I've always thought that every authoritarian regime is simply a company whose business is to manage and extract value from the country that they own, like any other productive asset.

Some of them are longstanding family businesses (monarchies), perhaps they have delegated or divested some of their ownership to a board or to the public to some degree (spectrum of semi-democratic monarchies).

Some are private companies with a single leading founder (different kinds of revolutionary/military dictatorships). Some act like large enterprises, that may be democratic or meritocratic to some degree internally, but closed to the public (single-party regimes).

It's interesting to think that we spend the majority of our time (work) quite happily within such power structures.

I guess the rather obvious trick is that it works as long as a company does not get a monopoly on violence. That's the difference.