Earlier this year, 14 companies made the Fortune 500 list for the first time. The idea of a Fortune 500 debut may conjure images of fast-growing tech startups or otherwise nascent corporations. But not all of the ranking’s newcomers fit that profile.
The youngest of this year’s first-time companies, delivery platform DoorDash, was founded in 2013. It entered the Fortune 1000 at No. 769 in 2021 and rose at a steady clip to make the 500 three years later (today, it’s No. 443). Gig economy peers Uber and Airbnb had joined the Fortune 500 ranks in 2020 and 2021 respectively.
The oldest member of the Class of 2024, meanwhile, has been around for more than a century and a half: New York Community Bancorp (No. 457), founded in 1859.
This is one of those juicy Fortune 500 facts that, at first pass, seems unintuitive. But indeed, a company that’s been around for 165 years only now has a high enough revenue to crack the Fortune 500, while it took DoorDash just a decade.
As past editions of this newsletter have underscored, to view any part of the Fortune 500 in a vacuum is to limit your understanding of the list and why it has shaken out the way it has over time, let alone in any given year. The methodology of the list has changed over the years; companies that were not eligible in the list’s first few decades (and in many cases could not have existed, given societal and technological constraints) now dominate the ranking. The Fortune 500 lineup is also a reflection of the economy, so while some sectors are timeless, others rise to prominence because of shifts in consumer demand, policy, or both, because those are often intertwined.
