The Corporate Capital: How Delaware Incorporated America

There is a building at twelve-oh-nine North Orange Street in Wilmington that lists hundreds of thousands of business entities at a single address. It is called Corporation Trust Center, and it is the registered agent address for companies ranging from small startups to household names. More than half of all publicly traded companies in the United States are legally incorporated in Delaware. So are about two thirds of the Fortune five hundred. The world's largest economy runs through the courts and filing offices of this small city.

How did this happen? The answer traces to a law passed in eighteen ninety-nine, when Delaware adopted a General Corporation Law specifically designed to attract business. New Jersey had done something similar, but Delaware's law was friendlier to shareholders, clearer in its terms, and administered by a specialized court called the Court of Chancery that handled corporate governance disputes without juries, relying instead on judges with deep expertise in business law.

The timing was also deliberate. A few years later, in nineteen oh three, T. Coleman du Pont organized the Wilmington Trust Company to manage his family's growing industrial fortune. Wilmington Trust became the banking infrastructure that sophisticated corporations needed, and the city's legal and financial ecosystem grew together through the twentieth century.

Today, when Apple or Alphabet or General Motors needs a legal domicile for a subsidiary, Delaware is almost always the answer. The Court of Chancery has accumulated decades of written precedent that makes corporate outcomes more predictable than in any other state. Lawyers, investors, and boards have come to rely on that predictability the same way merchants once relied on the depth of the Delaware River to float their ships out to sea.