The control over big business is interconnected...the control over big business is interconnected through networks of interlocking directorates, where directors sit on the board of at least two companies. the level of connectedness between boards - the top decision making bodies in market economies - is remarkable. only a few degrees of personal connections are necessary to transverse the whole network: a flu virus infecting the j.p. morgan chase board in january could spread to 80% of the fortune 1000 by may through monthly board meetings. and increasingly so these board connections span a global network of corporate control. the objective of this project is to take advantage both from a comprehensive data set covering more than 100 million companies and from this modern agent-based modelling perspective in order to develop and estimate a formation model for corporate control networks. this model should be able to explain the most important stylized facts observed in real world, particularly the rich-club phenomenon. in doing so, the individual and collective behavioral rules underlying the network core formation and persistence will be unveiled to the academic community and to the main public as well. in addition, it will constitute a bridge between the economics and social sciences corporate control networks literature. in my phd thesis i have argued that the global interlocking directorates network presents excess rich-clubness, what rules out simple preferential attachment - the state-of-the-art explanation for small-worldness - as an explanation for network core formation. however, i could not ex- plain this phenomenon theoretically, i have just pointed it out. the objective of this project is to develop a network formation model which takes into account individual behavior at the micro level to explain the emergent, macro level properties observed in real world networks, such as the excess intra-core connectivity (rich-clubness). for doing so, i will consider the agent-based modeling approach to network dynamics connecting both the firms and the directors perspectives by means of a bipartite representation of the corporate network, in contrast to the less in- formative but often applied one-mode projections, where network nodes are either individuals or companies. it is a promising tool for explaining the peculiar features found in global inter- locking directorates networks - there might be a micro model of individual behavior built upon specific motifs which, when simulated, produces the emergent properties we observe in real- world networks, including rich-clubness. finding such model is the objective of this project. in this way, different behavioral rules motivating the agents that engage in corporate interlocks can be properly tested.