10 Things "Rolling Stone" Taught Us About the Koch Brothers

Koch Industries is scarier than you think. See what we learned from the new Rolling Stone exposé.

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Most people know the Koch brothers as the consecrative businessmen who stand for all things white, stodgy, and vaguely malevolent. But if you were to ask most Americans what the Koch brothers actually do, well, I'm willing to bet you'd come up aces. Political activism? Yes, but that's not really a business. Finance? Sure, but what does that mean? Oil? Sort of, but it's more complicated than that. Rolling Stone, in a new report by political correspondent Tim Dickinson, has managed to expose exactly how the Koch brothers continue to build their fortune—and in doing so, uncover the horrific, almost unbelievable environmental damage Koch Industries unleashes in order to achieve its $115 billion in yearly revenue​. Here are the most shocking revelations from Inside the Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire​

Koch Industries makes a ridiculous amount of money. 


Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."

The Koch brothers are more politically powerful than you thought. 


Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

Koch Industries controls a shit-ton of oil. 


The company controls at least four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural-gas-fired power plant and 4,000 miles of pipeline. Until recently, Koch refined roughly five percent of the oil burned in America (that percentage is down after it shuttered its 85,000-barrel-per-day refinery in North Pole, Alaska, owing, in part, to the discovery that a toxic solvent had leaked from the facility, fouling the town's groundwater). From the fossil fuels it refines, Koch also produces billions of pounds of petrochemicals, which, in turn, become the feedstock for other Koch businesses. In a journey across Koch Industries, what enters as a barrel of West Texas Intermediate can exit as a Stainmaster carpet.

Koch Industries' cost-cutting resulted in massive environmental damages. 


Through much of the 1990s at its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, Koch spilled up to 600,000 gallons of jet fuel into wetlands near the Mississippi River. Indeed, the company was treating the Mississippi as a sewer, illegally dumping ammonia-laced wastewater into the river – even increasing its discharges on weekends when it knew it wasn't being monitored. 

A "decrepit" Koch pipeline resulted in the death of two teens.  


As they drove away, the truck stalled where the driveway crossed a dry creek bed. Danielle cranked the ignition, and a fireball engulfed the truck. "You see two children burned to death in front of you – you never forget that," Danielle's father, Danny, would later tell reporters.  '

Koch Industries (begrudgingly) managed to comply with federal oversight laws...


In 2000, Koch Petroleum Group entered into an agreement with the EPA and the Justice Department to spend $80 million at three refineries to bring them into compliance with the Clean Air Act. After hitting Koch with a $4.5 million penalty, the EPA granted the company a "clean slate" for certain past violations. 

But then George W. Bush happened and regulations loosened. A lot. 


Correspondence, contacts and visits among Koch Industries representatives and the Bush White House generated nearly 20,000 pages of records, according to a Rolling Stone FOIA request of the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In 2007, the administration installed a fiercely anti-regulatory academic, Susan Dudley, who hailed from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, as its top regulatory official.  


The Enron Loophole became law in December 2000 – pushed along by Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, giving the Energy Group exactly what it wanted. "It completely exempted energy futures from regulation," says Michael Greenberger, a former director of trading and markets at the CFTC. "It wasn't a matter of regulators not enforcing manipulation or excessive speculation limits – this market wasn't covered at all. By law."

Koch Industries engaged in "proprietary trading" to anticipate market disruptions.  


"We're like a hedge fund and a dealer at the same time," bragged Ilia Bouchouev, head of Koch's derivatives trading in 2004. "We can both make markets and speculate." The company's many tentacles in the physical oil business give Koch rich insight into market conditions and disruptions that can inform its speculative bets. When oil prices spiked to record heights in 2008, Koch was a major player in the speculative markets, according to documents leaked by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, with trading volumes rivaling Wall Street giants like Citibank. Koch rode a trader-driven frenzy – detached from actual supply and demand – that drove prices above $147 a barrel in July 2008, battering a global economy about to enter a free fall. 

They have a massive interest in the Keystone XL pipeline.  


Leach says Koch Industries' tar-sands leaseholdings have them hedged against the potential approval of Keystone XL. The pipeline would increase the value of Canadian tar-sands deposits overnight. Koch could then profit handsomely by flipping its leases to more established producers. "Optimizing asset value through trading," Koch literature says of these and other holdings, is a "key" company strategy. 

Koch continues to benefit hugely from the Dodd-Frank ruling.  


Because it's private, no one outside of Koch Industries knows how much risk Koch is taking – or whether it could conceivably create systemic risk, a concern raised in 2013 by the head of the Futures Industry Association. But this much is for certain: Because of the loopholes in financial-regulatory reform, the next company to put the American economy at risk may not be a Wall Street bank but a trading giant like Koch. 

For a much, much more in-depth look at one of the truly terrifying company, head to Rolling Stone 

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