[skissane]

All companies have boards of directors, even privately owned ones

Small firms it is common to have a single person board of directors, where that single person is the 100% owner.

When private equity takes a large firm private, they’ll often appoint a board full of their own partners and consultants/advisers-if you own 20 different firms, you don’t want to deal with all their CEOs, you want a layer between the CEO and you-which is where the board helps.

100% subsidiaries (such as a large multinational firm’s local subsidiary in each country) commonly have multi-person boards of directors, with a handful of local senior staff on it (e.g. country director, head of local finance, HR and general counsel) - they usually all just rubber stamp whatever HQ wants, although occasionally they might refuse (e.g if local counsel insists HQ’s demands are illegal and complying with them would make the directors personally liable)

[waffle_ss]

Not all companies. Only corporations are required to have boards. LLCs are not - their structure is dictated entirely by articles of organization.

[skissane]

It depends on the country. Where I live (Australia), we don’t have “LLCs”, we do have “PTY LTDs”, which are like an LLC - but it is a corporation and all corporations have directors, although the majority of PTY LTDs are sole director sole shareholder. Here, all companies are corporations

I should point out that in the traditional legal sense of the term, even US LLCs are corporations-it is just that people in the US have adopted some weird redefinition of “corporation” which excludes them. Under Australian law, a US LLC is a corporation, albeit a foreign one. Worldwide, I think most countries legal systems would reach the same conclusion

The British monarchy is a corporation (a corporation sole) - actually, a whole bunch of distinct single member corporations (the monarch), one for each Commonwealth realm, and also one for each Australian state and Canadian province - each called “the Crown in right of X”. Maybe that’s an example of a corporation without any directors, although one might (rather meaninglessly) claim the monarch is the sole director