Tesla

Energy sector dominated this year for the first time since 2008, with 28 companies featured on the list.

100 Fastest-Growing Companies

The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

Fortune Global 500

Industries included in the sector are autos and auto parts manufacturers.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Motor Vehicles and Parts

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

Fortune 500

The 200 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

America's Most Innovative Companies

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

The 300 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500-2023-050-Tesla

The EV maker has flown up the Fortune 500 since its 2017 debut. Its 51% revenue growth in 2022 boosted it into the Fortune 50, a milestone it reached faster than any other company on this year’s list. Tesla also led all Fortune 500 companies with an annualized 49% 10-year total return to shareholders through 2022. 
<ul> 
 	<li>Tesla slashed prices multiple times in the first few months of 2023 on various models to drive sales volume, but the move squeezed the company’s operating profit margin and dinged its stock. Tesla raised prices again in May 2023.</li> 
 	<li>In April 2023, Tesla won a lawsuit that had aimed to hold the company’s Autopilot driver-assist software responsible for a crash years prior, but it faced other safety concerns with probes into faulty seat belts and steering wheels on some models.</li> 
 	<li>Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his CEO successor at Twitter in May 2023, a signal that he would refocus his energies on Tesla; Tesla shares rose on the news.</li> 
</ul>

Industrials came out on top this year, with 22 companies featured on the list.

Just as it dominates our economy, Big Tech now dominates Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation.

World's Most Admired Companies

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500 2022-Tesla

The electric car company headed by Elon Musk continued its meteoric rise up the rankings, climbing 35 spots over last year. The company had a blockbuster 2021, bringing in $53.8 billion in revenue, up 70% from 2020, and expanding significantly into key European and Chinese markets. Tesla delivered 936,000 vehicles in 2021, an 87% increase that puts the company at the pinnacle of the global EV industry, with a 14% market share. The company sustained its growth in the early months of 2022, weathering uncertainty and periodic factory shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic in China to deliver 310,048 vehicles in the first quarter, en route to posting record quarterly earnings.

After a year in which humanity leaned more heavily than ever on tech giants, see which companies topped Fortune's ranking of corporate reputation.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

<span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:12673,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Calibri, Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}" data-sheets-textstyleruns="{&quot;1&quot;:0}{&quot;1&quot;:312,&quot;2&quot;:{&quot;6&quot;:1}}{&quot;1&quot;:328}">Elon Musk’s electric-car company brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $625 billion as of July.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-100-Tesla

<span data-sheets-value="{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.&quot;}" data-sheets-userformat="{&quot;2&quot;:12673,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;15&quot;:&quot;Calibri, Arial&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}" data-sheets-textstyleruns="{&quot;1&quot;:0}{&quot;1&quot;:312,&quot;2&quot;:{&quot;6&quot;:1}}{&quot;1&quot;:328}">Elon Musk’s electric-car company cruised to No. 100 on this year’s list. It’s a big accomplishment for the automaker, which brought in $31.5 billion in sales for its fiscal 2020, a 28% jump over the previous year. Tesla also reported a profit of $721 million in 2020, driven largely by regulatory credits. While Consumer Reports ranked Tesla second to last in its most recent automobile reliability survey, the carmaker still captivates investors—not least because of its recent big bet on Bitcoin. Tesla remains the most valuable automaker in the world with a market cap of nearly $600 billion as of May.

For an astounding 13th straight year, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts.

Explore this year's ranking of the 50 companies with the best long-term growth potential.

Future-50-2020-Tesla

Elon Musk’s EV and battery manufacturer leaps up the ranking as it becomes one of the world’s most valuable companies. Why such potential? Furious expansion of its global manufacturing capacity should allow Tesla to begin producing greater volumes of cars, thus improving cash flow and justifying its eye-watering valuation, and perhaps even dragging the auto industry into a fossil fuel–less future. (See our <a href="https://fortune.com/longform/elon-musk-ceo-tesla-spacex-2020-businessperson-of-the-year/">profile of Musk</a> in this issue.)

The Future 50

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-124-Tesla

Elon Musk's electric-car company, which jumps up 20 spots on this year's Fortune 500, unveiled its Cybertruck late last year with production planned for late 2021.

Fortune's proprietary methodology allows us to zero in on the 50 global firms that are best poised to deliver—and continue delivering—above average gains.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

Welcome to the inaugural Fortune Future 50, our new ranking of companies best positioned for breakout growth.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Here’s our look at 50 companies that do well by doing good.

