How much influence can you buy with a billion dollars?

To understand this we scraped littlesis.org — where hundreds of people have added data about people, entities and organizations. LittleSis is a tremendous resource, and comes with a browser extension that makes adding data fun and easy.

We reduced the dataset to only those with direct relationship to the corporate finance behemoth, BlackRock, which seems to have holdings in every conceivable portfolio imaginable.

With the data in hand, we used Graphistry.com to visualize. Graphistry is an incredible tool, marrying GPU accelerated compute with beautiful exploratory data science and visualizations. Sign up for a free account and start exploring!

The graph below shows Owner/BoardMember relationships that all connect to BlackRock and their nearest neighbors. Click in on nodes to see relevant information and use the toolkit to accentuate different features.

We can see the fuller graph below (donors, member, lobbyists, etc). What we see is a complex web of relationships (and certainly not exhaustive) — the full dataset has over 3 million edges — what is most interesting is that many of the same people sit on the boards of diverse industries, ranging from oil and gas, to entertainment, government, banking, and policy & think tanks. This web of influence and power, seen in aggregate, speaks for itself.

Use the histogram feature in the bottom right corner, click on `relationship_type` and then hover over the different bins, which will highlight different edges between entities. What one sees immediately, is that Owners and Shareholders connect to many different companies, while CEO/VP etc are company specific and rarely shared between organizations. This clear organizational structure shows two views of how information can flow between different hierarchical constructs.

There seems to be a concerted effort by the press and media to state that people at the top don’t know each other, nor make plans together. The above paints a very different picture. Let us know what you think below!