gemini://warmedal.se/~bjorn/posts/2022-01-25-why-do-corporations-have-to-grow.gmi
In the old days, running a busines was exactly that: you sell something to someone, get a little bigger, make a reputation for yourself, hire a few people, maintain an inventory. You work an honest day and got an honest return.
Today we live in an absurdly corrupt, crooked environment. Every phase of business operations is fake, from the bottom to the top.
In the US, the pre-1972 (or more accurately, 1932) asset-based 'US Dollar' has been replaced with a debt-based 'Dollar Bills'. Dollar bills are debt notes created on demand by the Federal Reserve(the Fed), an international banking conglomerate, which loans out the newly-created money to member banks, which are owned by the members of the Fed. Member banks, in turn, loan money to other banks, and quietly buy up excess US debt, providing the US government with operating funds. It's a pretty amazing scam.
In the old days governments had to borrow money from people. People were not happy to provide funds for things like wars and police that shoots at them. With a central bank, governments can 'borrow' any amount for any reason, without any accounting to the people (except occasionally making a public spectacle of 'raising the debt ceiling').
Other countries have similar monstrosities designed to obfuscate what would normally be called 'counterfitting'.
In order for new money to be created, it must be borrowed by the member banks - that is, the Fed requires a constant demand in order to operate this machinery which would otherwise grind to a halt. But member banks need, in turn, to have someone else borrow money from them (at a higher rate), so they can go to the fed and borrow the Fed's money to replace the money they loaned out, pocketing the difference. The more money flows through, the more money banks make.
Who provides this demand? Smaller commercial banks, which in turn loan to corporations. Some of those buy up other debt like mortgages and consumer debt, and borrow from banks on the other side. Others just spend like crazy, doing business and stupid things like paying executives hundreds of millions and launching junk cars into space and expanding beyond any reason.
Expansion is required for the fake economy to function, and there is plenty of fake money to entice fake businesses to expand.
A common answer is to achieve economies of scale. That is largely bullshit in many fields, as it takes exponentially more and more effort (and money) to keep up an ever-increasing bureaucracy. But note that it requires more money, which is readily provided by commercial banks who need to borrow from member banks, which exactly what needs to happen.
In a real free market, a business would come toppling down once it reached perhaps 100 employees or so. A smaller, hungrier company would take away all of its customers. Not so in a fake market, where businesses grow so big that they only deal with other big businesses, and the little guy has no chance.
Once a corporation reaches a certain size, it becomes a printing press for money. It can borrow almost infinite amounts by issuing bonds and selling them directly into the debt markets. Borrowing money becomes its primary business, and selling crap is just a ticket to play - you sell hundreds millions in order to borrow tens of billions.
Laws do not apply to large corporations. Even complete fraud goes largely unpunished - maybe some flunky gets a jail sentence while everyone else continues to rape and pillage.
A large corporation can easily assure its success by bribing politicians. For tens of thousands in contributions, they can get billions of dollars in business, tax credits, and other funding not available to smaller businesses.
Finally, a business of a certain size becomes 'too big to fail'. Our corrupt leaders will then back up truckloads of our money to avoid 'failure'.
And that is why.