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Genuinely curious: which centralized businesses existed in 8000 BCE?

I would bet that the first multinational organization to corner an intercontinental market was the apostolic church of Rome.

If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad... is right, the necessary technology for international trade was not available before 4000 BCE (horse riding ~3700 BCE, long-distance sea travel ~2000 BCE).

And more to the point, what fraction of centralized businesses in the past 10,000 (or even 1,000, or even 100) years did not eventually fail?

As the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid - everything eventually falls, but Twitter's not on the long side of "eventually" here.

400 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company

https://www.muroji.com/en/

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