Which magazine compiles and publishes the Fortune 500?

Fortune magazine compiles and publishes the Fortune 500. The annual ranking identifies 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

The list is part of Fortune’s long-running business journalism tradition. It was created by Fortune editor Edgar P. Smith and first appeared in 1955, giving readers a standardized way to compare the scale of major American enterprises. Companies may be publicly traded or privately held, as long as reliable revenue information is available.

Fortune’s name is easy to mix up with Forbes, Bloomberg, or Time. Those publications also report on business, wealth, companies, and markets, but they do not publish the Fortune 500 itself. Forbes produces separate rankings, including the Forbes Global 2000, which uses multiple measures rather than only revenue.

The title also invites a geographic misunderstanding. Fortune publishes the Fortune Global 500 for companies around the world, whereas the unqualified Fortune 500 refers to the largest corporations based in the United States. Related domestic lists include the Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000.