Honestly, I'm pretty sure I was just drunk wrong when I said Nintendo. I know they started with playing cards and I think I just assumed they dabbled with other stuff but no, I was wrong. I'll edit my comment
I need a pepper mill from the company that invented it
Peugeot: I got you, buddy
I also need a shitty car that breaks down all the time
Peugeot: You're not gonna believe this
Me: Another Guinness please
Bartender: Here you go
Me: urgh what is this?
Bartender: A Stout. Why, is it bad quality?
Me: It seems so. Don't you have a way of testing this beforehand?
Bartender: Now that you mention it....
The whole point of the Michelin guides were originally to entice people to drive more to visit hotels and restaurants and such, thus leading to more tire wear which would lead to more tire sales, and eventually more money for Michelin.
I like that the Guinness Book of World Records was created because the manager of Guinness Breweries wanted to stop arguments in pubs (and keep people drinking).
The weird thing is, they don't actually sell the jars anymore. "Ball jars" are not made by the ball jar corporation after their antitrust lawsuits for being a fucking jar monopoly. So they sold the "ball jar" rights and now only do aluminum cans for food packaging and high end satellites and satellite launch systems.
So, at the time (1930) ball jar actually would have qualified as big business in the sense that you mean.
Home canning was very popular and they consistently bought out smaller companies.
Since they were privately owned, it's tricky to find specifics about value, but they were "found a university", "own a company town or two", "chairman of the federal reserve" levels of rich.
On December 11, 1939, the U.S. Government sued the Ball
Brothers, the Hazel-Atlas Glass Co., and the Owens-Illinois Glass Co. under monopoly charges
based on the Hartford-Empire and Owens licensing agreements. The plaintiff claimed that small
producers were being frozen out of business or prohibited from entering manufacture by the
nature of the licenses.
Almost a decade later, in 1947, the justices rendered a final verdict. The court prohibited
the Ball Brothers from purchasing or otherwise controlling any other businesses engaged in the
same manufacturing processes – in other words, the small jar producers. In addition, Ball had to
divest itself of the Three Rivers Glass Co. (already closed for almost a decade) that Ball had
acquired in 1936. Ball sold the property
The Ball Corporation has made improvements to its environmental record since 2006, when the company began its first formal sustainability efforts.[50] In 2008 the Ball Corporation issued its first sustainability report and began releases subsequent sustainability reports on its website.[45] The first report was an ACCA-Ceres North American Sustainability Awards cowinner of the Best First Time Reporter award in 2009.[51][citation needed]
In the Toxic 100 list for 2004, using data from 2002, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) identified the Ball Corporation as the 59th-largest corporate producer of Air pollution in the United States, with an estimated 4.57 million pounds of toxic air released annually.[52] The PERI report for 2008, using data from 2005, ranked the Ball Corporation 54th on its Toxic 100 list; PERI's report for 2010, using data from 2006, ranked it 65th.[53] The PERI studies indicated major pollutants included glycol ethers and 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene.[54]
The PERI Toxic 100 Air Polluters list for 2013 ranked the Ball Corporation as 619 in its list of companies producing the most air pollution in the United States.[55] In 2015 Newsweek ranked the Ball Corporation as 70th in their "Green 2015" report, which reviewed the environmental performances of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the United States.[56][57][58]
That's not really relevant to the post, is it? And that kind of praise on Wikipedia usually comes from the company editing its own Wikipedia page and being very picky about which data they cite.
I'd say it's relevant because I certainly didn't know anything about the company the meme is discussing, and that was a fun fact to see. I especially appreciate the wiki link cuz that's what I wanted to go to after asking such a head scratcher.