Audio Version of this Post can be found here
Errata: In the audio file and transcript, I said JPMorgan had 40 billion dollars in assets, but they have 4 trillion!
As someone who has been studying this stuff for over 60 years, I still have trouble thinking in trillions.
It was not part of business vocabulary back then!
Today, I’m trying something a little different. I’m recording a live audio of me looking through the new Fortune 500 list that just came out, so it is more informal than most of our posts. I used the audio to create a transcript, an edited version of which is what you see in the text below if you’re reading this. If you are listening to the 42 minute audio file, you can always go to the American business History.org website and read it and see our charts.
We introduce today our annual update of our animated charts. Today we’ll show the 25 largest U.S. companies last year and a second chart, the 50 largest. For the 50 largest, you have to do some scrolling. It’s a little harder to follow the years. With the 25 largest, it is a little easier to do that.
The text continues below the two animated charts.
The Fortune 500. When and where do I start?
I started subscribing to Fortune magazine when I was 12, in 1963. I did that because I discovered the Fortune 500 list of the biggest companies.
I lived in a General Motors factory town, Anderson, Indiana, 25,000, give or take, GM workers in a town of 60,000 people. Nobody could really answer all the questions I had about General Motors, which was, gosh, it was the source of everything.
They were the total economy of that town, much like other industrial cities that were essentially company towns. You find them all over Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. I mean, you’ve got State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, Illinois. You’ve got John Deere in Moline, you’ve got Cummins engine in Columbus, Indiana, Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, the old Upjohn Pharmaceuticals in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Kellogg in Battle Creek, Michigan. You can find plenty in Ohio, too.
Anyway, in a factory town, life revolves around that company. And I was fascinated to learn about leadership management companies and all that and everybody I knew pretty much worked for General Motors or worked for a company that supplied General Motors or worked in a grocery store or a restaurant that served General Motors employees.
So I was fascinated, discovered this magazine, and got my subscription. I have spent hours and hours and hours over the last 64 years reading the Fortune 500 list. I probably get more out of the few hours I spend studying that list than I do any other single few hours during the year in terms of understanding big business in America.
So for me, it’s a critical step and I think there’s kind of an art to reading a list and how you consume information in a list, how your eyes work, how your fingers work, which is why I have to have the printed copy. I mean, the digital is fine. An Excel spreadsheet or Google spreadsheet is even better for playing with the numbers. But to really touch them and feel them, get a printed issue.
So let’s take a look at the Fortune 500.
Prior to 1994, Fortune magazine didn’t do the list the same way, back then they focused on industrial or manufacturing companies. They made separate little lists for retail chains and transportation companies, insurance companies, banks, stuff like that. And then in 1995, starting with 1994 data, they consolidated all the companies to one list. So it changed a little bit.
Overall it’s been going for 72 years.
The first came out in 1954 and we have an animated chart of that earlier period from 1954 through 1993 under the title Dinosaur Age: Charting Giant Companies 66 Years Ago. If you just search on dinosaur on the website, you can find that chart quickly.
In those 72 years, there have only been four companies that have been the biggest company in America.
And let me stop a second before I go on with that. What do I mean by biggest one?
Things I see every day in the financial press is they refer to the biggest market capitalization companies as the biggest companies. That’s not right. It drives me nuts. Those are the most valuable companies. That’s very different from the biggest.
You know, a lump of coal is pure carbon. A diamond is pure carbon. A lump of coal is bigger than a diamond, but a diamond is worth more than a lump of coal. Size means scale and scope.
To look at that pick a very popular comparison. Let’s compare General Motors to Tesla. General Motors was the second great automobile company to arise in the United States after Ford and in the late thirties from 1930 onward, Chrysler also rose up to become a meaningful competitor, at times even bigger than Ford. GM and Ford battled for the lead for years.
Of course, it’s a more global industry today. There hadn’t been a really successful automobile company in the United States, started since that era until the rise of Tesla.
Today, Tesla is valued at about 20 times what General Motors is valued at. It’s like $1.4 trillion against 67 billion. So that’s an enormous difference in the valuation.
But the one thing about looking at those numbers is that valuation can change. We all know a stock can go up or down 5 or 10% in a single day. And over 90 days or six months or within a year, it can go up 10, 20, 30%, sometimes much, much more, and down sometimes, too.
So valuation is a highly variable number and kind of a hard one to pin your hat on.
Sales or revenue of the company shows how many products they sold for what price to how many people. That’s how big it is. That’s how many transactions, how many people it made happy or whatever.
