded Universe, Kuat Drive Yards is the Empire's primary manufacturer of starships. It should be noted that this company is powerful enough to have a security fleet comprised mostly of Star Battlecruisers and Star Dreadnoughts that dwarf the Empire's iconic Star Destroyers, each of which is in turn, powerful enough to literally scare an entire star system into submission. Talk about overkill.
- Czerka Corp. in Knights Of The Old Republic doesn't have its own navy, but it does own and enslave entire planets (Kashyyyk being one of them) and is utterly indifferent to the outcome of the Jedi Civil War.
- The Corporate Sector Authority, first seen in the early Han Solo Adventure novels, owns an entire sector of space (the Corporate Sector), in which the Empire permits it to harvest and exploit resources with impunity. Strip-mine entire worlds? Enslave whole populations? Execute workers for conspiring to form labor unions? Check, Check, and Check.
- Buy N Large, from WALL-E, a barely-disguised scathing satire of Wal-Mart. It's so large that the CEO is literally President of the World - we even see the White House press room redone with the Buy N Large logo.
- Played with in Scanners, where ConSec is given much the same role as The Kingdom would be in a standard fantasy, with a Reasonable Authority Figure and an Evil Chancellor. Two evil chancellors, if you count Dr. Ruth.
- The Big Bad in Repo The Genetic Opera, Gene Co, definitely counts, what with the selling you organs which will be repossessed if you don't make payments for 90 days (which is common in the future), getting you hooked on drugs, and generally being jerks. But they did save the world at one point, So Yeah.
Literature
- Manpower Incorporated of the Honor Harrington series is the poster boy of this trope. They own and control entire planets, have their own space navy, their own army complete with combat line clones, own other corporations, their main products are genetic slave clones, and practically dictate the foreign and domestic policy of not one, not two, but dozens of star nations. To add icing on the cake, their CEO Albrecht Dettweiler, is a genetically engineered Magnificent Bastard; with major emphasis on the bastard part..
- Although Manpower is widespread and powerful, they are not alone in being a system spanning Megacorp. Kinder examples such as the Hauptman Cartel and Honor's own company. Not to mention the Mafia planets like Erewhon.
- Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM), Dune. They control all interstellar business in the Imperium except for star travel.
- Regarding the last part: The major stockholders of CHOAM consist of the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and... the Spacing Guild.
- CHOAM has the curious distinction of being a megacorp in a feudal society. The main indication of political power among the nobility is the possession of CHOAM stock and directorships.
- Jennifer Government has two giant corporate alliances, US Alliance and Team Advantage, that cover the strongest and second strongest corporations of every trade, respectively. Any independent companies have long since gone bankrupt.
- The Thursday Next books have the Goliath Corporation, which produces everything "from cradles to coffins." They're also more or less the main villains of the series.
- The dystopian society featured in Eoin Colfer's The Supernaturalist is controlled by real companies. Buick have laser satellites, Pepsi has a private army, and so on.
- The concept is a heavily examined theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy, where modern multinational corporations successively evolve into 'transnational corporations' (transnats) and then 'metanational corporations' (metanats, richer and powerful than most nations on earth) over the first two books before they effectively collapse in the face of a global catastrophe and worldwide uprisings near the end of the second book.
- Morning Star Cartel (a Meaningful Name) in A Game of Universe is a global corporation that became a interplanetary and then an interstellar corporation, thanks to the founder making A Deal With The Devil.
- Podkayne of Mars by Robert A Heinlein. The Venus Corporation, which controls the entire planet.
- In Robert A Heinlein's Friday, the Shipstone corporation owns, by the protagonist's own accounting, pretty much everything on Earth — to the point where it controls nuclear weapons and uses them on countries that piss it off; and its internal "power struggles" are resolved by mass assassination.
- Goodkind International, in the Whateley Universe. They make a big deal about taking care of the 'little people' and being a responsible corporation. But the CEO disinherited and disowned his own son when the boy became a mutant, and turned the kid over to a company mad scientist for experiments. Kind of makes you wonder about the company now...
