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They did essentially own Dupont. I was there as a senior scientist, and watched them come in in 1982, gut the company, then get out a little over a decade later.

There was a lot of their influence exercised to get Dupont to integrate backward into oil (for plastics and solvents), and buy out their ownership of Conoco Oil. Dupont traded shares for all of Conoco stock, so the Bronfmans wound up with 24% of The Dupont Company's voting stock, which was enough for complete control.

Dupont was supposed to have bought out Conoco. Actually, Conoco bought out Dupont, IMHO.

In the end, they forced the company to buy back its own stock massively into the treasury, elevating stock street value. Then they issued notes to Dupont as loans for the company to buy back about $2 billion of the Bronfmans' stock at the elevated price, and thus the Bs were out awash with cash owed to them by the company.

One of the nasty little deals was to force the retirement fund to buy a $500 million block of their stock. (Usually, one expects a retirement fund to diversify away from the stock of the parent company.)

I think they did this kind of thing with a lot of other companies. Those whose wealth was based on the wreckage of people's lives through the booze industry could not have had much care as to how their machinations affected the lives and loyalty of Dupont employees.