And that’s a hard number. You know, when these companies report through their SEC filings, their sales and their profits, those people and a lot of lawyers have gone over those numbers, they are never going to change. So when we say General Motors did double the sales of Tesla last year, 185 billion against about 95 billion, that’s very real, not just paper profits or temporary.
I’m not saying valuation isn’t real. It’s very real if you’re an investor.
So let’s compare these two companies, which is larger? So General Motors had twice the sales in dollars of Tesla, had twice the assets, the total amount of buildings and everything that are involved in doing it, 261 billion against 138.
Like I said, GM had 1/20 the valuation of Tesla.
Why is that valuation so different? Well, it’s because over the last ten years, the stock of Tesla has compounded at almost 40% a year. General Motors has only gone up about 12% a year. And General Motors earnings have actually fallen from where they were ten years ago by about 6% a year. Tesla was losing money back then, so you really can’t calculate the earnings growth rate over the whole ten year span.
If you look at how many lives they touch, and you’ve really got to think about tire companies and dealerships and, you know, all the people like back in Anderson, Indiana. Today, Anderson, Indiana has zero General Motors employees. It’s gone.
That shows you the change in the industry, but also how many lives GM touches. In the U.S. Last year, General Motors sold 2.9 million vehicles against Tesla’s 600,000, or about five times as many.
And globally, General Motors sold 6.2 million to 1.7 million at Tesla or about four times as many. So I think it’s completely fair to say General Motors is a substantially larger company than Tesla. It is also a substantially less valuable company.
That lead me to think about market shares, which are not in the Fortune 500, but worth considering.
From the 1930 to the 1960s, General Motors sold about half of the cars made in the U.S. and about 35 to 40% of all the cars made in the world. Because back in that era, there weren’t a lot of big foreign car companies. And even the great names of today, like Daimler Benz and Volkswagen and Toyota, they were small compared to the big American automakers.
That all went into decline, really starting in the seventies. But you think about a company having a market share of like 40% globally and 46% in the U.S. It’s pretty amazing.
Just for some comparison, ExxonMobil last year had about 3% of the global oil and gas market. McDonald’s including sales of all its franchisees had about three and a half percent of the global restaurant business, 5.1% in the U.S.
Marriott in the U.S. had about 22% of the hotel business, and worldwide about 18%. So those are huge shares. If you cut that Marriott share and you put in all the Airbnb, Vrbo, campgrounds, hostels, and other places people stay, it comes down to about 6%.
But so when you look at ExxonMobil, at 3% globally, McDonald’s three and a half, Marriott at 6%, you know, to have 40% global market share in anything like General Motors had for so many years is just amazing.
And then we come to two other names that we’re going to talk about here shortly. Last year, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club in the U.S. did about 11% of the total U.S. retail sales that are relevant.
So I took out gasoline. I took out automobiles. I didn’t include restaurants, really just counted merchandise like you’d find in a typical store.
Wal-Mart had 10.9%. Amazon, if you include their marketplace, the third-party sellers, had about 8.5 percent. We know that those two companies, in a sense, dominate American retailing. They certainly lead it.
Between the two of them, you got like 19 to 20%. So that’s a big number. That’s still a long way from like 40% in cars.
And I have to add that Amazon, within e-commerce; its U.S. sales were around 36% of total U.S. e-commerce sales. That’s an awesome number.
We could look at Google and search, which might be going into decline with the rise of A.I. anyway.
So I’m focused on the biggest companies, the ones that have the greatest impact. And over the 72 years that the fortune 500 has been published, for 38 of those 72 years, General Motors was the largest company in the world. For 20 of them, Wal-Mart was the largest company in the world, including 2024. ExxonMobil, originally called the Standard Oil Company in New Jersey, was the largest in 13 of those years.
ExxonMobil was the biggest company in the world in 1974, 1975, and 1976. It was the biggest company in America in 1979-1983, again in 2000, then 2005, and then again in 2007, 2008, and 2011. So it pops up there once in a while when oil prices are high; BP and Shell are usually right up there with it in the global rankings.
Only three companies in 71 years.
Last year, 2025, Amazon became the largest company in the world.
So you’ve only got four companies in all that history that have been the largest, the largest in the United States.
Ranking among the largest in the world gets a little blurred. Historically, U.S. companies were always much, much bigger than any international company.
There was no European company in the 1960s that rivalled General Motors in size, in revenues. Even AT&T, a massive company in assets and employees and number of stockholders, and in market capitalization, didn’t rival General Motors in sales.
