Category Greatest Companies

The story of the greatest manufacturer the world has ever produced does not begin with a car. It begins with a loom. In the early twentieth century, a self-taught Japanese inventor named Sakichi Toyoda built a weaving loom unlike any…

Every time a card taps a terminal, somewhere in the world, hundreds of times every second, a tiny fraction of a cent flows to a company most people never think about. Not the bank that issued the card. Not the…

Before dawn on January 5, 1914, in a freezing Michigan winter, thousands of men gathered in the dark outside Ford’s plant in Highland Park. Some had arrived at three in the morning to hold their place. They had come because…

When Nvidia became, in July 2025, the most valuable company in the history of the world, crossing four trillion dollars on the back of the artificial-intelligence boom, the achievement was rightly celebrated as Nvidia’s. But Nvidia does not make a…

On a winter night at the very end of 1900, the most important number in American business was written on a single sheet of paper. Charles Schwab, the president of Carnegie Steel and no relation to the brokerage that would…

On a spring afternoon in 1911, a tall, gaunt man in his seventies was playing golf on his estate north of New York City when a messenger brought him news that the Supreme Court of the United States had just…

In 1995, a thirty-year-old chemist named Wang Chuanfu borrowed about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, gathered twenty employees, and started a company in Shenzhen to make rechargeable batteries. Wang’s background was not glamorous. Orphaned young and raised by an…

In July 2012, the magazine Vanity Fair published a long, devastating article with a title that stuck like a label on Microsoft’s back for years: “Microsoft’s Lost Decade.” The writer argued that the company that had once terrified all of…

For most of the 1960s and 1970s, the titans of American retail did not think about Sam Walton at all, and that was the single greatest advantage he ever had. While the giants of the industry, Sears and Kmart and…

In the late 1990s, the internet had a problem that everyone experienced and no one had solved: it was becoming impossibly large, and there was no good way to find anything in it. The search engines of the day were…

In 1954, a fifty-two-year-old salesman named Ray Kroc drove across the country to find out why a single small restaurant in San Bernardino, California, had ordered eight of his milkshake machines. Kroc sold a device called the Multimixer, which could…

Walk into any Costco and you will find, near the exit, a hot dog and a soda for a dollar fifty. That price has not changed since 1985. Through four decades of inflation, through recessions and booms, through the price…