This is the version of "how corporate America is actually organized" built for whoever has to explain it next. 67.6% of Fortune 500 companies are legally incorporated in Delaware -- not headquartered there, incorporated there, a purely legal address chosen for the state's corporate law. Nearly 300,000 new business entities were incorporated in the state in 2023 alone, and the resulting franchise taxes and fees brought in roughly $2.2 billion in a recent fiscal year, close to a third of Delaware's entire state budget. That industry has almost nothing to do with what actually built Delaware's physical economy. DuPont, founded in 1802 as a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine River, once employed up to 10% of the state's entire population and invented nylon, Teflon, Kevlar, and Tyvek -- and its 1939 nylon stockings launch alone sold nearly 800,000 pairs on the first day nationwide. DuPont's long decline (a 2017 merger with Dow, then a three-way split into Dow, DuPont, and Corteva) left a real gap in the state's economy -- and in 1999, Delaware specifically recruited AstraZeneca's new US headquarters to North Wilmington, with reporting at the time explicit that the state won the bid because it was already struggling with DuPont's downsizing. Three separate mechanisms -- an 1899 corporate law statute, a 19th-century gunpowder mill, and a 1999 pharmaceutical merger -- all anchored in the second-smallest state in the country, almost entirely independent of each other.