Succession is coming to an end this Sunday, after four seasons and nearly five years of deception, greed, murder, and hijinx. HBO’s satire has garnered universal acclaim chronicling the cunning yet often hapless Roy family dynasty. Could the fledgling family business, Waystar Royco, earn its keep on the most important list in business without GoJo’s help? If it is to be said, so it be—so it is.
The fictional media and telecom giant at the center of HBO’s smash series Succession is, like much of telecom, in a moment of crisis. In the fictional world of the Roy family, that’s no different. But first, some context.
Waystar Royco, founded in the early 1970s by pater familias Logan Roy, is something of a Frankensteinian mix of two distinct and dysfunctional empires: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Sumner Redstone’s Viacom. Fortune has been covering sprawling businesses like those since 1929. Should it ever materialize in our universe, we will cover Waystar exhaustively. In the Succession universe, at latest, Waystar is bigger—both dramatically and by revenue—than real-life Fox and News Corp combined.
The conglomerate, which includes far-right-leaning print and television news, entertainment studios, and parks/cruises divisions, is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and operates in 50 countries and across four continents. Logan Roy’s family—namely, his four awful children, Connor, Kendall, Roman, and Siobhan—hold majority ownership. At least for now.
But then came GoJo, a Norway-based tech company led by bombastic, Elon Musk-adjacent CEO Lukas Matsson. Before his untimely passing, Logan hoped a deal with GoJo would thrust the old-school, print-media-heavy Waystar into the modern age—even if it meant screwing his sycophant kids out of their coveted leadership positions. (Much like that of News Corp, the planned merger flamed out spectacularly.)
All season, 2.3 million American viewers have seen the not-serious-people kids and Matsson jockeying for control (even getting a presidential election reminiscent of 2016 involved).
As we head into the final episode, we will learn which slime puppy is taking the reins, whether they’ll ultimately sell to the Swedes, and—if there’s any justice—what happened to Roman’s kid from Season 1, episode 1. But back to business: We checked the data, and we’ve emerged with receipts. Where would Waystar take its place on the Fortune 500?
The price of democracy? $100 billion.
Based on Fortune’s analysis, Waystar Royco’s estimated market value falls within a $95 billion to $105 billion range. That puts the Roy family business in 122nd place on the 2022 Fortune 500.
The Fortune 500 rankings are based on total revenues for their respective fiscal years. To get that, we divided Waysar’s $100 billion market capitalization by its price-to-sales ratio of 3.5, which gave us an estimated $28.5 billion.
Every value—including Waystar’s market value—is based on some sort of financial ratio multiple. In this case, we used price-to-sales. To find out how big a company is, you reverse it: With its revenue and its price-to-sales figure (which some fan blogs had graciously provided) we reverse-engineered to find the valuation.
You’ll have to check back next month to see where that lands them on the 2023 Fortune 500 rankings, but judging by last year’s list, they’re just below coffee chain Starbucks and confectionery Mondelez and just above pharma giant Eli Lilly and tech stalwart Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
It’s anyone’s guess where GoJo would land.
