Honestly? It takes a helluvalot to bring down a AAA. Hell, the backlash from the whole SCIRE incident only rung Renraku's bell, globally speaking. It butchered their North American division, but they didn't lose AAA status. In Crash 2.0, both Novatech and Cross had been engaged in brutal corporate wars and were already weakened. Ares and Cross had been trading shots for years, going back and forth like two heavyweight boxers. The only reason there even was a Novatech IPO to jumpstart the Crash was because Arty-boy had been systematically butchering Novatech with a kind of single-minded hatred seen in true zealots.
To be fair, there's one and only one thing that can take down a AAA: the line developer's will.
In 2059, Renraku lost an arcology, major computer system, a number of its best and brightest engineers, along with the death of tens of thousand people. A majority block among the other corporations backed the UCAS government in suspending Renraku extraterritoriality, which was just another way of saying that Renraku was (locally) not up to the requirements of the corporate extraterritorial privileges.
And that came just month after Renraku avoided a guilty verdict for industrial espionage and sabotage on the Corporate Court only because Fuchi would have been found equally guilty and everyone favored a settlement. The case was so serious that the settlement actually included the
expropriation of a shareholder. And the situation also led to the departure of Brightlight, who hacked into Renraku computers to entirely erase two years of work, forcing Renraku to spend months retro-engineering their own software and hardware products, their core business. And then the CEO took an "indefinite leave of absence" with the board unable or unwilling to chose a replacement for over a year. And Renraku was a publicly traded corporation with no shareholders over 10%.
Nothing happens.
In 2065, Cross Applied Technologies, which for some reasons decided to borrow money from companies its top-notch intelligence service was unable to figure out belonged to Ares-owned Bank of America (instead of borrowing from the Zurich-Orbital Gemeinshaft Bank like AAA are entitled to). Then its CEO died in an air crash, leaving his sixty-years old son, the respected Chairman of the board, as the owner of 60% of the stock, with 27% belonging to a seasoned corporate executive with an intimate knowledge (and just as intimate hatred) for Ares.
Cut to Ares taking over subsidiaries it wants, other megacorporations trying to do the same. Next turn, the Corporate Court vote out Cross to make room for Horizon as a AAA.
Maybe Horizon manipulated public opinion, governments and corporations on an epic level to force its way onto the Corporate Court as a necessity (something not told anywhere). Maybe Cross entire intelligence service vanished overnight (barely addressed). But try having your entire North America management vanish overnight instead.
The point is not that Cross could get voted out the court while Renraku couldn't. The point was that while Cross shareholding structure made it basically invulnerable to a takeover, which would have been unlikely when most megacorporations should have been in damage control mode, Renraku was a perfect target at a time all the other megacorporation were up and running.
The actual difference is that neither Mike Mulvihill nor Rob Boyle wanted Renraku to disappear in third edition, while Rob Boyle wanted Cross to before moving to the fourth edition. It will be basically the same thing for the next AAA to disappear. It doesn't have to make sense because the events will be set up so as to achieve the desired result - the reasons for Renraku survival are just as made-up as Wuxing, Cross and Horizon cases to become AAA, or Richard Villiers ability as Fuchi CEO to order the sale of JRJ International to himself without anyone reporting it to the board (in real life, such operation would account to a fraud - no mention yet of Yamana and Shiawase suing in Zurich-Orbital and Tokyo courts at least to make Novatech look bad).
It's not about nuyen and sense, it's only about which way the line is going.
