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Drawing on a qualitative study of employees’ capabilities in France and Germany, this article identifies two types of trust in companies: enacted trust, which is never definitively acquired and must constantly be reaffirmed through action, and latent trust, which is there regardless of the situation. The notion of third-party mediation, considered by Georg Simmel a necessary condition for social experience, is used to analyze how these types of trust are produced. Focusing on the case of a multinational aeronautics company, we show that enacted trust is mediated by organizational arrangements and forged by in situ interactions, whereas latent trust is grounded in institutional arrangements external to the company. The two types are complementary and may coexist within a single organization, but the latent form is not to be found in major corporations in France, where enacted trust dominates. It is the enigma of this improbable finding, revealed by the French-German comparison, that the article seeks to account for.