If you look at global lists now, the thing is, you got these big, huge, giant Chinese companies. You got state owned, government owned companies. So the global list of the largest companies, which we will also do a post about when that list comes out later this year from Fortune, that’s gotten a little blurred.
It isn’t quite as apples to apples as it used to be. Asian companies keep rising.
But the bottom line here is there have only been four guys on top. And so for a change, a new company to enter that race, that was basically General Motors forever then Wal-Mart forever, with Exxon popping in once in a while, is the biggest of news.
Wal-Mart first became the biggest company in the United States in 2001 and has held it 20 years between 2001 and 2024. And so for Amazon, for a new company to come to the top, that’s really remarkable news.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to open up my Fortune magazine. I urge you to rush to a Barnes & Noble or any good newsstand and get your own copy.
Otherwise, they’re kind of tricky to find. I think the publisher themselves says allow six weeks to deliver, or something silly like that. Barnes & Noble’s got it in stock. You can find copies on eBay. I’m sure the data is online somewhere.
So let me open the issue. And when we open the list, it’s 500 companies listed in size order, page after page. Let’s start with the largest companies.
I’m just going to run through the top 25 this year. Amazon is first at 717 billion in sales, Wal-Mart is second at 713 billion. So really close there. But given Amazon’s growth rate, they aren’t going to look back. And given history, my guess would be Amazon should be the biggest company in the world for the next 20 or 30 years.
But you never know. Maybe ExxonMobil will have some more big years, but they’re now so far behind the size of Amazon and Walmart, it gets a lot harder. So those are the big two.
Third biggest is UnitedHealth Group. Health, the health industry, big pharma, big insurance, man. It’s enormous and just gets bigger and bigger.
The next names down the list are Apple, Alphabet which we know as Google. Then CVS Health, which is drugstores and insurance and pharmacy benefits management systems (PBMs), an enormous company. It started out as Melville , a shoe store chain. That story is told on our website. Next is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company.
Then, McKesson, the biggest wholesaler in America and more likely the world. They’re a drug wholesaler. They’re the intermediary that goes between the manufacturers of the drugs and the retailers and the hospitals. And it’s a big industry. We’re going to see two more companies they compete with here in the list.
Next is ExxonMobil. McKesson is now bigger than ExxonMobil.
Rounding out the top ten, next is Cencora, that’s number two to McKesson in that drug distribution industry. And those companies provide a lot of other services, software and whatever it takes to make the distribution system work.
These companies are all doing like 300 billion a year in revenues. Next are Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Costco, Cigna the insurance company, and then Cardinal Health. That’s the third big competitor in the in the wholesaling of drugs. Next on the list are Nvidia, Meta which we know is Facebook, Elevant Health, another big health insurance company, and Centene, that’s another health insurance company. Centene focuses on Medicare and Medicaid and such. Now, that’s the 19th biggest company and last year did 194.777 billion in sales. So these are enormous outfits.
After Centene come Bank of America, Chevron, Ford Motor, General Motors, Citigroup, and Home Depot. So those are 25 biggest. The ones right behind that are Fannie Mae, Kroger, Verizon, Phillips 66, Marathon Petroleum, and StoneX. StoneX is a commodities and securities trading organization. Then State Farm Insurance.
The Fortune 500 list is normally only public companies, but any company that reveals their sales and profits, Fortune does take those into account. State Farm is a mutual company, essentially a co-op owned by its customers, by the policyholders. But their data is in here.
Then come Freddie Mac, Humana (more health insurance), AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Comcast, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Valero Energy, Dell Technologies, Target, Tesla, Walt Disney, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Boeing, UPS, RTX (the old Raytheon, the big defense company), and FedEx.
Those are the 50 largest U.S. “Public” companies and you’ll see that in the animated charts on the website. So those are the real giants, The smallest of those, FedEx, does 87.9 billion in sales.
When I first started reading the list in 1963, there were about 50 companies that did a billion a year in sales.
Today it takes like 7 or 8 billion even to make the 500 list. So, you know, time passes, inflation happens and then numbers just add more zeros behind them.
More learning takes place by going through the columns of data that Fortune provides.
Let’s go through the columns.
The first one shows the company name and where it’s headquartered. There’s interesting information in the issue about which cities and states have the most headquarters and how that’s changed over time. Great rise of Texas and a decline of a lot of the older Eastern and Midwestern cities. See our article for more details: https://americanbusinesshistory.org/bye-bye-new-york/ .
