Waters

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Fortune 500

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

Fortune collaborated with the Diligent Institute to rank the most innovative boards of directors among S&P 500.

Modern Board 2023-Waters Corporation

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The medical supply and lab equipment provider’s board includes highly specialized and acclaimed medical professionals, executives, and financial officers. Many members are doctors themselves, including the chair, Flemming Ornskov, CEO of dermatology health care company Galderma. Other board members include Waters CEO Udit Batra; Pearl Huang, CEO of Dunad Therapeutics; and former managing director of Bain Capital Edward Conard. In April, Waters agreed to acquire light scattering tech firm Wyatt Technology for a staggering $1.36 billion. The company’s stock is up 5% year over year. </span>

Fortune Modern Board 25

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

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Total Return to Investors (last year)

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Total Return to Investors (10 year, annualized)

Get insights into Waters including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

Waters (WAT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Waters | Fortune

Waters (WAT): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Michael Phillis

The Associated Press

Trump’s EPA is about to roll back limits on forever chemicals in drinking water that were imposed by the Biden administration

/2025/05/14/epa-rolling-back-limits-forever-chemicals-pfas-drinking-water-biden-administration/

Jennifer McDermott

Your clothes are shedding millions of microplastics that clog water supplies every time you do laundry. Here’s how to fix it

/well/2025/04/22/microplastics-pollution-health-safety-laundry-clothing-earth-day/

Nestle and Sources Alma face investigations over French mineral water

/europe/2025/02/14/nestle-sources-alma-face-investigations-over-mineral-water-france-perrier-contrex-vittel/

Lindsey Leake

The incredible health benefits of drinking enough water: New study highlights role in weight loss, migraines, and more

/well/article/hydration-water-weight-loss-headache-migraine-kidney-stones/

Emma Hinchliffe

Nina Ajemian

One of the most influential female CEOs in Europe leads a $49 billion company helping others adapt to climate change

/2024/11/15/one-of-the-most-influential-female-ceos-in-europe-leads-a-49-billion-company-helping-others-adapt-to-climate-change/

https://fortune.com/well/2025/04/22/microplastics-pollution-health-safety-laundry-clothing-earth-day/?itm_source=parsely-api

It's a watershed year for the world’s most valuable AI company. It’s rapidly restructuring for revenue, aggressively competing for top AI talent, and fending off competition in its native U.S. and abroad. As the maker of ChatGPT pivots toward a more commercial future, can it maintain its momentum and justify its $300 billion valuation?

