Curated playlist
Multinational companies headquartered in the United States
- MicrosoftAmerican multinational technology megacorporation
- Nike, Inc.Nike, Inc. began not in a boardroom but out of the trunk of a car. Phil Knight, a University of Oregon track athlete, and his coach Bill Bowerman started selling Japanese running shoes at track meets in 1964. They called their venture Blue…
- The Walt Disney CompanyThe Walt Disney Company began not as an empire but as a $1,500 contract. In 1923, a young animator named Walt Disney signed a deal with New York film distributor Margaret J. Winkler to produce six series of short films called Alice…
- GoogleGoogle began in January 1996 as a research project by two PhD students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They had a different idea about how a search engine should work. Conventional engines ranked results by counting how…
- JPMorgan ChaseJPMorgan Chase traces its roots to a political maneuver so brazen it would be called corruption today. In 1799, Aaron Burr wanted to found a bank in New York City. The problem: obtaining a bank charter required an act of the state…
- WalmartWalmart operates in 20 countries and employs 2.1 million people, making it the largest private employer on earth. In February 2026, it became the first traditional retailer ever to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Yet the company traces…
- ComcastComcast Corporation began not as a broadcasting giant but as a small cable operator in Tupelo, Mississippi, with five channels and 12,000 customers. In 1963, Ralph J. Roberts and his two partners, Daniel Aaron and Julian A. Brodsky, paid…
- Warner Bros. DiscoveryWarner Bros. Discovery announced its name on the 1st of June 2021, alongside a borrowed tagline: "The stuff that dreams are made of." The phrase came from the 1941 Warner Bros. film The Maltese Falcon, which itself paraphrased…
- Alphabet Inc.Alphabet Inc. was born on the 2nd of October 2015, not as a startup or a spinoff, but as a deliberate act of corporate reinvention by two of the most powerful people in technology. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, looked…
- General MotorsGeneral Motors held the title of largest automaker in the world for 77 years before losing it to Toyota in 2008. That reign began in 1931, when GM overtook Ford Motor Company, and it lasted longer than any rival has managed since. The…
- Meta PlatformsOn the 28th of October, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta Platforms. The timing was not coincidental. Weeks before the announcement, a former employee named Frances Haugen had handed thousands of…
- Bank of AmericaBank of America began not in a gleaming tower but in a converted storefront in San Francisco, where on the 17th of October 1904, a man named Amadeo Giannini opened the Bank of Italy to serve Italian immigrants who had been turned away by…
- Apple Inc.Apple Inc. started with two men selling everything they owned. Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus. Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator. Together they scraped together enough to build a single circuit board in a garage in Cupertino,…
- FedExFedEx began with a term paper. Frederick W. Smith, a student at Yale University, sketched out the concept for a delivery system built specifically for urgent shipments. His professor was unimpressed. Smith pressed on anyway. He founded…
- HasbroHasbro purchased its first breakout toy, Mr. Potato Head, from inventor George Lerner in 1952. The company behind that purchase had started just three decades earlier, selling textile remnants in Providence, Rhode Island. It moved through…
- Amazon (company)Amazon began, on the 5th of July 1994, in the converted garage of a house in Bellevue, Washington, under a name most people have never heard: Cadabra. Jeff Bezos had just relocated from New York City to start an online bookstore, and he…
- MastercardMastercard began not as a corporation but as a defensive alliance. In 1966, Karl H. Hinke, an executive vice president at Marine Midland Bank, summoned representatives of rival banks to Buffalo, New York. Bank of America had refused Marine…
- General ElectricGeneral Electric's logo is a blue circle with four curved white lines that suggest the blades of a fan, wrapped around cursive letters spelling GE. Arthur L. Rich designed it in 1899, and it was trademarked in 1900. Inside the company,…
- AmgenIn April 1980, a small group of venture capitalists gathered in Thousand Oaks to establish Applied Molecular Genetics. This entity would soon change its name to Amgen and become a titan of the biopharmaceutical industry. The founders…
- YahooYahoo began as a handmade list. In January 1994, two electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University named Jerry Yang and David Filo started cataloguing their favorite corners of the web on a site they called "Jerry and…
- IBMIBM, formally the International Business Machines Corporation, was born in Endicott, New York, on the 16th of June 1911, when a financier named Charles Ranlett Flint merged four separate companies into one holding entity. Those four…
- Ford Motor CompanyFord Motor Company was incorporated on the 16th of June 1903, with $28,000 in cash from twelve investors, launched in a converted factory in Detroit. Henry Ford was 39 years old at the time. The first president was not Ford himself, but a…
- IntelIntel Corporation was founded on the 18th of July 1968, in a Mountain View garage of ambition by two men who had just walked away from one of the most storied chip companies in history. Gordon Moore, a chemist, and Robert Noyce, a…
- General DynamicsGeneral Dynamics Corporation is an American industrial and technology company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. In 1900, the United States Navy paid $150,000 for a single submarine built by a company then called Electric Boat. In 2025…
- The Coca-Cola CompanyThe Coca-Cola Company was born from a personal crisis. In May 1886, a pharmacist named John Stith Pemberton was searching for a way out of a morphine addiction he had developed after being severely wounded in the American Civil War.…
- Visa Inc.Visa Inc. processes more transactions in a single year than most people could count in a lifetime. In 2025, its global network handled 257.5 billion transactions worth US$14.2 trillion. That staggering scale rests on an idea that nearly…
- Electronic ArtsElectronic Arts began with a meeting in February 1982, when Trip Hawkins walked into the offices of Sequoia Capital and pitched a company he was calling Amazin' Software. Don Valentine, the venture capitalist on the other side of the…