The Agnelli family owns 43.4%, members of the Rothschild family own 21%, other big corporate/rich families interests own the rest. Lots of "Sirs", "Ladies" and "Baronesses" on the board of directors, as you can see below.
From the Wikipedia page:
Pearson PLC held a 50% shareholding via The Financial Times Limited until August 2015; at that time Pearson sold their share in the Economist. The Agnelli family's Exor paid £287m to raise their stake from 4.7% to 43.4%, while the Economist paid £182m for the balance of 5.04m shares which will be distributed to current shareholders.[2] Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild (21%), Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders.[2][3]
The current members of the board of directors of The Economist Group are: Rupert Pennant-Rea (Chairman), Zanny Minton Beddoes (editor-in-chief of The Economist), Lady Suzanne Heywood, Brent Hoberman, Sir David Bell, John Elkann, Alex Karp, Sir Simon Robertson, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Chris Stibbs and Baroness Jowell.[12]
Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild publicly supports many politicians including Hillary Clinton.
The Economist used to be pro-small-business free market. At some point they started justifying outsourcing as "free trade", which benefited big companies like Apple, etc. and stagnated or starved small businesses (and the productivity/innovation that comes from it), not to mention labor providers (even highly educated ones, such as software engineers :-))
This has proven to be quite bad for the US and Europe (except the 1%, whose interests The Economist represents through ownership) - and it may get even worse when money-printing will stop working at some point.