Ashley Kramer
Chief Revenue Officer, OpenAI

Andrew Nusca
Editorial Director, Fortune Brainstorm

How OpenAI is Closing Deals

Conferences

I'm excited to introduce now the morning session, the first opening session. This person is leading charge of revenue. At the most valuable AI company in the world, she has a lot to live up to. What was once a research lab now has a reported valuation up to $500 billion. Please welcome the chief revenue officer of OpenAI, Ashley Kramer. She'll be joined by Fortune AI reporter Sharon Goldman. Hello. Hi, Ashley. Hello. I feel like this is my understudy moment. Thanks for standing in fantastic. This is great. So glad you could join us. This is terrific. Good morning, everyone. Um, well, OpenAI was famously founded in 2015 as a research lab, but today you are scaling one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. As its first chief revenue officer, I wanted to write off the bat, ask you how you balance this urgency of revenue growth with those research routes that OpenAI is known for. Yeah, I mean, I think I'd say first and foremost we are a research lab. We're a research. lab that has breakthrough technologies and findings that we turn into real world products that can drive further innovation and so that's what was most exciting for me about joining this company by way of background, I am not a salesperson by nature. I was a software engineer. I've been a chief product officer at my former company Gitlab. I was even a chief technology officer, and throughout my entire career it was all about how We partner with organizations, companies, consumers across the world to really drive change, and that stays first and foremost for us. Our mission remains the same AGI to benefit all of humanity and that's what excites me to be here and part of this mission every day. Absolutely. Well, OpenAI just hit 1 billion in monthly revenue, I think it was in July, which is extraordinary by any measure. At the same time, reports suggest. that the company is also burning cash at an unprecedented pace. From your C to CRO, I'm wondering how you keep driving customer adoption while also, you know, showing investors this is a sustainable business again, kind of like balancing those two things. Yes, it's all about, you know, measuring the usage of what we're creating and making sure that it is driving value. And so the balance is real when we think about it, particularly from the finance level. It's all about making. Making sure we have the capital to make sure we have the capacity for all of these frontier models and making sure that we're delivering the capabilities to organizations, consumers, customers across the world. And so the balance is real, but what energizes me, particularly on the enterprise revenue side, is really the way that these companies are thinking about not just transforming their business but transforming the world together with us and with other partners. Right, the enterprise market, you know, that's something that everyone's going for. You also see enterprise's expectations kind of rising, you know, we're now almost 3 years since Chat GPT came out. These are no longer enterprises that are brand new to using these tools. How have you seen their expectations change and demands for what OpenAI has to offer? So we see a balance. We see the forward thinkers that have been partnering with us for years and you know. Deeply with us as far as research, particularly in healthcare, financial services, retail, so we see those ones really on the bleeding edge. Now we see ones that have a little bit of FOMO around it and are in catch up mode. And so our balance is continuing to partner with those companies, with those customers in understanding what we can do together to drive change, but also figuring out how to make that repeatable across industries, across departments, within organizations, across the customer. right, not just pilots, but the whole idea is to scale it out, right? Real production use cases measuring real ROI, which by the way, is not the easiest thing. We've talked a lot about that here at ROI you have how do you measure the ROI number one question that I get, but it is, it is something that we continue to focus on and we partner with customers on. In the end there are even within organizations sometimes conflicting priorities. I'll give you a real life story. I met. The chief AI officer at a large hospital system and I said to her, How are you going? She was new and I said, How are you going to measure ROI of this joint AI investment that we make together? And she said, I'm going to measure it by better patient safety, faster time to serve patients, and better patient satisfaction. I said, Great, we can do that together. And she said, but my CFO is going to measure dollar ROI. Even within that organization, sometimes conflicting, right? Well, we, we, as I say, we've talked a lot here already at Brainstorm Tech about ROI. Yet, as you said, OpenAI is known for pushing the technology frontier towards AGI, AGI with the mission of benefiting humanity, artificial general intelligence. As chief revenue officer, how do you balance the customer's demand for this practical immediate value? One thing I was thinking, this is kind of silly. But I remember speaking to folks at OpenAI, and they talked about their salespeople being like AGI Sherpas, you know, bringing their organizations toward AGI. Do you see that in the same way today? This was like 2 years ago. Has that shifted? I think, I think it's still going on that, on that pace. When AI and Gen AI was first introduced, it was all about people saving time, being more productive, teams working better together, tasks that used to take a month, then take. We then take a day, then take an hour. Now we're seeing they really want to figure out how to transform. And so I have, I take no