Churchill Downs Incorporated's own homepage says it outright: "The Kentucky Derby is just the beginning." Its FY2025 books prove it -- the company is now mostly a gaming operator running slot-machine-style betting terminals, with the actual Derby accounting for a narrow slice of $2.9 billion in revenue. Kentucky's other signature export, bourbon, tells a parallel story: almost every major heritage brand has left state hands for owners in Japan, Italy, Britain, and France; even Kentucky's most mythologized "family" bourbon depends on a Louisiana company to actually make it; and a real 2025 trade war with Canada hit foreign-owned and family-run distillers alike. Only now is Kentucky's own bourbon industry starting to name who actually built it in the first place.