You’ve probably seen the letters ITT on an old technical institute commercial or perhaps stumbled across them while digging through the history of the Vietnam War. Most people think it was just another boring phone company. They’re wrong. The International Telephone and Telegraph Company, better known as ITT, was the original corporate monster. Before Google was a verb or Amazon owned your grocery store and your cloud storage, Sosthenes Behn was building a borderless empire that didn't care about flags. It only cared about wires.
ITT wasn't AT&T. That's the first thing to get straight. While AT&T was busy dominating the local US market under the "Ma Bell" monopoly, ITT was the wild, international cousin. It was founded in 1920 with a handful of small phone exchanges in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Behn, a man who basically treated the entire globe like a game of Risk, wanted to build a world where communication bypassed national identity.
The Rise of a Sovereign Corporate State
Think about how weird it is for a company to have its own foreign policy. ITT did. By the 1930s, Behn was buying up manufacturers and telecom providers across Europe and South America. They owned the Spanish national phone system. They were deep in Germany. They were everywhere.
It gets dark, though.
Historians like Anthony Sampson, who wrote The Sovereign State of ITT, have documented how the company played both sides during World War II. It’s a messy, uncomfortable reality. While ITT’s American factories were churning out gear for the Allies, their German subsidiaries, like C. Lorenz AG, were busy building components for the Luftwaffe. Behn even met with Hitler in 1933. Was it just business? Was it survival? To ITT, the company was a nation unto itself. This "neutrality" through profit is what allowed them to survive the war with their infrastructure mostly intact, while other companies were being bombed into the dirt.
They were basically the blueprint for the modern multinational corporation that exists above the law of any single country.
The Geneen Era and the Conglomerate Madness
If Behn built the empire, Harold Geneen turned it into a machine. When Geneen took over in 1959, he wasn't interested in just phones. He was interested in growth. Constant, aggressive, quarter-over-quarter growth.
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Under Geneen, the International Telephone and Telegraph Company became a "conglomerate." This word sounds dusty now, but in the 60s, it was the height of corporate fashion. ITT started buying everything.
- They bought Sheraton Hotels.
- They bought Avis Rent-a-Car.
- They bought Continental Baking (the people who made Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies).
- They even bought Hartford Fire Insurance.
It was insane. You could wake up in an ITT hotel, eat ITT bread for breakfast, rent an ITT car, and call your office on an ITT phone line. Geneen was a micromanager's micromanager. He held monthly "management meetings" in Brussels that lasted for days, where executives were grilled until they practically broke. He believed that if you tracked the numbers closely enough, you could manage any business, regardless of what they actually made.
He was wrong, of course. You can't manage a bakery the same way you manage a satellite company. But for a while, it worked. ITT’s stock price soared, and Geneen became the poster child for the "professional manager."
The Chile Scandal: When Business Becomes War
We have to talk about 1970. This is the moment where ITT’s legacy takes a massive hit. Salvador Allende, a socialist, was running for president in Chile. ITT had massive investments there, specifically the Chitelco telephone company. They were terrified Allende would nationalize their assets.
They didn't just lobby. They didn't just write letters.
Declassified documents eventually showed that ITT offered the CIA $1 million to help block Allende’s election. When he won anyway, they continued to push for economic destabilization. The 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power had ITT's fingerprints all over the buildup. This wasn't just "business." This was a private corporation trying to topple a sovereign government to protect its balance sheet.
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Public perception never really recovered. The International Telephone and Telegraph Company became the face of "Yankee Imperialism." It sparked massive antitrust investigations back in the States. The Department of Justice finally had enough. They forced ITT to start selling things off. The dream of the "everything company" began to crumble under the weight of its own scandals and the sheer impossibility of managing 350 different businesses at once.
Why Does a Dead Company Matter in 2026?
You might think ITT is gone. It isn't. Not really.
In 1995, the company finally split into three separate entities. One became ITT Hartford (insurance), another became the "new" ITT (mostly industrial products), and the third was Starwood Hotels (which took Sheraton).
If you look at the "ITT Inc." traded on the NYSE today, they mostly make highly engineered components. We're talking about brake pads for high-speed trains and pumps for the oil and gas industry. They aren't trying to run the world anymore. They’re just trying to make valves that don't leak.
But the ghost of the old ITT is everywhere in how we talk about "Big Tech" today. When people complain that Google or Meta have too much power over global discourse, they are echoing the same fears people had about ITT in the 1970s. The idea that a company’s loyalty belongs to its shareholders rather than its home country started with Behn and Geneen.
What You Should Take Away From the ITT Story
History isn't just a list of dates. It's a warning. The rise and fall of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company teaches us a few specific things about the business world that are still true today:
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Complexity is a trap. Geneen thought he could manage anything through data. He couldn't. Eventually, the businesses he bought started to fail because they lacked specialized leadership. If a company tells you they can do "everything," they are probably doing most of it poorly.
Corporate "neutrality" is often a myth. ITT tried to play both sides of WWII and ended up being viewed with suspicion by everyone. In the modern era, companies are finding it harder to stay "neutral" in geopolitical conflicts. Eventually, you have to pick a side, or the world picks one for you.
The "Sovereign Corporation" always faces a reckoning. Whether it's through antitrust laws or public backlash, no company is allowed to stay more powerful than a government forever.
If you want to understand the modern world, stop looking at the startups for a second and look at the fossils. ITT was the first company to prove that you could own the world’s ears. They just forgot that people eventually stop listening when they don't trust the voice on the other end of the line.
To truly grasp how these dynamics play out today, look into the "Antitrust Paradox" and how 1970s legal shifts—many sparked by ITT's overreach—changed how the US government regulates giant mergers. Understanding the collapse of the conglomerate model is the best way to predict which of today’s tech giants will be the next to break apart.
Check the SEC filings for ITT Inc. today. It’s a fascinating exercise in seeing how a behemoth survives by becoming small, focused, and quiet. Sometimes, the only way to stay alive in business is to stop trying to be everything to everyone.