Tabla de contenidos para August/September 2024 en Fortune

FOR THIRTY-FIVE years, Fortune has been tracking the world’s largest companies in our Global 500 ranking. It’s a strong barometer of global business, and last year a couple of trends collided to shake it up: Energy prices cooled, knocking down revenue for companies such as Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil; and AI got red-hot, fueling a boom for tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft. Which companies being built today will grow to be the world’s biggest? It’s the job of a venture capitalist to figure that out. No VC firm has picked winners better than Sequoia Capital. In 1978 it gave Steve Jobs $150,000 to create Apple—now worth $3.6 trillion. Sequoia was also first to back Nvidia in 1993. It cut early checks for Google, Cisco, YouTube, and Airbnb.…

In less than two years, artificial intelligence has radically changed how many people write and find information. While searching for details about Supreme Court precedent or polishing a college essay, millions seek help from AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. In his newly published book, Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn explores this new tech-infused reality and what should be done to avert the inevitable pitfalls. In the following excerpt, he focuses on the little-recognized problem of subtle bias in AI and the potentially profound influence it can have on what users believe. TRISTAN HARRIS, cofounder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, has been called “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.” He was…

WHEN 51-YEAR-OLD Pazit Aviv walks her dog in her Silver Spring, Md., neighborhood, it takes an extra 30 minutes as she inevitably gets lost in an impromptu chat with a neighbor. “I know every single person in a three-street radius,” says Aviv, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., suburb for a decade and raised two children here. Silver Spring, which ranks No. 1 on this year’s Fortune Best Places to Live for Families, has been an ideal hometown for Aviv. It’s close enough to D.C. to enjoy the city’s many amenities, but Silver Spring has its own thriving arts and restaurant scene, plus high-performing schools. It’s the tight-knit community, however, that makes Aviv want to live here into old age. “We have meals together, and meal trains when…

Volkswagen RANK 11 COUNTRY GERMANY 2023 REVENUE $348 BILLION ABOUT 180 MILES south of Berlin sits the small town of Zwickau, home to a sprawling Volkswagen factory—and a perfect encapsulation of the past century’s epic history. Generations of German autoworkers have built cars in the area, since the dawn of the combustion engine in the early 1900s, through the Nazi regime, the devastating Second World War, and decades of Cold War isolation from the West, when Zwickau’s auto production was a prized Communist asset in the heart of East Germany. But step inside the Zwickau factory now and the clanging noise of robots and steel car parts is the soundtrack of a new epic drama—one that will define the $4 trillion global auto industry for decades to come: the…

THERE IS A DESPERATE NEED FOR NEW treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), including Lewy body dementia (LBD) and Parkinson’s disease dementia. Of the 7 million individuals above age 65 living with ADRD in the U.S., upward of one in five have dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), yet no treatments have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the European Medicines Agency, according to the LBD Association. CervoMed is working to change this. The Boston-based clinical-stage biotechnology company previously reported the results of AscenD-LB, its first clinical trial with an oral drug called neflamapimod, which showed potential as a treatment for DLB. CervoMed now has a second clinical trial of neflamapimod in patients with DLB, RewinD-LB, that is ongoing. “In DLB, the groundwork done…

A POPULAR ADAGE about leaders says the most effective of them build self-sufficient organizations. If the conductor leaves, the orchestra plays on. But let’s be honest: That’s not true for many of today’s most influential leaders, in business or politics. Instead, as this year’s run-up to the U.S. election has made plain, we often elevate leaders who believe they’re irreplaceable. Without me, the entire enterprise disintegrates, these leaders seem to think. The music stops. Now Americans are watching in real time the problems this can cause. Less than a month before the start of the Democratic National Convention, the 81-year-old sitting president, Joe Biden, has capitulated to demands from within his party that he stand down from his campaign for a second term and make way for a younger…

J.D. VANCE first caught the public’s attention with his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a populist howl about Appalachia that accuses elites of betraying the white working class. Since then, Vance has cultivated some of the wealthiest elites in tech and venture capital—including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and the billionaire VC Peter Thiel—to help him win a U.S. Senate seat and, in July, the Republican nomination for vice president. With Donald Trump’s ticket on the rise, observers in the business community may well wonder what approach Vance will bring if voters put him in the White House. Will it be a radical populist agenda? Or will Vance deliver on the priorities of his well-heeled friends in Silicon Valley? It’s too soon to say, of course. But based on his…

FOR COMPANIES WITH GOODS TO SHIP, traceability has never been more important. Customers want to know where ingredients and materials were sourced, and managers want more efficient ways to analyze where bottlenecks and mishaps occur during shipping and warehousing. All the while, new trade regulations require that product tracking systems continually evolve. “Traceability allows companies to better meet demand, handle product recalls when needed, and keep pace with regulatory and consumer pressures,” says Carrie Wilkie, senior vice president of standards and technology at GS1 US, a not-for-profit standards organization that administers the ubiquitous universal product code. To address current supply chain challenges, more businesses are working with GS1 US and embracing new and improved tracing technologies—such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and two-dimensional barcodes to unlock better decision-making in…

