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Taxation of business entities.

Corporate Law: Why do business entities use obfuscated names?

  • Some answers to this are common sense, but I want it really spelled out: every reason why business entities do this, and perhaps a few cases to demonstrate the usefulness (or even uselessness) of such a practice. By obfuscated name, I mean to say a name that is not related to the primary holding/asset of the business entity. For example, popular technology blog TechCrunch was once legally known as Interserve, Inc.

  • Answer:

    The answer is complicated.  Generally speaking there are two reasons for businesses to have different names than their product.  The first is that the business may offer more than one product.  Using your example of TechCrunch, the company that owns it may own a number of brands.  The second reason is related to ownership.  Sometimes ideas are bought by investment groups.  For example, Jimmy developed Quora.  Jimmy then sold Quora to Widget LLC.  So now Widget LLC does business as Quora.    

Mark Sadaka at Quora Visit the source

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A2A. I'm not going to try to list "every reason". Instead, I will make some general comments: Given that, for all practical purposes, a company is likely to be known by at most one name, any company with multiple differently-named products or services  automatically would have an "obfuscated name" under your definition. Sometimes company names are chosen to reflect the names of the founders; or a position in a given industry; or the founders' sense of humor or whimsy. They see no need for the company name to be the same as a product or service name. As prior answers have noted, a company may be formed before any product or service is named, or a product (or its company) may be bought by a company that almost certainly will have a different name. This answer is not a substitute for professional legal advice....

Dana H. Shultz

Sometimes the company is formed before the product is created or conceived of.  It's usually easier to get the corporate crap out of the way before the product is created.

Justinian Lane

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