credit because I hired hardly any of them. I'm fairly new to the company, world class sales leaders, world class salespeople that really want to integrate with the businesses and understand how to solve these challenges together, a partnership, not a vendorship, because that's the only way that we will drive change together, right? Um, Just turning a little bit to other aspects of the OpenAI business, thinking about the $6.5 billion acquisition of Joni Ives IO positioning OpenAI in the hardware race, which I think is not immediately where people put their thoughts about OpenAI, but they're really going into a lot of different areas. So how do you see that as CRO? Does this mean that OpenAI sees its future, you know, not just as the software powerhouse, but as an integrated hardware? A, how does that shift the whole commercial story to you as far as revenue going forward? I think time will tell on that. I mean, at first what we're focused on is really figuring out how to, you know, inspire, engage, enable with more people. If you think about the trajectory of where even computers have come, it started with command line, then it moved to graphical user interfaces, interacting via mouse, then touch. Now it's time for more of an ambient solution. And I know as much as you do on exactly what that will be. So if that's the next question, I do not know the next question. I'm not asking for your prediction on what hardware, but for us it's about, you know, AI more accessible to everyone in a way that that the world is moving. And so we are super excited to have more possibilities on what we can do on top of these frontier models that we've been creating since 2015. Absolutely, I want to make sure that I let you guys know that that we're open for questions up here and I'll let you guys think about that a little bit, um, but definitely put your thoughts in motion and I'll come back to you guys. um, but you, you, you've said that one of your goals is to ensure OpenAI is seen as a trusted partner to enterprises, you know, not just a vendor but really partnering with these organizations, some of which are very large, um, but amid lawsuits. You know, we've got regulatory scrutiny. There's intense debates about AI's risks. How do you protect the brand, you know, while scaling aggressively? I feel like this is something that OpenAI has, you know, been wrestling with all along, and here you are having to like take that forward. How does that work for you? Yeah, and it's the number one question I answer in enterprise is will you use my data to train your models? The answer is no. Trust. The safety security always top of mind. A real example is we launched our first open source open weight model a little over a month ago, and it was launched late because it wasn't ready. Sam publicly tweeted that we wanted to put more safety testing and guardrails around it before we launched it. So for us it's less about time to market to get there first and more about is it the most trusted privacy first model. Solution out there and it is definitely a conversation I have with enterprises, but we have some of the largest healthcare financial services companies working with us and so we couldn't do that if we didn't have that top of mind. I'm curious, is there an example you can give up a client that you worked with where like you, I don't know how to change the timeline or really wanted to make sure that things were, you know, set and in order before releasing something for them. You know, to make sure that everything was as safe and trustworthy as possible. Yeah, particularly for the ones that we deeply partner with because we are getting glimpses of their data just within their walls. We're doing e-valves together. We're building together and so we less so have hard dates as milestones and more outcome-based milestones and So as long as we are aligned on that and we wouldn't go into the partnership unless we were, that's more of how the team thinks about going to market with customers versus on August 1, 2026 this must launch. It is when we are ready for this outcome and we feel all of these safety checks have passed and we're ready to go, we will launch together. Any questions for Ashley so far? We've got some mic runners here. OK. I hope you've had your coffee, people. Oh, I think we've got one over here. Hi, good morning. Um, thank you for being here. What's your name and where are you from? Danilo Tomanovic, Synchronicity Angel Ventures. I know you just joined the OpenAI team, but I think a real crucible moment was November of 22 when we had Dev Day. And one of the things I was paying attention to was that initial group of enterprise companies that were there. So I'm wondering if you could provide a little bit of visibility, for instance, in Shopify as being one. I'm from Toronto, so this is, this is, yeah, it is near and dear. I love Toby. Toby is a gift as a CEO. He's remarkable. He's developed an incredible culture there and Uh, the entire team deserves all the success as you do, but I'm wondering if you could, that's something that's missing for me when I'm reading the press is could you give us some visibility in terms of the people that had started with you in November of 22 and then perhaps some insight as far as what they've learned along the way, because a lot has changed in terms of technology and adoption and we can talk about the metrics, but I'm more concerned about that initial group and where are they? Today we continue to grow with even our earliest customers and partners, and what we've done is learned along the way. So November 2022 was our first launch of Chat GPT. We launched Chat GBT because we needed more ways to make our deep models that we had been developing accessible to more people. So if you're a large organization that has a deep developer team, you could use API platform, but