The Liberty Daily 
(The Epoch Times)—Online retail giant Amazon unseated brick-and-mortar rival Walmart as the top company on the Fortune 500 ranking, ending Walmart’s 13-year run as the nation’s highest revenue-producing company.
The 2026 Fortune 500 list was published online on June 3 and will hit newsstands on June 16. Since Fortune launched its Top 500 list in 1955, only four companies have ever held the No. 1 spot. The other two were General Motors and Exxon Mobil.
“You can’t succeed at that kind of scale without persuading millions of people to trust you,” Fortune Executive Editor Matt Heimer said in a statement.
“From Amazon’s historic rise to the battles for customer loyalty at Microsoft, Boeing, and American Express, the companies featured in this issue share a common thread: They understand that size means nothing without that trust.”
Amazon debuted on the Fortune 500 just over two decades ago at 492nd place. Its net sales in the fourth quarter of 2025 jumped 14 percent year over year to help the Seattle, Washington-based e-commerce and cloud services provider close the year with $716 billion in revenue, Amazon reported in February.
Walmart, meanwhile, reported net sales of $706 billion for the fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, up by 4.7 percent from net sales of $674 billion for the previous fiscal year.
Google, YouTube, and Waymo parent Alphabet climbed two spots on the list to No.5 and retained its title as the most profitable company with more than $100 billion. Google in February reported net income of $132 billion on revenue of $402 billion for 2025—a profit milestone for any company featured on the Fortune 500. NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft are the only other companies to top $100 billion in profit.
Rounding out the list’s Top 10 are UnitedHealth Group at No. 3, Apple at No. 4, CVS at No. 6, followed by Berkshire Hathaway, medical-surgical and pharmaceutical supplier McKesson, Exxon Mobil, and pharmaceutical wholesaler Cencora.
Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s first $4 trillion company by market valuation, was No. 16 on the list. It debuted on the Fortune 500 list at No. 387 nine years ago.
Financial companies took 95 total spots on the list and accounted for $4.7 trillion in revenue and $474 billion in profit, Fortune said. The healthcare sector had eight companies in the Top 25 and accounted for $3.6 trillion in combined revenue.
Texas led all states with 57 Fortune 500 companies headquartered there, generating a combined $2.8 trillion in revenue. California and New York followed with 56 and 53 headquarters, respectively.
Texas received a boost in the rankings from Chevron’s move from San Ramon, California, to Houston in 2024. Other Fortune 500 companies that have left the Golden State for Texas include Oracle, CBRE, Hewlett Packard, Tesla, Public Storage, and McAfee.
The 57 Fortune 500 companies in Texas are the state’s most since 2010, Fortune said. Houston is home to 25 Fortune 500 companies, including Phillips 66 and Sysco. Eleven Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in Dallas, including AT&T and CBRE, while Austin is home to Tesla and Oracle.
Despite slipping to second place overall, California’s Fortune 500 businesses significantly eclipsed any other state in economic value. Its Fortune 500 companies were worth more than $20 trillion in market value, accounted for $647 billion in profit, and employed more than 2.8 million people, Fortune said.
