Stock exchange, family and foundation: Lego builds 21st century capitalism

The company that built a global giant out of plastic bricks is still familiar. Now he intends to transfer about a third of the voting rights from the private holding Kirkbi to the non-profit foundation K2 Family foundation, to finance a sustainable life model

In the now distant 1932 Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published their masterpiece “The Modern Corporation and the Private Property” which opened a new road to property law, modern enterprise and twentieth-century capitalism. The separation between ownership and management, the public company, the spread of shareholding through stock market listing became cornerstones of the American model destined to supplant family capitalism. In reality, families, the stock exchange, large multinational companies continued to live together in the States, often in the same house. In the meantime, state capitalism arrived from Europe. As a singular tool emerged: the foundation, particularly widespread in the Germanic world, but also in the United States, where the Rockefellers paved the way. With the turn of the new millennium, capitalism appears increasingly polymorphous. The latest example comes from Denmark.