Fortunate: Walmart's got competition at the top of the Fortune 500

6/6/23 8:00PM

Turning over?

‍The Fortune 500, Fortune magazine’s yearly ranking of America’s biggest companies by annual revenue, was released on Monday, with Walmart taking the top spot for the 11th year in a row after sales rose 6.6% to $611 billion in the last financial year.

However, that streak of dominating the index could soon come to an end, as online retail giant Amazon continues its campaign to close the gap on its brick-and-mortar counterpart. Also looking to challenge for the top spot are ExxonMobil — the last company other than Walmart to top the list back in 2012 — and the most valuable company in the world, Apple.

‍Most fortunate

‍The Fortune 500 list was first published in 1955, and it certainly looked a little different back then. The tech giants, health companies, and retailers of today are notably absent in the upper end of the rankings, with 1955’s list topped by General Motors alongside food makers, steel and electric firms, and oil companies (two of which are now nested under the ExxonMobil umbrella).

And the names at the top of the list will likely dramatically shift again in the next 70 years too — just 10 years ago, Walmart’s fiercest rival Amazon sat 51st on the Fortune 500. Indeed, even back in 2017’s edition, Bezos’s company was $350bn a year off the number 1 spot, but the 6 years since have proved how quickly the business landscape can change.

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Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s CEO and founder, was also an early Anthropic investor

A chess prodigy and an actual a knight of the realm in the UK, it’s perhaps no surprise that Demis Hassabis has made some strategic moves about his exposure to AI upside. According to people familiar with the matter, the influential AI architect became an angel investor in Anthropic, currently behind many of the leading AI models, per Arena AI leaderboards.

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

Google, which bought DeepMind, the company that Hassabis cofounded and heads to this day, for a reported ~$400 million in 2014, is also a key Anthropic investor. The tech giant reportedly plans to invest up to $40 billion in the AI company as part of the mutually beneficial relationship the pair have forged, with reports that Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion in the other direction on Google’s cloud services over the next five years.

I’m playing all sides, so I always come out on top

In addition to his financial support for Anthropic, Hassabis has also invested in a range of AI startups launched by colleagues, such as Inflection AI, a company set up by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman (who is now CEO of Microsoft AI), as well as efforts from other collaborators, like David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Hassabis also emerged as a recurring figure on the fringes of the recent Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial, cropping up repeatedly in testimonies and court documents and appearing to live, as The Verge put it, “rent-free” in Musk’s head.

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis emerges as early Anthropic investor

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

I’m playing all sides, so I always come out on top

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

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