EVER SINCE uttering the letters “GPT” became enough to summon a salivating venture capitalist, tech giants have been gobbling up electricity at the scale of small countries, consuming ever-greater power supplies to fuel the AI future. To satiate that hunger, they’re getting increasingly creative: Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement with a nuclear fusion startup in May 2023; Amazon bought a nuclear-powered data center in March; and Meta announced a nearly $40 billion plan for digital infrastructure investment earlier this year. AI is the new gold, but you can’t mine it without energy. And that could offer an edge to retail investors eager to buy into the trend. Many investors are now leery of the high share valuations of AI-focused stocks like Nvidia or the so-called hyperscalers—the large cloud-services…

FIVE YEARS AFTER Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled plans for his polarizing Cybertruck, I found myself standing in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot on an afternoon in July, surveying the automaker’s surrealist take on the electric utility vehicle: a triangular behemoth, sharp-angled and brutalist. Its wide, unpainted, stainless-steel body boasts a massive windshield and nary a curve throughout, and it has managed to draw comparisons to both the Eiffel Tower and a preschooler’s loose-leaf sketch. “Just be careful if you walk too close to the front, or even the back, because people have cut themselves,” says LJ, the owner who rented me his truck for the day through an app. He pointed to the jagged intersections of body panels, which did indeed look sharp enough to cut flesh.…

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Eli Lilly RANK 455 COUNTRY U.S. 2023 REVENUE $34.1 BILLION THE GOOD NEWS about donanemab, Eli Lilly’s Alzheimer’s drug, reached CEO Dave Ricks on July 2 as he was hiking in a remote part of Colorado. The pharmaceutical company had slogged for 35 years and spent $8 billion to develop an effective treatment for the terrible memory-robbing disease. So when much-longedfor news of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medicine finally arrived—in the middle of the Indianapolis pharmaceutical company’s annual shutdown week, with the CEO and most of his 20,000 U.S. employees on holiday—Ricks dialed into FaceTime for a quick impromptu celebration. Two of his top science deputies toasted the achievement with their boss, raising glasses of Champagne as Ricks took a swig from his bottle of…

A POSITIVE WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT HAS BECOME an increasing priority for today’s workforce and is key for talent retention. For IAT Insurance Group, open communication has been crucial to creating its rewarding, employee-first culture. “We believe that feedback is a gift, and when you not only seek employee feedback but also take action in response, it builds trust,” says Bill Cunningham, CEO of IAT, a specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and surety products. This practice has not gone unnoticed at IAT. The Raleigh, N.C.–based company, which employs about 1,000 people in the U.S., has been a certified Great Place To Work® for the past six years. In 2023, it was named to the Fortune Best Workplaces in Financial Services and Insurance list, and most recently, it was named…

WORK IS IN AN ERA OF TRANSFORMATION. For many business leaders, the best way forward is through prioritizing people and reimagining company-wide efforts to meet their needs. The Surplus Line Association of California (SLA), which provides guidance on the state’s surplus lines insurance marketplace, is one organization that is evolving to better serve its workforce. Founded in 1937, the SLA’s leadership has learned that the key to growth is building strong relationships with staff members. “We’ve gone through a lot of change, yet we’ve done it pretty seamlessly because we proactively worked to earn our people’s trust,” says Benjamin McKay, CEO and executive director of the SLA. “Championing this employee-first culture has been essential to our success.” At the SLA, building a collaborative culture begins with offering jobs that…

AT THE END OF 2022, JAPAN MADE A SEISMIC announcement: The country would be adopting a more assertive national security posture. The move, aimed at countering rising threats from authoritarian adversaries, precipitated a significant increase in military expenditure and a shift away from its post-World War II pacifism. In December 2023, Japan’s cabinet approved a record 7.95 trillion yen (about $50.3 billion) defense budget—a 16.5% increase from the previous year. But the focus of the country’s revamped defensive strategy goes beyond military applications. Economic security has an equally important role to play. A multifaceted concept that involves safe-guarding financial interests, protecting advanced technologies, and maintaining an open international business environment, economic security has surged to the top of Japan’s national agenda. For businesses at home and abroad, this development…

AT THE CROWN of Roelof Botha’s otherwise perfectly coiffed, light-brown head of hair, there’s a small patch that’s gone completely white. It’s the result of a serious concussion Botha incurred in his twenties while playing rugby, his sport of choice in his native South Africa and in business school at Stanford. That injury ended his playing days. But spend some time with Botha—who’s now the head of Sequoia Capital, one of the oldest, largest, and most successful firms in venture capital—and rugby will come up again and again. Botha cites lessons from rugby in talks with founders and colleagues, and watches it devotedly while he exercises. The game has provided him with endless analogies about the value of teamwork and resilience—and some decent one-liners. “Soccer is 90 minutes of…

FOR MORE THAN A CENTURY, GOLFERS HAVE BEEN TEEING OFF at public courses and private country clubs. But in recent years, an increasing number of players have opted for alternatives beyond the green. From driving ranges to indoor simulators, off-course golf has more than doubled in the last decade, totaling 32.9 million participants in 2023, according to the National Golf Foundation, while on-course golf now accounts for less than one-half of the game in the U.S. But it’s not just recreational golfers who are jumping on this growing alternative golf trend. PGA TOUR superstars Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are launching TGL presented by SoFi, a new high-tech golf league under their company, TMRW Sports, which is taking the game off the grass and into a custom-built arena in…