Halliburton is an oil company, whoever said there wasn't one

I doubt wal-mart would find it cost effective to maintain something like an army. They have too many places to guard and those places are in urban centers. Certainly they could have sophisticated security forces, but no real army.

On the other hand, oil companies in the gulf of mexico would find myriad defensive uses for aircraft carriers and complex military infrastructure.

Anyone doubting that hundreds of billions of dollars isn't a lot of money, go look-up the annual budget for NASA (under 14 billion dollars).

Few aspects of US government spending really exceed those kinds of profit numbers. Military spending and welfare comes to mind...

Well, seing as Berlin is now a Sony/Daimler-Chrysler Corp enclave..

What about Tycho.

Based out of the Bahamas, they have security contracts with government and public sources through ADT. They have their own private guard service (ala Securitas). Chinese manufacturing facilities with 300+ person dorms on site so the workers have a place to live on site, with stores and recreation available. They have their own medical and biotech development divisions, hard manufacturing divisions (pipes, machine tools, plastics, etc), software development divisions, security (manufacturing as well as manpower) divisions, and Semiconductor manufacturing.

Just saying even with their recent financial issues, the only places they are closing shops up are in the US. Their global operations are mostly unfazed by the issues with the ex-CEO.

BlacKat
ex-Tycho employee

Conquering the world... Priceless.

Hmmm, never heard of them, but I am by definition ignorant in international affairs, I'm an American.

They could have the mitsuhama-effect going for them where they can materialize out nowhere (part of keeping power is not letting on that you have it). Certainly, anyone with extreme notieriety in an industry, such as Microsoft, is likely to draw the attention of government regulation before a corp that could manipulate the system to produce favorable conditions before forcing the issue of them being their own super-power.

Oh god, what RL corporations would do that?

Any one of them whose cost-benefit analysists decreed it was a wise idea and nobody with an ounce of common sense told all those analysists they were now mail room clerks.

What's that South Korean company that owns something like 2/3 of the industrial production of the country? They make everything from cars to toasters to automatic shotguns... it'd seem pretty easy to see them go extraterritorial.