Name: Here’s What the Fortune 500 List Might Look Like in 2026
Uploaded: 2016-06-09
Duration: 5 min 56 s
Description: A lot of new names could be leading the pack.

Erin, you've been compiling this list looking out ten years from now. Explain how you can predict the future? It's not necessarily the most accurate prediction, but it's the best that we've got. We've taken five years of past compound annual growth And sort of average them out and basically take the top growers of the last five years and assuming they're gonna keep growing at that same pace, you know created the list based on that. It's not totally perfect because a lot of companies especially when you When you get to the size of Fortune 50 or Fortune 10 companies, grow by massive acquisition. And so those are things that take a long time to digest. And they might not be repeated. So, for example, we've got Energy Transfer Equity, number nine. They had a massive acquisition in 2015, and that's obviously going to kind of distort the numbers, but overall it's an interesting way to look at which companies have been growing the fastest and are going to continue, possibly, to ascend on the Fortune 500. Right, so what was the number one on this new list? I don't remember. What I remember most notably, because I cover tech is that Twitter was number two. Twitter is a company that has been under a lot of pressure lately and they are not even in the fortune 500. They might be fortune 5000 They have about $ 3 billion in revenue, but they have grown 100 % in each year, their revenue. So that is a very impressive number. Obviously, it's easier to grow when you're a smaller company than when you become a number one like Walmart with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. Yeah, and that's a huge surprise, right. Twitter, nobody thinks that the company doesn't have problems and yet- Yes. Not crazy growth. Their business side is a bright spot, they're struggling to get more users and so they might be plateauing off on the revenue side. Right, right. Another company that I was wondering about with regards to this kind of projected idea is Walmart versus Amazon. So kind of projecting forward You know, where do these two shake out? Walmart, right now, is at the top of the Fortune 500 list, and it falls in this list to number 14. Which really is pretty good. You know, you don't have hardly any old world companies on this list of the future, but Amazon does beat it out by one slot at number 13. Does that surprise you, Ann? Yeah, I did, but you look at the top of the list now, there's only one tech company, and it's Apple. You look at our list of the future, it's safe to say it's very tech heavy. Right. In an earlier segment, we had Alan Murray and Brian O'Keefe talk, and we discussed Apple, and Alan said, you know, I don't know if If that growth is going to continue, and yet, here we are projecting and money is still good. When you are as big Apple, and you're still growing faster over the last five years average then almost every company on Fortune 500. That is a really impressive feat. Of course, people are going to always be raising questions about the company at the top. I think I remember three this year on the list. Can they continue their growth? In the last five years, they've shown that they can. [ LAUGH ] So, so You know, I'm sure a lot of folks are wondering, and this is a very tech- heavy list, right? You've got list, the unicorn list, this highly valued, fast growth kind of thing. They're all privately held. Now of course, the base on the Fortune 500 is usually something like $ 500 billion in revenue. Yes. So we're not even in the same ballpark here. But should we be surprised or expect that a unicorn company will end up on this list in 10 years. I mean, that's obviously the question on everyone's mind. The most interesting thing every year, the Fortune 500 comes out. I look at this and then I look at the unicorn list. Uber, the top of the unicorn list worth 62 billion dollars. That's more than the vast majority of the market caps of the fortune 500, I think when they were at 50 billion it was more than 80 %, so now they're probably up closer to 90 % as far as market caps go, but. Uber wouldnt make the Fortune 500 list if they were a publicly traded company. Really? Because their revenue isnt high enough. I think that reports say that Uber's net revenue, so that excludes all of the money theyre paying out to drivers, is just over something like one billion dollars. You said before the floor is five billion dollars so Uber wouldnt even be a Fortune 500 company and The other thing to note about this is that Uber is in no hurry to go public. In the last year they've raised 6 billion dollars in private money and they're just finding, every time you think they can't raise more money, they find another place to pull it from and so I think that they are planning to put this off as long as they possibly can. Yeah. I think you also see the trend lines favoring maybe the Unicorns at some point. The average age of a Fortune 500 company is going down, the churn is going up. Interesting. In 1955, when it debuted, only 10 % of those companies are on today's list. So you have an increasing turnover. And so it seems like some newer companies that maybe we haven't even heard of might end up at the top. So Anne, if you were talking to the CEO of some of these companies, and you presented that kind of turnover to them, Would you say, hey that's life. You're not gonna last very long. What would you tell them if you wanted to help them stick around? I don't know if I would tell them to stick around. I think I would extol the virtues of creative destruction, and talk about how healthy churn on the list is actually really good news for the economy. Ellen Murray brought up creative destruction earlier today in his segment. And If you look at some of the tech stalwarts that have been on the fortune 500 for a decade or maybe two, Oracle, HP, EMC, a lot of them are undergoing some kind of awkward changes right now, some of them are doing big M & A transactions that are completely transformational. Some of them are spinning off like you saw eBay with PayPal and HP split itself into two. I mean they're realizing that they have to do some drastic things to stay relevant and continue to be growth companies. Is that a strategy Ann to just kind of merge your way to stay on this list, this Fortune list? I mean, you look at the energy companies we're projecting ahead. They're really consolidating. Is it a good strategy? It's hard to say. In terms of value creation, there's revenue, it's great. Well, the lesson I've got from all this is this is a tough business. Business is a tough business. Business is a tough business. [ LAUGH ] Exactly. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

A lot of new names could be leading the pack.