Think of the most exclusive groups you know—SEAL Team 6, Skull and Bones, Augusta National—and they’re probably easier to join than the Fortune 500. Only 0.03% of America’s incorporated companies make it, and each one must requalify every year; dozens of them typically don’t. Now, as we publish the 70th annual ranking of the Fortune 500, consider an even more exclusive club within this pantheon of U.S. companies. Of the thousands of firms that have come and gone in the 500 since 1955, only 49 have merited membership in every one of those 70 annual rankings. They are America’s corporate Olympians.
What have these extraordinary 49ers got? An analysis shows that their magic was at work long before the first Fortune 500. The vast majority of them had grown so large by then that they were in the top half of the 1955 ranking. We should note that all of them are manufacturers or oil companies because in 1955 the 500 did not include service companies such as retailers, banks, insurers, utilities, and transportation providers (those industries have been included since 1996). In addition, many were already uncommonly old—DuPont had been growing for 153 years, Colgate-Palmolive for 149 years, Deere and Procter & Gamble for 118 years. Decades before the Fortune 500 came along, natural selection had identified most of the 49ers as business sequoias.