- Used and subverted with Event Horizon from the sci-fi detective series by Peter F. Hamilton. Although megacorporations are more powerful than governments, the young and patriotic CEO Julia Evans keeps most of her industry in Britain to provide work and a strong economy, rather than subcontracting out to cheaper Pacific Rim countries. Of course, this also increases Event Horizon's power and influence within Britain. Hamilton's later novel "Fallen Dragon" reverts to the traditional trope with Earth dominated by five mega-corporations which wield almost unlimited power and increase their profits by using their private army and spacefleet to asset-strip the offworld colonies they helped establish.
- The Dream Park series by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes subverts the connotations of this. Huge? Check. Multidisciplinary? Check. Consider themselves above the law? Check. Manipulate people with subliminal messages? Check and Double-check. Good guys? Also check.
- In the Alternate History classic "For Want of a Nail" by Robert Sobel, the company Kramer Associates directly runs the Phillippines and Taiwan along with influencing many of the great powers economically with holdings in the United States of Mexico, Japan, The Confederation of North America etc. Kramer Associates was the first to develop the Atomic Bomb in the 1960s. The notable thing about "For Want of a Nail" is that it was written well before cyberpunk popularized the sovereign corporation trope.
- J Corp in Tad Williams' Otherland is one of these. While not as large as some of the other examples (it has competitors), it's still big enough to own a private army, cofinance a project to build the world's most powerful computer network, and pretty much tell governments to piss off.
Live Action TV
Tabletop Games
- Pentex, The World Of Darkness. They're a front for the embodiment of entropy and its efforts to poison the entire universe.
- The New World of Darkness has the Cheiron Group from Hunter: The Vigil, a gigantic multinational organization that controls a dozen front businesses. One of those departments hunts, captures and studies supernatural creatures, both to find new product possibilities and to utilize their powers (by harvesting bits of them) for the company's own use. Their employees are given a handbook containing near-useless information as their only guide to what they're dealing with, so turnover is insane (giving the player characters a job opening).
- Shadowrun has ten Megacorps that produce nearly all the goods and services one can find in 2070.
- Interesting in that real-world corporations such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart are included in the Shadowrun universe, but are decidedly inferior in size and influence compared to any several dozen other businesses.
- It's established in the backstory that the Grid Crash in 2029 massively weakened the existing corporations and made them very vulnerable to aggressive newcomers as well as forcing mergers and buyouts that made the Big 10 what they are.
- BMW was bought outright by the great Dragon Lofwyr and formed the early backbone of Saeder-Krupp.
- Ford and most of the other American auto companies were bought or merged with Ares.
- Microsoft was almost killed overnight during the Crash but managed to hang on as the third tier cyberdeck software maker Microdeck (still run by the Gates family too); the third edition even made a plot hook out of them and possible ties to the Otaku.
- Interstellar corporations in Traveller, such as GSbAG, Hortalez et Cie, Sternmetal Horizons, Ling-Standard Products and SuSAG.
- The Alternity game's Star*Drive setting. The following Stellar Nations, which controlled large regions of space: Austrin-Ontis Unlimited, Insight, the Rigunmor Star Consortium, the Starmech Collective, and Voidcorp.
- In SLA Industries, the eponymous Mega Corp effectively constitutes a state; its numerous subsidiaries (some big enough to be Mega Corps in their own right) compete with each other in a kind of internal market. Real competitors Thresher Inc and DarkNight Industries are corporations in name only, operating as paramilitaries opposed to SLA.
- The Crysalis Corporation from Cthulhu Tech, a game best described as an unholy lovechild of the Cthulhu Mythos and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The corporation produces everything from household supplies to military hardware. In addition it secretly strives to dominate the world, supplying various cults and terrorist organisations and creating mutated creatures to fight for it. Furthermore, its CEO is actually an avatar of the god Nyarlatothep disguised as a mortal man. Talk about a corrupt corporate executive!
- The Dungeons And Dragons Setting of Eberron has the 13 Dragonmarked Houses, Dungeon Punk equivalent to Mega Corps, each with their own specializations (Entertainment & Espionage, Banking, Consummer Goods, Private Security, Animal Breeding, Notary, Prospecting, Magical Detections, Overland Travel & Teleportation, Overseas & Air Travel, Hostelling, Healing). Each house descends from a bloodline blessed with a dragonmark, a unique set of birthmarks that grant them powers and skill bonuses relating to a particular theme. Each family used their advantage to corner the market on a particular good or service, as no non-dragonmarked could really match them.
