# McKinsey & Company **McKinsey & Company** is the largest global management consultancy by revenue, with US headquarters in New York and a presence in roughly 130 cities worldwide. Founded 1926. Privately held by partners. For most of its history, McKinsey's brand depended on a reputation for institutional integrity that placed it largely outside the ordinary frame of corporate-scandal scrutiny. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, that reputation collapsed across several fronts simultaneously — South African state-capture scandals (Eskom, Transnet), opioid-crisis exposure, ICE detention-conditions contracts, and authoritarian-government engagements. The opioid-crisis exposure is the most directly documented in court filings: - **2009–2013** — McKinsey advises [[Purdue Pharma]] on how to "turbocharge the sales" of [[OxyContin]]. The strategy includes targeting high-prescribing physicians (some flagged in Purdue's own data as potential pill-mill operators), building distributor rebate structures, and identifying untapped patient populations. - **2017** — McKinsey continues advising Purdue on opioid sales tactics even after the broader public-health reckoning was well underway. - **2021-02** — McKinsey settles with **47 US state attorneys general** for **$573 million** — its first-ever such public settlement — and issues a rare public apology, agreeing to release documents and to stop advising on opioids and addictive substances. - **2024-12** — DOJ announces resolution of criminal and civil investigations into McKinsey's Purdue work. A **former McKinsey senior partner, Martin Elling, was charged with obstruction of justice** for destroying records related to the opioid engagement — the first major individual criminal charge in the McKinsey-Purdue arc. The McKinsey-Purdue engagement is a structural feature of the [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]]: a major management consultancy with prima facie access to public-health context was paid by Purdue to optimize a sales strategy that was, by all available indicators, already producing mass casualties. The 2021 settlement and 2024 individual indictment are partial accountability for that pattern. McKinsey's overall opioid-related disclosure remains incomplete. McKinsey has been a fixture in many other domains the KB tracks — including the broader Silicon Valley executive pipeline (a striking number of major tech-company CEOs are McKinsey alumni), the [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] consulting layer, and the policy-laundering apparatus that connects major corporations to federal regulatory positions. ## See Also - [[Purdue Pharma]] — the opioid-engagement client - [[Opioid Crisis Timeline]] — Era 4 detail - [[Sackler Family]] — the family that owned Purdue during the engagement