How Much of What It Owns Does a Company Own Outright? 15 Balance Sheets Compared

Nvidia owns 71% of its assets outright. Colgate-Palmolive owns 3%. Both balance sheets add up, both companies are profitable, and the gap between them says more about how each company is put together than about which one is healthier.

The ratio is shareholders' equity divided by total assets. Assets are what the company owns. Liabilities are what it owes. Equity is what is left for the owners, so the ratio answers one plain question: of every dollar the company owns, how much is not owed to somebody else?

Fifteen companies, ranked

Each row is the company's latest balance sheet filed with the SEC as of 27 October 2026, so the dates differ. Each one was checked against Assets = Liabilities + Equity before it went in, and all fifteen pass.

Equity here includes noncontrolling interests where the company reports them, the same line for every row. Tesla's and Deere's liabilities plus equity come out a few tens of millions of dollars short of total assets, well inside the check's tolerance. A gap that small most often comes from an item a filer reports between liabilities and equity.

The top: companies that have not needed to borrow much

Nvidia, Alphabet and Microsoft sit at the top. They have earned more than they have spent for years, and those earnings stay on the balance sheet as equity unless they are paid out. Their liabilities are mostly what any large company owes in the ordinary course: suppliers, taxes, deferred revenue, leases and some long-term debt. Nvidia's long-term debt is $32.37 billion against $320.27 billion of assets.

ExxonMobil's 57% has a different shape behind it. Its assets are mostly property and equipment, $296.30 billion of the $464.48 billion, and it has funded much of that from its own earnings.

The bottom: three different reasons

Near the bottom of the table, a low ratio means three different things.

1. A lending business inside the company. General Motors, Caterpillar and Deere each own a finance arm that lends to the customers buying their cars, machines and tractors. Those loans are assets on the consolidated balance sheet, and the money borrowed to fund them is a liability. A lending business runs on thin equity, much like a bank, so it pulls the whole company's ratio down. Read these three as a manufacturer and a lender added together.

2. Years of buying back stock. When a company buys its own shares, the cash leaves the asset side and equity falls by the same amount. Do that for long enough and equity can shrink to a sliver while the business keeps earning. Look at the equity section of Mastercard's and Colgate-Palmolive's filings and you will find treasury stock, the shares bought back, subtracted from the total. Apple, at 28%, is the same story at a smaller ratio.

3. Being a bank. Not in this table, but worth holding up against it: JPMorgan Chase runs at 7%, and most large US banks sit between about 6% and 12%. For a bank, a thin slice of equity is how the business works. Our table of the largest US banks by total assets has the ratio for eleven of them.

What the ratio cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether a company can pay its bills. That depends on when its debts fall due and how much cash it brings in, which the balance sheet alone does not show. It cannot tell you whether the assets are worth what the balance sheet says: goodwill and other intangibles are $48.36 billion of Visa's $94.59 billion of assets, and those figures reflect what Visa paid in past acquisitions rather than a price anyone would pay today.

And it is only as good as the three figures behind it. Read the wrong equity tag, or a segment's total assets in place of the consolidated one, and the ratio is wrong in a way that looks perfectly plausible. That is why every row above was checked first. Each filing is checked against Assets = Liabilities + Equity when it reports the lines needed; where it does not, it is marked not testable instead of passing.

Work it out for any company

Every company page shows the balance sheet drawn to scale, so the equity block's size against the whole is the ratio you can see. The figures come from the API too, with no key for a quick look:

curl https://balanceproof.dev/api/demo/AAPL

Divide equity.total_equity_incl_nci by assets.total_assets and you have it. A free key gives 1,000 calls a month. For why the identity behind all of this always holds, see what the accounting identity means.

Figures are as reported to the SEC. Not financial advice.