what other private companies are known to be significantly more profitable than Apple?
> Founded in 1865, it is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue. If it were a public company, it would rank, as of 2015, number 15 on the Fortune 500, behind McKesson and ahead of AT&T.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
The OP's claim about the "largest companies being private" isn't exactly true...
McKesson is a drug wholesaler, so if they buy a case of an expensive drug for $999K and sell it for $1M, that’s $1M in revenue.
One that surprised me was Fidelity investments. It's huge company held privately by a single family. Not centuries old and probably nowhere near as profitable as Apple though.
There are restaurants in the U.S. that are a couple of centuries old. They might own the building by now.
Well then this was a misleading thing to say. You don't know that this is true
I think what I meant more was the conflation of wealth and power, and the need to look beyond just the name of a certain corporation. Autocratic rulers don't technically run a corporation nor sit on the board, but I doubt anybody would defy their orders if asked. In that sense, they do "own" the corporation. This is also not mentioning the nature of shell and holding corporations which obfuscate liability and ownership, but operate according to their owner's wishes despite their disjoint legal nature.
But no I can't find any proof that any are bigger than the largest publicly traded corporations, so again, sorry.