Videogames
- Crey Corporation in City Of Heroes. One bit of dialogue says that they have products in 90% of Paragon City's homes. Indeed, they're so large, they're able to fund their own massive army of "security personnel." One thing that doesn't quite make sense, though, is how they were able to achieve this level of market saturation in what is suggested to be maybe a decade at the most (extreme corruption notwithstanding).
- Shinra in Final Fantasy VII, which produces electric power, military hardware, Materia, and automobiles, among other things.
- The Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil. Their front is a pharmaceutical company, but their business plan consists of "Let's inject this zombie potion into an animal and see what happens." while giving OSHA the finger.
- Mega Corp, your one-stop shop for Ratchet And Clank weaponry in the Bogon Galaxy.
- Along with Gadgetron (Solana Galaxy) and Vox Industries (Shadow Sector). Slight subversion in that just about every game has at least ONE Mega Corp, but they're not necessarily the same Mega Corp - they just control different galaxies / portions thereof.
- The Crimson Corporation, in Star Control 2, owns everything on all Druuge planets. If you get fired, breathing becomes theft of corporate property and grounds for execution.
- Furthermore, they are the extreme example when it comes to considering your employees expendable. Druuge ships can reload their power supplies by throwing extra crew members into the ship's reactors. In the game this translates to being able to sacrifice hitpoints to restore power.
- Morgan Industries, from Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, owns an entire faction of the game. It's also a Shout Out to Microsoft: compare MS's nineties slogan "Where do you want to go today?" with Morgan Industries' "Where do you want your network node today?" An "economic victory," achieved by cornering the energy market (requiring an initial expenditure of enough energy to have used mind control on the entire planet and taking twenty years), which can theoretically be achieved by anyone, would be an even more extreme version.
- Bokamba-Mercer in The Longest Journey, which even operates the police department. "Our duty is to protect, serve, and inform you about the marvelous new products available from Bokamba-Mercer!"
- TLH also has Bingo! corporation and, in the sequel, WATIcorp.
- If GLaDOS is to be believed, Aperture Science from Portal.
- The Aperture-branded cans of beans found in secluded places throughout the game would seem to support this theory.
- Though given Aperture's questionable track record with their projects, this might be more of a case of a company that doesn't believe in outsourcing anything rather than one that produces anything.
- Also in the same 'verse; has anybody important in the Half-Life universe apart from Chell not worked for Black-mesa at some point?
- The World Economic Consortium, bad guys in the Crusader series, are the Mega Corp — a conglomeration of several economic bodies who themselves rose to power and prominence as traditional governments failed in their area at the end of the twenty-first century. The WEC extracts everything, refines everything, manufactures everything, packages everything, sells everything, employs everyone. And they brook no red ink in the bottom line.
- EuroCorp of Syndicate, one of a number of global mega-corporations powerful enough to control whole areas of the globe and maintain covert(ish) cyborg agents with no fear of law enforcement. EuroCorp are a minor player in this field at the start of the first game, but by the end they own the entire world, and in Syndicate Wars they've been ruling the world for some time.
- The Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) from the Doom series, whose experiments in teleportation technology were responsible for all Hell literally breaking loose.
- TriOptimum from System Shock, where the "tri" stands for military/science/consumer... that's an evil combination in any
sci-fi setting. Mega-corporations dominated the System Shock world in general and national governments were very weak, but the corporations were greatly undermined by the events of the game. The world population rose against the massive corporate corruption responsible for the Citadel Station scandal and reinstalled The Government as the Unified National Nominate to regulate what remains. By the time of the second game, TriOptimum was on its last financial legs before an employee invented a working faster-than-light drive. In predictable corporate fashion, as many corners were cut from the ship built around the drive, to the point where the engines leaked constantly. Then the captain brought some alien life forms on board. And you, a UNN soldier, have to fix all of this.
- The various goblin cartels in World Of Warcraft are Dungeon Punk versions of the Mega Corp, offering all variety of arms, Applied Phlebotinum, and services equally to all comers.
