In the paragraphs below, we take a visual tour of the evolution of the largest American companies over the past thirty years.
We’ve posted updates of our annual charts of America’s biggest companies from the recently published Fortune 500. The first chart shows the 25 US public companies with the largest annual revenues (sales) from 1994 through 2024. We believe revenues are the single best way to measure the absolute size and scope of a company (but not necessarily its profits or value, which we will cover in upcoming charts, along with employment size). A second chart shows the 50 largest companies over the same three decades, but requires more scrolling to see all the action.
You can pause and move to any year between 1994 and 2024. (There is also a video of the top 25 chart on YouTube.)
We hope you enjoy these animated charts and get a better understanding of change through time in the American economy. You can find more charts on different topics including population change here.
A Quick Romp through History
Let’s start with the very earliest list produced by Fortune magazine, in 1955 using 1954 final data. At that time, and up through 1993, these lists only included “Industrial” companies, manufacturing and similar businesses. Retailers, financial companies, utilities, and transportation companies were in separate lists that have not been consolidated. So the definitions changed in 1994, resulting in new lists.
Even if one added the big non-industrials like Sears Roebuck, Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea, and American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), the top list would still have been 90% industrials in these early decades.
That “largest company” position, #1, had been back and forth between General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey (later renamed Exxon) for decades, with US Steel being a contender early in the 20th century. By some measures, like employment and assets, AT&T was also enormous throughout this era. (Our article here describes what we termed the three greatest companies of all time.)
America was a nation of heavy, gritty industries. Here we see cars, oil, steel, electrical equipment, and meatpacking at the top. There are no computer, electronics, or pure “tech” companies in the modern sense. Only nine of these twenty companies still stand today as independent companies, and some like General Electric and General Motors have been substantially redesigned since 1954. (Note that Ford Motor is not on the list; Ford did not go public until 1956, nine years after Henry Ford’s death).
Ten years later, little has changed except that Ford became a publicly owned company and International Business Machines (IBM) has come roaring up the list.
By 1974, we are in the era of oil embargoes and gas lines, so the big oil companies (10 of them!) take over more of the list, as they seem to do periodically, as the commodity called oil rises and falls in world markets.
Ten years later, the list contains largely the same firms, though oil prices rose even higher, generating huge revenues for the industry.
Shifting to 1994, we need to adjust our lens a bit, since the list henceforward includes service companies of all types, reducing the number of manufacturing companies to 14 out of the top 20, 70%, in the list below. Since this was the first year that retailers were allowed in this list, the rise of Walmart might not surprise, but in fact in 1984, the chart above, Walmart was less than half the size of #20 Sunoco, so it was far off the list at the start of the decade. In the ten years 1984-94, Walmart grew from $6.4 billion in revenues to $84.3 billion, rising at an annual average rate of 29.4% compounded. During this period, it dethroned first Sears and then Kmart as the largest American retailers; those two later merged, then disappeared. This period also saw IBM joined by Hewlett-Packard (H-P) as one of two tech companies in the top 25, as well as the appearance of a few financial giants.
We may think of the late 1990s and early 2000s as the rise of the Internet and companies like Amazon, but by 2004 the only tech companies were still IBM and H-P. The most lasting newcomers are in healthcare – drug wholesalers McKesson, Cardinal, and AmerisourceBergen (later renamed Cencora), and big pharmaceutical producer Pfizer. This was an era of great merger activity, including in big pharma. Also note that while Sears and Kmart are gone, The Home Depot has risen onto the list quickly, as has Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. And the American “Big Three” automakers are finally dethroned, after about 75 years on top.
While the rise of tech kept accelerating and spreading over the following ten years, by 2014 the only tech company that made a mark at this size level was Apple, in another miraculous rise. But H-P and IBM have dropped down, with no sign yet of the other “Magnificent Seven” tech companies. More healthcare companies join the list here, now up to five companies, including newcomers CVS (the old Melville Shoe Company), UnitedHealth, and Express Scripts (later bought by Cigna). Costco has also made the list.
And finally, we come to the latest reported numbers, for the 2024 year. Here we see even more seismic changes, with newcomers including Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook. None of those companies got to the top overnight! But healthcare now takes up 8 of the top 25 spots. Oil is down to two companies, in part due to lower oil prices and in part due to mergers. General Motors and Ford are way down. Four big financial companies also make this top 25 list.
Here we add one more picture for you, taken from our chart of the top 50 companies. This one shows the lower-ranked companies of 2024, so you can see who is next in line. The only newcomers to the top 50 in 2024 compared to the prior year 2023 are Nvidia, which rose from 65th to 31st in one year and Stonex Group, another financial company, which rose from 66th to 42nd.
You can see the top 20 companies for the earlier era, 1954-1993, here.
Stay tuned in coming weeks to see updated charts based on the highest dollar profit companies, the largest employers, and the most valuable companies by market capitalization.
Gary Hoover
Executive Director
American Business History Center