Change the World

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Sector

Industry

Industry Rank

Previous Industry Rank

Overall Score

Impact Segment

Website

Employees

Company Type

Revenues ($M) (Last Fiscal Year)

Profits ($M) (Last Fiscal Year)

Market Value ($M) as of 8/12/19

Future 50

Culture rank

Process rank

Product rank

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Fastest-growing Companies

Revenue 3 Yr Growth Rank

Revenue 3 Yr Annual Growth Rate

EPS 3 Yr Growth Rank

EPS 3 Yr Annual Growth Rate

Total Return 3 Yr Rank

Total Return 3 Yr Annual Rate (Through June 28, 2024)

Beat S&P 500 3 Yr Return (10%)

Current Streak

Years on List

Tesla is a maker of electric vehicles and energy generation and supply systems. It is the largest maker of electric cars in the U.S., and, with China’s BYD, one of the two largest makers of EVs globally. Tesla was founded in 2003; Elon Musk became the company’s largest shareholder the following year.&nbsp;

Tesla (TSLA): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

tesla

Tesla is a maker of electric vehicles and energy generation and supply systems. It is the largest maker of electric cars in the U.S., and, with China’s BYD, one of the two largest makers of EVs globally. Tesla was founded in 2003; Elon Musk became the company’s largest shareholder the following year. 

Tesla (TSLA): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Greg McKenna

Tesla has $1.4 billion that seems to have gone astray, potentially raising questions about the company’s controls

/2025/03/23/tesla-billion-gone-astray-questions-controls/

Christiaan Hetzner

Tesla investors at a loss as Elon Musk drags down stock price: ‘This time it feels different’

/2025/03/22/tesla-investors-elon-musk-drags-stock-price-down/

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

Elon Musk’s companies have billions in federal contracts but also deep ties to China. Trump said it makes him ‘susceptible’ as a businessman 

/2025/03/22/elon-musk-spacex-starlin-tesla-china-ties-trump/

Bloomberg

Lydia Beyoud

Nicola M. White

Tesla’s retail fans buy the stock at a pace never seen before

/2025/03/21/tesla-musk-ceo-fans-stock-history-retail-buying/

Irina Ivanova

After the Justice Department charged three people with vandalizing Tesla property, the president floated sending the accused to prisons in El Salvador

/2025/03/21/doj-charged-three-people-with-vandalizing-tesla-property-trump-floated-sending-to-el-salvador-prisons/

Sasha Rogelberg

Tesla mega-bull Dan Ives warns ‘the clock struck midnight’ for Elon Musk as he begs CEO to step back from DOGE

https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/tesla-mega-bull-dan-ives-elon-musk-doge/?itm_source=parsely-api

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk returns to rally his troops in company all hands: ‘The future of Tesla is incredibly bright’

https://fortune.com/2025/03/21/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-returns-to-rally-his-troops-in-company-all-hands/?itm_source=parsely-api

Tesla investors at a loss as Elon Musk drags down stock price: 'This time it feels different’

https://fortune.com/2025/03/22/tesla-investors-elon-musk-drags-stock-price-down/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/03/22/elon-musk-spacex-starlin-tesla-china-ties-trump/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/03/21/tesla-musk-ceo-fans-stock-history-retail-buying/?itm_source=parsely-api

Mercedes takes biggest swing yet at Elon Musk's Tesla as it unveils new CLA with 492-mile range

https://fortune.com/europe/2025/03/18/mercedes-benz-cla-tesla-challenger/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://fortune.com/2025/03/21/doj-charged-three-people-with-vandalizing-tesla-property-trump-floated-sending-to-el-salvador-prisons/?itm_source=parsely-api

Jason Ma

Since Elon Musk joined Trump's White House, more Tesla owners are trading in their cars than ever before

https://fortune.com/2025/03/21/tesla-trade-ins-record-high-edmunds-elon-musk-trump-doge/?itm_source=parsely-api

Amanda Gerut

Tesla sales are cratering in California but there are now thousands of Cybertrucks roaring across the Golden State

https://fortune.com/2025/02/04/tesla-sales-decline-california-elon-musk-trump-cybertruck-honda-hyundai-toyota/?itm_source=parsely-api

Elon Musk's Tesla recalls every single Cybertruck ever delivered to fix stainless steel panels which have been coming loose and falling off

https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/tesla-cybertruck-recall/?itm_source=parsely-api

From selling six of his own companies to serving as president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, Jon McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and reveals the secrets to his success.