what about people that didn't have that? And so we go on this journey with customers like Shopify figuring out if it's going to build joint solutions together, leveraging the model directly, whether it's going to empower. We're doing a lot of what we call wall to wall chat GPT deployments, making it the digital operating system of the company, and then there's more. can do along the lines of commerce partnerships, inviting more of the startup ecosystem in, more of the retailers in to have that one consistent experience. And so we're super grateful for the early enterprises because we continue to partner closely on what we can do next together. So again we can achieve that overall mission together of AGI to benefit all of humanity. Beyonce, oh, sorry, we've got one more here. Let's take one more. Thank you. Let us know who you are and who you're with. Hi, my name is Gillian Mannis. I'm with the European Innovation Council. We're a deep tech fund for the European Commission. So I'm just wondering with the regulatory, you know, landscape being so fluid and obviously the AI Act in Europe and other countries trying to figure this all out. Is OpenAI or will open AI influence or try to inform the global geopolitical landscape in order to help us all use AI in a much more constructive, intentional, and mutually beneficial way. Absolutely, and we have a large global affairs team that is focused purely on that. I'll be in Europe next week meeting with some of them. And so for us this is a global effort, and we realize just like when data started moving to the cloud and there were different rules and regulations depending on what country you're in, what region you're in. Um, but we, we do want to keep trust, privacy, safety, security top of mind, and that means trying to have influence to make sure that it is a global effort and we're, and we're complying with regulation and compliance to the needs of the specific regions. So absolutely. I just want to, speaking of Europe, um, globally, uh, you know, OpenAI's competition has kind of really risen up, especially over the past year and a half or so. When Chachi PT first came out, a lot of other players were playing catch up, but now rivals in Europe, the US, China are moving fast. How do you think about maintaining OpenAI's positioning and proving that the valuation is justified? especially when you're working with these larger companies who might have different choices as far as which company they want to go with. Yeah, for us it's all about prioritizing where we can jointly with enterprises find the most value. So you see a lot of different players in the space doing things like popping different flavors of a chat up for free. You see. Is doing big marketing efforts around industry efforts for us, we want the value to be provided by what we're actually driving, whether it's for the customer or the customer's customers. So for us it's all about the usage and the value and prioritizing that. And again, when you focus even from an industry perspective, things become repeatable and you understand how you can go from one bank to the other and help them. And then build on top of that. And so we're more focused on making sure we're research led first to build those products versus in the enterprise the big marketing buzz to try to just capture a wider audience. We're doing it very thoughtfully. I've spoken to folks at OpenAI about kind of beyondchat GPT, these bespoke deployments tailored to specific industries. You know, how do you see the future of those industry specific models? Is there going to be, is that really the future? Do you think when it comes to enterprise, the more bespoke and customized the better? Do you see that really outpacing the consumer subscriptions as the main revenue driver for OpenAI? I think it'll be a balance of both. We have both today, but when we We partner and we can leverage the data specific to a healthcare organization or financial services. We can go deeper with them when we have forward deployed engineers involved with their teams to build those solutions, we can move faster and drive deeper solutions. And so I believe it will be a mix of both. I just found out. This stat actually a few weeks ago that 90% of the world's data is not being analyzed right now. It's either locked up in unstructured places. It's in PDFs, it's in emails, or it's deeply locked within an organization that has compliance around it. So if we can help even get a glimpse of that, we can build much more powerful solutions together. And, I've got time for one more question here. This is your moment, OK, right here. I, I don't know if it's my moment. Thank you for coming. My name is Sati Muha Krishnan. I run technology at Allied Financial, the largest digital bank in the US. We were one of the early adopters of OpenAI. We still continue to run on OpenAI. Um, she asked a question about regulations, and I want to connect it to what you just said. So, are you open to partnering and creating, uh, not an LLM but an SLM? small language model that is specific to banks that will satisfy the regulators and, and give us the opportunity to unleash innovation at a much faster rate than we do now. It's absolutely something customers request and they want them air gaps within their walls. This is, this is one of the many reasons for our open source model being leverage. Because you can actually take that model and specifically put it within the walls of your organization, financial services, particularly government, we're asking for that. And so that is one of the many paths that I absolutely see emerging in the future, and we're happy to partner with customers on what that means. And thank you for being a customer. Well, we are out of time, so sad. Thank you so much, Ashley. Everyone give it up for Ashley Kramer from OpenAI. Thank you so much.

