succession is ending this Sunday after four seasons and nearly five years of deception, greed, murder, and hijinks. The HBO satire has received universal acclaim for chronicling the lineage of the cunning but often helpless Roy family. Can budding family business, Viastar Royco, make it to the top business list without Gozo’s help? If it has to be said, it is so—it is so.
The fictional media and telecom giant at the center of HBO’s smash series succession Like most telcos, is in a moment of crisis. In the fictional world of the Roy family, it’s no different. But first, some context.
Waystar Royco, founded in the early 1970s by patriarch Logan Roy, is like a Frankensteinian amalgam of two separate and dysfunctional empires: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Sumner Redstone’s Viacom. Luck Covering giant businesses like this since 1929. Should this ever materialize in our universe, we’ll cover WeStar entirely. In succession universe, at the latest, Viastar is bigger – both dramatically and by revenue – than the real-life Fox and News Corp.
The group, which includes far-right-leaning print and television news, entertainment studios and parks/cruise divisions, is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and operates in 50 countries and four continents. Logan Roy’s family—namely, his four awesome kids, Connor, Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan—holds majority ownership. at least for now.
But then came GoJo, a Norwegian tech company led by the bombastic, Elon Musk-adjacent CEO Lucas Matsson. Before his untimely demise, Logan hoped that a deal with Gozo would push old-school, print-media-heavy Westar into the modern era – even if it meant ousting his sycophants from their coveted leadership positions. (Like News Corp, the planned merger unfolded spectacularly.)
All season long, 2.3 million American viewers watched non-serious people’s children and Mattson jockey for control (even with reminders of the 2016 presidential election included).
As we head into the final episodes, we’ll learn which Slime Puppy is taking over the reins, whether they’ll eventually sell out to the Swedes, and — if there’s any justice — what happened to Roman’s baby from Season 1, Episode 1. But back to business: we checked the data, and we got receipts. Where will Westar rank on the Fortune 500?
The price of democracy? $100 billion.
based on fate’s Analysis, the estimated market value of Westar Royco falls in the range of $95 billion to $105 billion. This places the Roy family business at number 122 on the 2022 Fortune 500.
The Fortune 500 ranking is based on total revenue for their respective fiscal years. To get this, we divided Wyser’s $100 billion market capitalization by its price-to-sales ratio of 3.5, which gives us an estimated $28.5 billion.
Every price – including Westar’s market price – is based on some sort of financial ratio multiplier. In this case, we used price-to-sales. To find out how big a company is, you reverse engineer it: With its revenue and its price-to-sales figures (which some fan blogs graciously provided) we reverse-engineered to find the valuation. Did.
You’ll have to check back next month to see where this lands them in the 2023 Fortune 500 rankings, but looking at last year’s list, they’re just below coffee chain Starbucks and confectionary Mondelez and pharma giant Eli Lilly and tech giant Eli Lilly. Right across from the Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
It’s anyone’s guess where GoJo will land.