- The Steamwheedle cartel is the largest of the goblin cartels, and has a huge monopoly on goblin business.
- World Of Goo Corporation in, of course, World Of Goo. Their products are vague and their landfills are sinister.
- G-Corp from Gaia Online. Founded by death-fearing megalomaniac Johnny Gambino, and Badass Grandpa Edmund, G-Corp was responsible for a majority of Gaia's technological, scientific, and medical advances. Unfortunately, when Edmund left the company, things took a turn for the worse. Now everything G-Corp makes (from pet dinosaurs to hair growth formulas) has a penchant to go horribly, horribly wrong. (To put this in perspective, G-Corp has caused the Zombie Apocalypse twice. In fact, zombies seem to be their chief product). Ironically, G-Corp is actually the good company. The evil company is Ne Xus, run by Labtech X. Ne Xus's sole purpose is to provide X with the means to take over the world. Their most famous achievement is using G'hi to create a self-replicating, almost invincible army of Animated. They also build a cool Underwater Base, a Humongous Mecha, and a Scarf Of Ass Kicking. G-Corp also has an Expy in S-Corp, which consists of "Elftechs," and is owned by the Claus family.
- The Ultor Corporation from Saints Row 2 and Red Faction. It is also heavily implied that Saints Row is in the same timeline as Red Faction making the two Ultor Corporations one and the same.
- The Mishima Zaibatsu and the G Corporation from Tekken.
- F.E.A.R.'s Armacham Technology Corporation is a company primarily focused on aerospace technology and weapons development. However, said weapons development programs include armies of cloned supersoldiers and telepathic commanders, and ATC itself maintains a series of massive underground bunkers and a private army that could probably take over a medium-sized country if it felt like it.
- RED and BLU, the two mysterious organizations players in Team Fortress 2 work for, apparently each own one half of the world and are fronted by a destruction and construction companies, respectively. It's All There On The Official Website.
- In Tachyon: The Fringe the megacorp GalSpan "The Galactic Spanning Corporation" does not have a monopoly on every product ever made, but it certainly eclipses the other companies featured. Those smaller ones make the parts of your ship. Galspan doesn't worry about such trivialities, despite maintaining it's own military fleet; they mine stars. For the main section of the campaign, they are one of your two options to take for exclusive employment as a contract pilot, and through morally dubious means, their game ending is the only way your character can ever return back to Earth. Post-game Bora missions put you through some rigamarole towards the effect, but this troper has never found any definite mission or clue in the audio files that say the Bora get you back to Earth again.
- Concordance Extraction Company from Dead Space specializes in cracking entire planets open to get at the raw materials inside. Thankfully there's no alien plagues that resurrect dead people into twisted monstrosities out there, and they hire well-trained, albeit nontalkative staff people capable of using every tool at their disposal.
- The Kirijo Group in Persona3. Company high school, hospital, police...they're also a Yakuza clan, but in Japan there isn't really that much of a difference.
Web Comics
- The Suburban Jungle had MegaHugeConGloMaCo, which was acquired by Amalgatronix Corporation. From the FAQ:
What does MegaHugeConglomaCo do, exactly?
They merge with, take over, or establish corporate relationships with other huge companies with similarly vague names.
- The closest Freefall has is Ecosystems Unlimited. They control most of the colonized planet, own most of the robots, and even one of the main characters' species (and they owned her too until they sold her). This may be due to the planet not being totally terraformed yet, so it's not very populated, and E.U. has to be there for the terraforming to be done: It's their job, after all.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Mom Corp, Futurama.
- Conglom-O ("We Own You"), Rockos Modern Life.
- Xanatos's company in Gargoyles. He's the wealthiest man, with the tallest tower, and several other "-est"s. The scary part is that the comic series is busily subverting this trope, as Xanatos is a raw recruit in the Illuminati, the group that secretly runs the world.
- FleemCo, The Replacements. Evidently produces and/or runs absolutely everything the characters use.
- There is little that Khan Industries from Tale Spin does not produce and/or sell. This Mega Corp has got the tallest skyscraper in Cape Suzette and even both a navy and an air force of its own.
