The easiest and quickest research you can do is an online search. We will be using the brand “Burt’s Bees” as our example.

1. Go to search.brave.com (Google is Mr. Monopoly owned.)

2. Type “who owns Burt’s Bees”
   You will see “Burt’s Bees” is owned by The Clorox Corporation

Time to dig a little more.

1. Next, type “who owns Clorox”. You can see Clorox is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. Their ticker symbol is “CLX”. This means anyone can buy shares in Clorox.

2. Next, type “top institutional shareholders” and CLX together in the search bar. When you do this with enough brands, you will see the same few companies over and over. Most of these are owned by Mr. Monopoly with “circular ownership” mentioned in the film.

   You can see with our example, Mr. Monopoly owns 27.56% of the company, which is $4,910,210,516. And this is just one company they’ve invested in. So when you are buying “Burt’s Bees” (or any other publicly traded company), you are feeding the beast when instead you could be supporting a privately-owned competitor of theirs.

If you are having trouble finding any information on a company, the final approach would be to call or email them directly and ask. We have done this with many companies on the list.