Next we find revenues and the percent revenue growth last year, then dollar profits and growth last year.
Each column shows their rank within the 500; are they first in profits or whatever. And then they show assets, stockholders equity, and market value (market capitalization). Next are profits as a percent of revenues (ROS Return on Sales), profits as a percent of assets (ROA), and profits as a percent of shareholders equity (ROE). And then they show the earnings per share ten year growth and how it did last year and the same for total return to investors, including dividends and the rise or fall of the stock price.
In short, a ton of information all in one inexpensive source! With a little practice at reading tables, you can quickly draw conclusions or issues for further research and analysis.
So let’s look at each of those metrics, starting with the top 25 companies. They are already in size order, so similar sized companies are grouped together. Now I’m going to look at the top 25 companies’ profits. I’m not going to look at dollars. I’m going to go on over to where they show profits as a percent of revenues.
Well, people talk about profit as a percent of sales a lot. What are their margins? This is their net margin. This is their after tax profit as a percent of their revenues and the median, the middle of the 500 companies is 8.2%. So half the companies make more than 8.2% on their sales and half earn less.
When I look at the top 25, the giants, the highest is 55.6% at NVidia. That’s not gross margin. That’s after all the executive pay, that’s after all the advertising and travel expenses, every expense, interest cost, etc. It includes interest income, if they’ve got a bunch of money in the bank.
For NVidia to achieve 55.6% net when the median is 8%, it’s just insane.
And then not much less insane,. Alphabet 32.8%. Microsoft 36.1%, and Metta 30.1%. Then we’ve got, among those big guys, Apple 26.9, JPMorgan Chase at 20.3%. So all those guys are above 20. There was one company that lost money during this period and that was that Centene company. Oh, let’s see. Ford also lost money.
And then there’s a whole range from people making under 5%, even down to 0.1%.
One thing is those wholesalers, those drug wholesalers, they make a lot less as a percent of sales. And a lot of people say, “Oh, well then that’s tough. You’re not very profitable,” but it’s return on investment that counts. How much money did it take to get those sales?
So if I look at profit as a percent of revenues, percent of sales like 55% at Nvidia, I’m looking down here and I see McKesson. They made 0.9% on sales. And the same with the other guys in that industry. They’re low. But also interesting is that Costco made 2.9%.
So somebody might look at that say, well, I wouldn’t want to be in that business, only 2.9%. All it takes is a bad day or a bad week and you’re losing money as opposed to a 55% cushion and margin of error over at Nvidia. But not quite, because it takes so much fewer assets in that wholesaling business. And the same in the grocery store business.
I mean, you look at the inventory, the inventory of stuff in Costco. They completely sell through all the stuff they own in something like 26 days, they turn their inventory like 11 to 13 times a year. So does Kroger. So they really use their money well.
Therefore, I look at profits as a percent of assets, the total amount invested or borrowed, because assets includes both the amount stockholders put up and the amount the company borrowed.
Again, those tech companies are through the roof. At Nvidia, the return on assets is 58%. They range from 15% up to 31% at Apple. 16.5% at Microsoft and Meta. But when I look at Costco, it makes 10.5%. The median ROA for the whole Fortune 500 is 4.2%.
I’ve studied that number for years. We used to use return on equity (ROE), but there have been so many stock buybacks and unusual things that go on with the equity number, ROE is not as useful as it used to be. Equity is the book value or net worth of the company, or if you took a company and you paid all its debts and closed the business, how much cash would you have left to give to shareholders?
Well, ROE was always the measure. People used it to compare companies, but it’s become distorted. So I prefer a return on assets, ROA.
So when I looked at ROA over the years and the median is 4.2%, to me 8% means you really hit it out of the park. You are really doing well; if double digits, even better. And if it hits 15 or 20, it’s just kind of crazy.
Looking more broadly at return on assets, the biggest companies: Amazon was 9.5% and Wal-Mart was 7.7%. Both excellent, excellent numbers.
But UnitedHealth is only at 3.9% ROA. One thing is return on assets are much lower at financial companies because their whole business is assets. If you look at a JPMorgan Chase, they don’t turn those assets and let’s see what the numbers are here.
JPMorgan Chase is 40 billion in assets, out of which they only generate 280 billion, a relatively measly number, of revenues compared to those assets. They are not turning those assets. Their return on assets is only 1.3%. So you can’t compare financial services companies with other industries using ROA. Berkshire Hathaway has a lot of insurance in it, it’s a blend because assets include financial services but also railroads and factories and everything else.
