Methodology
Commanded capital
- Unit
- $ (stock)
- Role
- measured axis · weight
- Adopted from
- latent power (Mearsheimer) · committed-vs-called (PE) · AUM-vs-equity
What it is. The capital that answers to an actor’s signature — owned, fiduciary, and undrawn together. Not what the actor owns; what it can direct. This is the board’s weight: the resource base, before any judgment about how free it is or what it’s doing.
How we calculate it
| actor type | basis |
|---|---|
| operating corp | invested capital or total assets (stated per claim) + material undrawn committed lines |
| asset manager / fund | assets under management — commanded, mostly fiduciary |
| person / house | net worth + capital of controlled entities |
| private lab | cumulative capital raised + committed backing |
Why “commanded,” not “capitalization.” Market cap is what the market says an actor is worth — someone else’s claim on it. Commanded capital is what the actor can move. The two are always labeled separately.
The known distortion — and where we put the correction. Gross command overstates power: BlackRock’s ~$14T is nearly all client money it cannot redirect. We keep this axis deliberately gross and put the correction in optionality — how encumbered the commanded stock is — rather than silently netting it here. Read the two together; that pairing is the net-resources correction (Beckley) made visible instead of baked in.
Prior art. This is the oldest distinction in power measurement: latent vs. mobilized power (Mearsheimer), committed vs. called capital (private equity), AUM vs. balance-sheet equity (asset management). We adopt the convention rather than invent a parallel one.
This page is the recipe; each actor's figures live on its own claims, sources attached. Recipes change only in the open — edits are logged like any board change. Back to the map.