Moody's Corporation

Who owns Moody's Corporation?

Moody's is a public company on the NYSE under MCO. Berkshire Hathaway is the largest shareholder at roughly 13 to 14 percent, a position Warren Buffett has held since 2000.

Is Moody's a credit rating agency?

Yes. Moody's Ratings, one of its two segments, is one of the two dominant global credit rating agencies alongside S&P Global Ratings.

What is the difference between Moody's Ratings and Moody's Analytics?

Moody's Ratings produces credit ratings on debt issuers and securities. Moody's Analytics sells data, research, and software to clients for their own risk analysis. They are structurally separated.

When was Moody's founded?

1909, by John Moody, who published the first bond ratings through his "Analysis of Railroad Investments."

How big is Moody's?

Record FY2025 revenue of $7.7 billion, with roughly 16,000 employees and operations across more than 40 countries.

Why did Moody's pay an $864 million settlement?

In 2017, to resolve Justice Department and state claims that it assigned inflated ratings to structured finance products before the 2008 crisis, the largest ratings-related settlement in history.

John Moody founded the company in 1909 in New York with the publication of "Analysis of Railroad Investments," the first systematic rating of bond creditworthiness. His insight was that investors would pay for independent assessment of default risk, creating a business category that did not previously exist.

The ratings industry grew through the twentieth century as bond markets expanded. Moody's letter-grade rating scale became the standard, and the company was eventually acquired by Dun & Bradstreet, which spun it off as a standalone public company in 2000. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway took a major stake around the spinoff and has held it since, making it one of Buffett's longest-held positions.

The 2008 financial crisis damaged the whole industry. Ratings agencies were widely blamed for assigning AAA ratings to structured products that failed, and Moody's paid an $864 million settlement to the Justice Department and states in 2017 over pre-crisis structured finance ratings. The crisis permanently changed how regulators and clients viewed the ratings oligopoly.

The analytics business became the growth engine afterward. The 2005 Economy.com acquisition seeded economic research, the 2017 Bureau van Dijk deal added the Orbis company database making it the largest such source globally, and the 2021 acquisition of RMS added catastrophe risk modeling for insurance. Moody's Investors Service was renamed Moody's Ratings in 2024 as part of a brand simplification, while Moody's Analytics grew into a subscription software and data business generating nearly half of revenue.

Moody's publishes ESG and sustainability reporting and rates other companies' ESG profiles through various products, an interesting position of being both a rater of sustainability and a rated entity. It has set emissions targets and reports on climate risk in its own operations.

Its core ethics question is the conflict inherent in the issuer-pays ratings model: the entities paying for ratings are the ones being rated, a structural tension that has driven criticism for decades and contributed to the 2008 crisis conduct failures. The separation between Ratings and Analytics is meant to manage it.

Its data business carries privacy and accuracy obligations across the company and consumer data it aggregates, with KYC products subject to the same data-quality questions as competitors.

The defining controversy remains the 2008 crisis conduct. Moody's assigned high ratings to structured finance products that failed catastrophically, producing the 2017 $864 million DOJ and state settlement and lasting damage to its credibility that took years to repair.

The issuer-pays model draws permanent scrutiny. Regulators and academics have long debated whether the structure creates incentives to rate favorably, and periodic reforms including Dodd-Frank oversight and the SEC's ratings office keep it under supervision.

More recent matters include periodic criticism of sovereign rating decisions, which can move markets and anger governments, and questions about whether the duopoly's pricing power is excessive. No major new enforcement actions have hit the company in recent years.