It's safe to say that the global trade landscape today is like a rollercoaster, with corporate leaders being left to manage the cascading impacts of shifting tariff policies, a head- spinning geo-political landscape and talks of stagflation. The challenges make building a resilient supply chain a business imperative. Is AI the solution to navigating these turbulent waters? We'll hear from two leaders about their strategies for building adaptive supply chain frameworks that are made to withstand geopolitical pressures and regulatory changes –  essential knowledge for operational executives balancing short-term volatility with long- term strategic vision. 

BUILDING A RESILIENT SUPPLY CHAIN IN TODAY'S TURBULENT WORLD

Dan Durn | Chief Financial Officer, Adobe
Mandy Fields | Chief Financial Officer, e.l.f. Beauty
Xihao Hu | Chief Financial Officer, TDBank
Ishaan Seth | Senior Partner, New York, McKinsey & Company

Moderated by:
Geoff Colvin | Senior Editor-At-Large, FORTUNE
Sheryl Estrada | Senior Writer, CFO Daily, FORTUNE


Maintaining a Growth Mindset in Turbulent Economic Waters

Dan Durn , Adobe
Mandy Fields, e.l.f. Beauty
Xihao Hu, TDBank
Ishaan Seth, McKinsey & Company
Moderated by:
Geoff Colvin, FORTUNE
Sheryl Estrada, FORTUNE

Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12. Waters won eight triple crowns in 2022 and is coached by her mother Leigh Waters, who is also her doubles partner. According to her rep, she now earns a high-six-figure salary and is sponsored by Fila, Paddletek, and Carvana among others. 

Meet this pro pickleball player earning six figures at 16 years old

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Anna Leigh Waters is the top female pickleball player at 16 after becoming a professional player at 12.

