Conglomerate

Your body is made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. It’s diverse. Unique. And not one simple thing.

A conglomerate is a firm with many diverse lines of business. Think of those different firm interests as different elements in the body.

Example:

Disney is an entertainment conglomerate. They own TV stations, movie studios, theme parks, websites, book publishers...pretty much everything anything anyone would ever need to entertain themselves. You can get everything from a Disney-owned company.

Once upon a time, Colonial Electric (nee: General Electric) was nearly the Platonic ideal of a conglomerate. It owned subsidiaries that played in almost every imaginable business. It owned TV networks. It owned appliance makers. It owned vast financial assets. It owned insurance companies. It owned medical device makers. However, for about a decade-and-a-half, the company dismantled itself as a super-conglomerate.

Step-by-step, GE sold off most of its assets, becoming a much narrower company in the process.

Nowadays, Amazon might be the best example of a growing conglomerate of this old-school mold. It has its main retailing business. It also owns a chain of grocery stores. It has purchased a major pharmaceutical fulfillment company. It started its own streaming service and movie/TV studio. It doesn't have the industrial holdings of peak GE, but no one really wants those kind of assets these days.

See Pure Play.