- Surely Acme, makers of innumerable Warner Bros. cartoon products, must qualify? Certainly they're the only company big enough to arrange Product Placement whenever the coyote makes a purchase.
Other
- Globalsoft in the musical We Will Rock You. It has also become the government of the entire planet, which it has renamed Planet Mall.
- The World Company in the French satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l'Info is a generic evil corporation in which every single Corrupt Corporate Executive is a dead ringer for Sylvester Stallone.
Real Life
- During the early modern period, many European countries would grant trade monopolies to companies in the Orient and the New World. Sometimes, there would be a (nominal) for colonization. These companies would be dissolved with control being ceded to either local colonial governments or the central government.
- The Hudson Bay Company had a monopoly on the fur trade in the North West Territories in the first half of the 19th century, and controlled all trade in the Oregon Country.
- At one point in Canada, its' initials were said to stand for "Here Before Christ".
- The Honourable East India Company had a 21-year trade monopoly on all goods imported into Britain from India. It actually became a governing entity before it was dissolved in 1858.
- The Dutch East India Company similarly governed the Dutch Republic's Southeast Asian colonies until it was eventually dissolved. It is perhaps the best example of a Mega Corp in real life, as it printed its own currency, fielded its own army, and conducted its own foreign policy independent of the Dutch Republic. Following the Dutch East India Company's dissolution, the land it controlled became Indonesia, today the fourth most populous nation in the world.
- Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG, A.K.A. I G Farben; They paid for half of the Nazi party's successful 1933 election, used slave labour, had one of their factories situated in Auschwitz to make most efficient use of the pool of slave labour there, held the patent for Zyklon-B and owned just under half of the company that manufactured the Zyklon-B. After the war when it was broken up, four of the companies it was broken into bought the others, effectively turning it into four mini-mega-corps. Three of them still exist and are HUGE.
- De Beers. Although now only a Microsoft-esque nearly-monopoly, De Beers at one point held enough diamonds in its London vault to flood the market making diamonds worthless if anyone else in the world dared to try to set up a rival company. It gave smaller diamond cutting corporations bags of uncut gems and told them what price they would pay- the cutting houses took them at that price or got nothing. Oh yeah, and they practically owned/still own their own army in south-central Africa.
- The zaibatsu of Imperial-era (1867-1945) Japan, a group of a few dozen conglomerates that essentially controlled all capitalistic enterprise in Japan. Several of them essentially controlled their own political parties and large chunks of the military and merchant marine as well. The zaibatsu were largely dismantled after WWII, though some of them (including Mitsubishi and Nissan) still exist in stripped-down forms.
- Tata Group. It owns pretty much all India, and its services include stuff like chemical manufacturing, financial consulting, electronic design, automotive technology, e-learning, cars, steel, power generation, telecommunications, phone service, wrist watches, retail chains, air conditioner manufacturing, resort hotels, and even tea production.
- In the 1970s they dictated economic policy and basically defied the WTO's attempts at trade liberalization.
- The Walt Disney Company. They barely pay their employees, have their own police and fire department, and even have no-fly zones over their resorts. The Reedy Creek Improvement District in Orange & Osceola counties, Florida (where Walt Disney World and Lake Buena Vista are located) is almost totally owned and effectively governed by Disney.
- The United Fruit Company (a corporation that traded tropical fruit grown in third world plantations and sold it in the U.S. and Europe) maintained monopolies in certain regions and even controlled several Central American countries. United Fruit pushed the U.S. government into overthrowing the democratically-elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, when it threatened UFCO interests by redistributing crop land for peasants and refused bribes from UF.
- The chaebol of South Korea have controlled nearly the entirety of that country's economy since the 1960s, and have wielded significant political influence. Only in the wake of the Asian economic crisis in the 1990s has their power been weakened, and the government been able to take effective steps in curbing their power.
- During the Crusades, The Knights Templar were Mega Corp fused with Corrupt Church. Pope Innocent II's Omne Datum Optimum gave them the authority to ignore local laws and the Order were master bankers; built churches and castles; bought and managed farms and vineyards; were involved in manufacturing, import, and export; had their own fleet of ships; owned the entire island of Cyprus; and even had the world's first credit card system.
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