Teen pickleball player Anna Leigh Waters earns six figures

At the beginning of the year. This was my first ever triple crown at the end of the year. This is actually my eighth triple crown of 2022. This is the biggest trophy I have ever received. I'm Anna Lee Waters. I'm 16 years old and I'm the number one female professional pickle ball player. Mhm. Pickle ball has become so popular because anyone can play, any age can play and any skill level can play. You can have fun, you can be competitive. It's just a sport for everyone with the first pick in the 2023 major league pick a ball draft. The new Jersey fives select Anna Lee Waters so good everywhere on the court. There is no weakness in this young lady, Anna Lee was unquestionably the number one pick I think for everybody in the draft, people are picking men and women and to have a number one pick that was a female player and to have more women's picks in the top 10 than men was really remarkable and says something about pickle ball. She is a young phenom ranked number one in the world, both in singles, mixed doubles and women's doubles. She is the most dominant player in the game at the tournament of champions. I won the most or had the most points in that tournament. I was ranked the number one women's singles player at 14 years old. I feel like the achievement that I'm most proud of didn't actually happen this year. It happened in 2019 when I won nationals with my mom. I remember after we won the match, she like jumped and then she started like running around the court and I was like chasing her, like wanting to hug her and like celebrate with her waters and waters. It was our first huge tournament that we went together. I think I had an out of body experience. We had reached a goal that, you know, that we had set because I never thought of pickleball as a job. But at the same time, like, I guess it kind of is, it's a very fun job, especially this year. A lot of big companies have gotten into the sport. I've also seen a big growth in like celebrity pickleball. I've had a lot of sponsorship opportunities. I have an agent now. I am so young and to, you know, learn as many things as I'm learning and, you know, be a part of sponsorship deals and learning about contracts. Sometimes I'll see like the checks that come in and I'm like, save it. I'm saving, I'm put in the bank. I try not to spend my money. You see someone like Michael Jordan who can like design their own shoe and then I'm sponsored by. So I'm kind of designing a shoe with them. It's just kind of cool that I can be kind of grouped into like an athlete that's making their own shoe, which, which is amazing. Annie and I started playing pickle ball at the exact same day, the exact same second, we evacuated our home in Florida due to a hurricane and we went to visit my father who lived in Pennsylvania and he asked us, you know, do you want to go play pickle ball? And at first we were kind of like, no, because we didn't know what it was. And I was pretty young. I think I was 10. So we thought it was an older person sport, but we went and from the moment we stepped on the court, we were, we were hooked. First time I hit the ball, I was like in love with the sport. We played like three times a day for like two weeks straight while we were up there. From when I first started playing, I played with my grandfather and my mom and I can still play with my grandfather and my mom. It's fun, but it's also embarrassing. Uh, as I got older and older, obviously, I got worse and worse and as she got older, she got better and better. Unfortunately, at the previous national tournament Lee was injured. So when Anna Lee was going into a finals match, she had nobody to warm her up. So I actually warmed her up. I really don't know the outcome of the success of the warm up, but she won. So I guess I did something right. Anna Lee and I play a few times a week. Some of that is playing, some of that is drilling, watching Annaly compete. She's feisty. She's an animal. She's an absolute beast on the court. I'm a full time student, but I am also a full time professional pickleball player. So hopefully I'm gonna make a career out of this. You got that right on his mic. Can you send it to me? Yeah, when I'm home, I usually play pickle ball five days a week. I usually drill like two times a week and then I'll play games three times a week. If I'm drilling, it's around two hours. And if I'm playing games, it can be anywhere from like 2 to 3 hours. And I'm usually in the gym five days a week as well. I would say average in a day, I'm working out like four hours and even on my off days, I'm doing either some kind of cardio or walking. She started off as a soccer player and tennis player converted, I think at 11 and she learned the game went pro at 12 lightning quick hands. Great court awareness, great court coverage. I have a lot of different skill sets from different sports for soccer. It was, it's definitely like the footwork and the fast sprinting and the lateral movement and stuff for tennis. It's definitely the form. The form is very similar if you watch tennis and pickle ball. But there is a big difference between like strategy and pickleball and tennis. So I had to learn that Anna Lee and I had come from tennis and the minute I stepped on the court, I just wanted to hit the ball hard and everybody kept telling us like you're not playing correctly. This isn't how you play. You have to hit soft, you have to hit these dinks. But it's just what came so true to, to me and Anna Lee was this power game. So we just continued with our game. And the next thing you know, we were winning national championships at the pro level and we were known for our aggressive style of play. A lot of people ask the question like, how do you guys play on the court together? Isn't it hard that she's your mom and that she's your daughter is in the dynamic. Weird. But I feel like for us it's the opposite. Like we have this mother daughter intuition where we know where the other one's gonna be on the court. And if we miss a shot, we know the other person is not going to be mad at us. So we just feel like you know, we can play how we want to play. We don't have to worry about disappointing our partner because no matter what happens on the court, we're a family and that's what families do. They stick together. I travel with not only my mom but also my dad win or lose. Me and my family always go out to eat and I have a really special bond with my grandmom. She's been home schooling me from third grade on, I'm in 11th grade. Even before I started playing pickleball, I was home schooling and it just really worked out because I couldn't travel and do all the things that I'm doing with pickleball right now becoming a professional athlete. I am so proud of Anna Lee. Her coaches and her other sports have always told us what an athlete she was and what potential she had. But you still don't necessarily go to like, oh professional athletes. This is probably a very futuristic goal, but I want to play pickle ball in the Olympics one day I grew up watching the Olympics and I think it would be really cool to represent my country. And I also want to see pickleball grow like in other countries. I also want to see pickle ball grow in like high schools and get younger kids involved. And that's something that I'm working on now. So in the beginning of this year, one of my goals was to get a triple crown and I ended up getting eight this year, which was amazing. If I've accomplished the goal, there's still something better you can do. So I feel like next year I'm gonna try to get nine triple crowns, uh, which would be, might be difficult, but I'm gonna try to do it. I'm just really, you know, enjoying the ride and I wanna keep going as long as I can. Uh When we came home, we decided we were going to get a ping pong table. I think we played about two weeks before Anna Lee got so good that nobody wanted to play with her anymore. And I don't think we've played ping pong since.

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