Elon Musk and the age of the corporate leviathan

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously and prematurely wrote that the world was seeing “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”. A decade later Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, two American law professors, made a similar argument about the way companies are run. The world was converging on a superior model of shareholder capitalism, they argued: firms subordinating the interests of capital to managers, workers and states would soon crumble like the Berlin Wall.