But when you’re comparing non-financial companies, head to head, it’s a reasonable measure to study.
Take Costco is 10.5%. That’s an awesome number. And Home Depot is 13.5. Home Depot and TJX have been phenomenally profitable for years. TJX is the outfit that owns TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods.
Return on assets and tells me a lot, especially when you’re comparing two comparable companies that are in the same industry, to tell which one is really profitable. (See my articles https://hooversworld.com/do-you-really-know-what-it-means-to-be-profitable/ and https://hooversworld.com/the-ten-myths-about-profits/ ).
And then I can study the earnings growth and the earnings per share growth of the top 25. NVidia grew at 68.2% a year, compounded over the last ten years, and Amazon grew at 60.7%. Third place finisher is 33.7% for Meta (Facebook). And then they go down from there and some of them have shrunk.
Next is the total return to investors, among the giants over the last ten years the tops are 72.4% on Nvidia and 27.6% at Apple, compounded annually.
That’s a pretty darn good investment.
Now I turn to the dollars of profit dollar column. Here’s one way I do use it. I scan down.
I know these companies are listed in order of sales. So the first company I see is bigger than the one below it, and so on down the list. So companies of similar size are next to each other and grouped together. When I look at profits coming down from Amazon in this column, Amazon made 77 billion, Wal-Mart 21, UnitedHealth 12, Apple 112. Alphabet 132. CVS Health 1.8, Berkshire Hathaway 67, McKesson 3.3, ExxonMobil 28.9, Cencor the drug wholesaler 1.6, Microsoft 101.
By scanning down similar sized companies like that, looking at the profits instead of the revenues by which they are listed, some companies just pop out, like Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, compared with the others.
Then I go diving deeper down into the list.
Just grab a random page.
This whole page, it covers from the 178th biggest to number 227, companies that did between 19.5 and 25.5 billion in sales, still very very large enterprises. So these are all the same sized companies. Now I just scan down that dollars of profits column and my eye can follow it quickly, notice which ones have more digits.
If it’s a money loser, the profits are in parentheses, so that sticks out. What I see when scanning the whole page, the ones that made the most money last year were Union Pacific (railroad) 7.1 billion, Newmont Mining at 7 billion, and 6.9 billion at Altria. Altria was part of the old Philip Morris. They still make a lot of money making cigarettes. And even though the industry’s declining, they know how to get price increases. Those profits were down 38% from the year before, so they were even bigger in the past.
Crazy. So they’re making 7 billion on sales of 20, just crazy.
But Kraft Heinz lost 5.8 billion. They’re the only loser on the whole page. There are also several companies that only made $300-500 million, so it is a wide range from those numbers to 7 billion.
I don’t want to overemphasize return on sales, but going down to the list, I look at it that way and those companies with extreme high or low numbers pop out at me. Now I need to look at the other columns.
Next, I look at their return on assets. If I look at that same group of $25 billion companies, which once made the highest return on assets, it’s Adobe. It’s the highest at 24.2% ROA, a phenomenal number.
And then we’ve got a few double digit guys. Second highest on the page is Altria at 19.8%. We have Colgate-Palmolive, a wonderful company founded in 1806, at 13.1% and Ross Stores at 13.8%, which is the second place guy against TJX in the discount apparel world.
Kraft Heinz lost money and a several companies in the group made 1- 3% Returns on the Assets in 2025.
If we take the entire Fortune 500 list, the median return on assets is 4.2%. The median return on sales is 8.2%, and median Return on equity is 13.2%.
Over the ten-year span, the median revenue growth of the 500 companies is 5.5%, profit growth is 9.0%, and the return on the stocks has been 12%.
Those are medians with half the companies doing better and half doing worse. It’s not the same as the average, because the average is going to be more heavily weighted by NVidia and the bigger companies.
The total Fortune 500 companies did talk about 21 trillion in revenue, 2.1 trillion in profits, a market cap of 54 trillion, and assets of 64 trillion. The median company had 26,000 employees and now they range up to 2 million.
After the 500 list, the magazine goes on, it lists the arrivals, the new companies that joined, and the departures. And it lists the 47 companies out of the 500 that lost money. And who lost the most? The lost biggest loss was EchoStar 14.5 billion dollars.
Then it goes into a series of short lists of the top 20 by different measures, which are just great.
One cool page shows how many of the 500 companies are headquartered in each city. Houston, 27, Dallas 24, New York area 62, Chicago 27, L.A. 9, San Francisco 20, San Jose 22.
