Every company listed in the US has to attach a list of its subsidiaries to its annual report. It is called exhibit 21, it names each entity and the jurisdiction it is incorporated in, and it is filed once a year whether anyone reads it or not. Almost nobody does.
You can read it yourself, free, in about two minutes. Here is how — and then what I did with 115,367 of them.
EX-21. The filename is no help — NVIDIA’s is called “subsidiariesofregistrantfy.htm” with no “21” anywhere in it — so go by the type column.That is the whole method, and for one company it is genuinely quick. The problem is everything after one company.
On 26 August I asked five different engines what subsidiaries Townsquare Media files. Perplexity answered confidently, cited sec.gov, and said nineteen, all incorporated in Delaware.
I fetched the same exhibit it cited and counted 204, across three jurisdictions. It had opened the right document and stopped near the top.
That is not a knock on any particular engine — it is what happens when a long, repetitive table meets a context window. It also means the longer the exhibit, the less an answer can be trusted, and the long ones are exactly the companies where the structure is worth knowing. Abbott files 454 entities across 73 jurisdictions. Ventas files 2,645.
I parsed the exhibit for every company in the research set and published the whole thing: 115,367 filed subsidiaries across 1,424 companies, with the jurisdiction on every row and a link to the exhibit each one came from, so you can check the count against the filing rather than trust mine.
Reading one exhibit tells you where one company is incorporated. It cannot tell you which companies are incorporated somewhere — that needs every exhibit read at once, which is why nobody publishes it. So I turned the data around: 114,686 entities indexed by the place they are registered, including the 20 classified as offshore financial centres.
Being listed in an offshore centre is ordinary and lawful, and the filing does not say why a company chose one. These pages record what was filed and stop there.
Nothing. There is no account, no card and no limit on the research pages — they are a public read of public filings. Start with any company, or come at it from the institutions instead.
The same structure map is a panel inside the desktop terminal, where it is interactive — click an entity to re-centre and walk the ownership chain — next to the screener and the filings lab. That part is the paid product. The reading above is not.
Sourced from exhibit 21 of each company’s SEC annual report. Counts are as filed and only as current as the most recent annual report — a company that reorganised since its last filing will not show it until it files again. Not investment advice.