Dole food Company is one of the world's largest suppers of fruits and vegetables. However, it is not a publicly traded company and as a private company has no stock price.
Worldwide, according to a source at Bloomberg LP (which provides news on publicly-trade companies to the financial sector), there are about 63000 publicly-traded companies. There are roughly 15000 publicly traded companies in the US, of which about 1/3 are traded on exchanges and the other 2/3 traded in various over-the-counter markets.
Sunglasses Hut is a smaller company of the Luxottica Group, which is the world's largest eyewear company. Sunglasses Hut is not publicly traded, but the Luxottica Group ticker symbol is LUX.
Hundreds of publicly traded companies failed during the Great Depression. This came as a result of poor economic conditions in the United States prior to World War II.
Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, which is a division of the Walt Disney Company, which is a publicly traded company. The largest individual stockholder is probably Bob Iger, but he only owns a small fraction of Disney stock; the majority is held by various mutual funds.
Coca-Cola is a well-established multinational company that operates in numerous countries around the world. It is a publicly-traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with strict regulations and compliance requirements to adhere to in each jurisdiction where it operates.
DeBeers
Dutch East India Company
The world's largest stock trading tool is Merrill Edge, which is part of the Bank of America. The Bank of America is a publicly traded company. Brian T. Moynihan is the president and CEO of the bank. Which is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Citicorp does not have a single owner, but rather is a publicly traded company with stockholders and a board of directors. It is one of the largest bank holding companies by assets in the United States. Citigroup has the largest financial services network in the world operating in 140 countries. Until the global financial crisis of 2008, it was the largest company and bank in the world by total assets, today it ranks twentieth.
Apple is the largest publicly traded corporation in the world. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had withdrawn from Reed College and UC Berkeley, respectively. They founded Apple in the garage of Jobs parents home in Los Altos, California.
It is how much money (give or take a few billions) you need to buy all publicly traded companies in the world as of September 2008. To put it in perspective, the world's total GDP in 2007 was 57,000,000,000,000