How can an elder god's corporation remove suspicion from its plans while preserving its clandestine monopoly?

Question

The elder god Mickeyruth seeks to enter our reality and dominate humankind. To accomplish this, he has used his loyal cult of followers to found a company called Disney. Throughout the decades, this company has used disreputable business practices to achieve power in the world. Through its business acquisitions, such as Fox entertainment, and its practice of wage slavery among its workers, it has managed to gain a foothold in society, all the while maintaining its image as a kid-friendly corporation. Its good-guy image, maintained by its putting out subpar comic book films, to its excessive theme parks, has lulled idiotic parents into a fall sense of security, blinding them from the evil of the entity while it takes pleasure in our suffering.

However, there are flaws in Disney's plans that prevent it from achieving the domination that it desires. Worthless politrickans grow concerned that the Mouse is becoming too powerful, and took action by putting in place anti-trust laws. These laws were put in place to prevent companies from gaining too large a foothold in an industry. These laws protect the consume from exorbitant prices and encourage healthy competition between companies. They help prevent actions such as:

Market allocation- a scheme devised by two entities to keep their business activities to specific geographic territories or types of customers.

Bid Rigging- The illegal practice between two or more parties who collude to choose who will win a contract.

Price fixing- when the price of a product or service is set by a business intentionally rather than letting market forces determine it naturally.

Hefty fines and jail time result from the violation of these laws, putting a kink in the Mouse's plans. To avoid this, Disney has established seemingly separate corporations that remain under its control. Companies, such as Apple, Amazon, and Mickey Ds (sometimes known as "McDonalds") don't directly compete with each other and operate in different industries to avoid suspicion. However, the executives of each entity are loyal followers of Disney, operating under its umbrella. Soon, the Mouse will cross over into our reality and enslave us all.

These separate companies continue to support each other clandestinely while avoiding the anti-trust laws that would ultimately expose them. How can these companies operating in different industries protect themselves?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as a clandestine Monopoly, corporate law does not forbid conglomerates

A monopoly is a company or enterprise that is the sole supplier in a particular industry, or commodity.

You are describing companies that are not monopolies but rather a conglomerate, in other words a single company in control of other companies that operate in separate markets (although you mention yours is secretly so).

You would find your evil elder god has made a serious error: conglomerates or their equivalents rarely work very well (although with supreme effort, some do). There has actually been a trend recently away from conglomeration, when there was a peak trendiness of them in the 1980's.

This is for some very good reasons, mainly to do with the strengths of business in a competitive environment:

• Companies rarely excel at doing everything, well - even ACME companies (companies that do everything) actually only do a little, for instance Kmart is simply a good large retailer although it stocks a wide variety of products.
• Companies normally grow in a methodical manner to adjacent industries. Too diverse a company may be too capital intensive for little gain.
• A company that does everything diverts too many resources in different directions - it is expensive to have disparate overheads and personnel costs. Also, the Board of directors may simply not understand all of its diverse operations, so the company would not be as optimised as it could be if it was a more focussed company.
• Diversification can work, but only in complementary fields. A building company may do developing, or can do design, but a building company alongside a fast food company will not yield any cross-benefit, but simply have more overheads and costs.
• If a sub-company fails and needs artificial support from the others, it begs the question why it exists in the first place, and may give a false sense of security that damages its competitiveness. In other words, often owners should let the company fail rather than keep pumping money into it.
• Why not just invest in diverse interests? That's much easier than attempting a super-entity, and much lower risk.

Your evil elder god should simply invest in industries she/he wants influence in, like a standard investor (preferably a controlling proportion), this would be much easier, and in fact is what most investors strive for.

Answer 2

If the executives of the separate business entities are loyal followers, what's the problem? They don't need some kind of clandestine arrangement; they can support each other quite openly.

For instance, Evil!Amazon needs a cash infusion. Evil!Disney doesn't have to arrange for covert support: they simply invest openly in Evil!Amazon using any number of entirely plausible explanation ("We sell a lot of our product through the Amazon service, so it's good business sense to help them through this rough patch"). They can always sell the stock later on the open market, or Evil!Amazon could even buy it back. All legal, all above board.

The important thing is to keep it subtle and to have a perfectly valid reason to invest that any company not controlled by Mickeyruth could also use to justify an investment.