State wise: over the last ten years, Texas gone from 51 to 57, California has gone from 51 to 56, New York has gone from 55 to 53, Illinois from 36 to 29, and Ohio from 24 to 29, which is interesting that Ohio has gained.
The magazine continues with the fastest growing companies over one, five and ten years.
And in terms of profits growth over ten years, Nvidia hit 68% of year followed by Amazon, Netflix, Arista Networks, and Comfort Systems. Next are Meta, Newmont Mining, Kinder Morgan (oil), tech company KLA, Adobe, and Interactive Brokers.
Next are the 20 most profitable companies by total dollars, ROS and ROE. Then top 20 by revenues per dollar of assets, per dollars of equity, and per employee, where the median is $700,000 in sales per employee but Galaxy Digital generates $87 million a year per employee!
Then the little lists are the biggest companies by market value, which we will show in an upcoming history chart. As of March 31st, 2026, Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walmart lead the way. Then Eli Lilly, JPMorgan Chase, ExxonMobil, Visa, Johnson & Johnson, MasterCard, Costco, Oracle, Chevron and Netflix give you all 20 of the most valuable companies.
Another good list is the biggest companies by number of employees: 2.1 million at Walmart, 1.6 million at Amazon. 470,000 at Home Depot. 455,000 at Concentrix, 415,000 at Target, and 408,000 at FedEx are the top six, followed by Kroger, United Health, Berkshire Hathaway, Starbucks, TJX and on down through UPS at 350,000.
Then there are lists of the top 20 companies by investor return including dividends, for one, five, and ten year periods.
So all those list are worthy of study. And then the last part of what they do is a ranking within industries, so they break them into 64 different industries categories. And so I can look at something like beverages, and it’s just Coca-Cola, Keurig Dr. Pepper, Molson Coors, Constellation, and Monster beverage. PepsiCo isn’t in there because they have a huge food business, including Frito-Lay. So they’re over in the food table.
Those industry tables compare revenues, profits, profit as percent of sales (ROS) and profits as a percent of shareholders equity (ROE). Those can be very interesting because you look at these companies in an industry, side by side and the best and worst records really really pop out. They make me say things like, “Wow, I didn’t realize those guys were shellacking everybody that much” or “Wow, I thought they were more profitable than that.”
it’s looking at companies within an industry, but also looking at them in the whole overall view of big companies and how they fit in, how they compare. What drives profits and all that? They’re just numbers, right? All that has to lead to really thinking it through and analyzing and trying to understand the whys.
What are the differences? Why the differences? How did these companies get to where they are? Why did some decline and some completely fail?
What does history tell us? Why only four leaders in 72 years? What does that tell us?
That’s the whole idea of the American Business History Center; to try to try to see what history says and try to get a broader perspective, as well as try to get inspiration from the great leaders and great companies of the past.
Everybody studies Apple, Microsoft, and the other tech giants, with good reason. But you don’t know how they end up, you don’t know how they turn out.
I can study the history of Sears Roebuck and see the rise, the peak, the plateau, then the long, slow decline, then the rapid decline and death. I can study Westinghouse Electric or RCA, which dominated consumer electronics in America, retailers like W.T. Grant and Montgomery Ward. We recently posted about International Harvester and you really can see the whole story, the rise and fall.
To me what’s really amazing about some of these companies are the ones that don’t die, that survive decade after decade.
Procter & Gamble was founded in 1837 and is stronger today than it’s ever been. John Deere was founded in 1837, stronger today than it’s ever been. Colgate-Palmolive was founded in 1806, incredibly strong today, a global company. How did those companies survive? Is it the nature of what they make? Is it the quality of the management? Is it the development of the brand? How does a Coca-Cola stay on top?
To me, those are fascinating questions.
It is also the competition. I love sports. I was watching the World Cup. I love IndyCar racing. I love basketball, football, especially at the college level. I come from Indiana where basketball ruled and I live in Texas, where football rules and those are all exciting.
The Yankees versus the Red Sox and the Lakers against the Celtics and the Indiana Pacers against everybody. Those are all exciting.
But there is an equally exciting battle between General Motors and Ford and Tesla and Toyota and Volkswagen, between Amazon and Walmart, that affects a lot more people and affects real people’s lives. And there is a scoreboard! That scoreboard is the Fortune 500.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little audio or the transcript. Thank you for reading or listening.
Gary Hoover
Executive Director
American Business History Center
