Amazon placed No. 1 on the Fortune 500 ranking on Wednesday, overtaking Walmart’s 13-year streak as the highest-earning U.S. company.
The online retailing giant surpassed $700 billion in revenue last year, with a 12% year-over-year increase, according to the annual list that ranks America’s 500 largest companies by total revenue for the previous fiscal year.
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Amazon’s two-decade rise to the top of the Fortune 500 is the result of a dramatic shift in consumer preferences due to technological change. The company’s dethroning of the big-box store giant is the first time Walmart has fallen out of first place since 2012, when it was second to energy and gas company Exxon Mobil.
Meanwhile, Alphabet, Google’s massive parent company and conglomerate, stood as Fortune’s “most profitable company,” with $132 billion in earnings. Rounding out the top 10 are UnitedHealth Group, Apple, Alphabet, CVS Health, Berkshire Hathaway, McKesson, Exxon, and Cencora.
The total of Fortune 500 companies covers two-thirds of the U.S. GDP, “with $21.0 trillion (up 5%) in revenues, $2.1 trillion (up 12%) in profits, and $55 trillion (up 19%) in market value, while employing 30.5 million people worldwide.” This year’s required revenue threshold to make the top 500 was $7.5 billion, an increase of 5% from last year.
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The 2026 list featured a record 56 women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies. Their companies represented 11.2% of Fortune 500 company revenue, the highest share in the list’s history, and “the fourth consecutive year the figure has cleared double digits,” Fortune reported.
The announcement comes on the heels of news that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and AI giant Anthropic have filed paperwork for an initial public offering. Anthropic’s announcement gave the company an expected valuation of $965 billion despite the company’s dispute with the War Department, which claims the company refused to offer its services for lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. As for SpaceX, the anticipated IPO is projected to be the largest ever, with up to $80 billion raised from investors, which would make Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