How a former Tesla and Lyft executive is trying to reinvent venture capital

Leadership

Came from a uh a family without much means. Uh And so that meant that we had to buy our own clothes and shoes, uh Even early on. And so in, in first grade, second grade, I was hustling uh trying to earn money so I could buy clothes and shoes for school. And so I started a little lawn mowing business that grew into a big landscaping business. By the time I was in high school, I paid for my first car and I had employees that I had to pay and marketing. I had to do and billing I had to do. And I actually, I fell in love with business as a kid because it gave me independence. I kept that up. When I was in college. I worked at the trading Exchanges in Chicago. Started a few businesses in college. I fell deeper in love with business. I went to school in Chicago and was one of the first kids hired out of the big 10 to join Bain and company as a consultant and spent two years there. And then they were starting bain capital. They started just a few years before I got there. But they were really starting to ramp it up. So I spent a bunch of time with what is today being ventures and then was encouraged that I was an entrepreneur actually. And so I found a company to start and jumped out and started my first company and we started it literally from our kitchen table and it was a software business. We grew it to, to 40 million in a RR in 18 months. It was a crazy ride and we sold it to a public company. And then I did that five more times in a row. I guess I qualify as a serial entrepreneur. And uh then through a crazy series of events, met Elon Musk and um decided to join the be best practitioner of my craft on the planet uh as an entrepreneur, he's kind of unmatched. Um And so helped grow Tesla from 2 billion in revenue to or 20 billion in revenue and then helped take left public as coo and then jumped out to do something I've been planning on doing or planning for for years. And that is starting a platform to create companies. My granddad had a auto repair shop uh attached to his farming land uh in, in Iowa. And I spent summers there and uh and I learned to fix cars and I loved it actually and I loved it. I loved how tangible it was. Uh And so then as I started to build skills and business. I started to see all the opportunities especially for software in the automotive industry. And so a number of my companies have that be running through it. And I think it comes back to my grandpa's auto shop. So Elon had been talking with a, a dear friend of mine, Sheryl Sandberg about becoming uh president Tesla. And uh she called me one day and said, I'm not the right person for this, but I think you might be. So uh she introduced me to Elon, uh Elon and I uh immediately dove into a couple of challenges he was facing in manufacturing and then sales and as we started to get to know each other, both of us really enjoyed being around each other. I was certainly energized by him. And so I joined Tesla and it was about 1.8 billion in sales. And the biggest challenge was the demand challenge. Actually, they were learning how to produce cars at higher volume but didn't have nearly the demand that they needed to have. And so I dove in and went to stores uh so I could try to figure out what might be happening. I went to eight different stores took eight different test drives and nobody called me back. And so I called the head of uh sales ops. I said, can you tell me why I'm not being called back? I've used a different email addresses and I somehow have they caught up with me. And he said, he said, no, I can't see in the system why you wouldn't be called back. And I said, well, can you just run a report for me real fast? It tells me how many people we've done a test drive for that haven't been called back. And he said, sure, call me back in two hours. And he said, um, I can't believe this. Like, we've done 10,000 test drives in the last month and a half and 10,000 people haven't been called back. And I said, how many cars do you need to sell this quarter? And he said 12,000. And I said, I have a feeling why you think you have a demand problem. So let's shut off any new leads that people get until they call back all their test drives. And we did that within a few hours and sales went up. Uh, and this was before I even worked at Tesla. So I had to call Elon and say, hey, look, I may have overstepped my boundaries here. I don't even work for you yet, but here's what I found and here's what I did. And there was this long silence on the end of the phone, the long silence that Elon is kind of famous for, and I didn't know how to interpret it because I didn't know it very well yet. And after a long silence, he broke in and said, I think you're gonna fit in here just fine. I I didn't have any examples to draw on where you're taking a company from roughly 2 billion in revenue to 20 billion in revenue in 36 months. There wasn't any case studies for that. And so we all had to be super creative and scrappy uh which is what we did together as a team, but it was crazy times too. Uh especially as we got closer and closer to model three production. The balance sheet was super stressed. We were running out of cash and we had to get model three out to replenish the balance sheet and we were operating the company on less than a quarter of cash. It was a balance of absolute euphoria as you're growing a company, but absolute stress too as, as things are highly pressurized, we would fit in the of cars together a lot because he had a, an approach that was kind of a Vulcan mind meld he wanted in his words, if we had the same inputs, he wanted the same decision to come out of both of us. We would riff on business ideas. And uh and so I started to get a little jealous because he was able to go do things like Neuralink and the boring company and said to him, hey, like I'd like to scratch the stitch too. And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, well, there's a lot of things we could do to change the car business from an episodic sale. We sell to a customer once every four or 5 to 6 years, we could turn that into a recurring run rate or revenue business. So an A RR business and he said, how would you do that? And I said, well, I'd sell insurance embedded in the car. I'd sell infotainment subscriptions, uh uh autonomy subscriptions, et cetera. So he gave me the chance to be an entrepreneur inside of Tesla. We grew a pretty significant insurance business, a pretty significant subscription business in infotainment and autonomy as well. I learned a few things. One is setting really high bars and high goals. And Elon is famous for his super ambitious goals for people and then really holding folks accountable to those on a weekly basis, but also giving them the tools to be successful. So it wasn't just throwing people to the wolves, it was really supporting them. I think what I also learned was all the stuff I learned about putting scaffolding in companies that was helpful to growth, worked at scale. And so that gave me the confidence then to go help other companies at scale. After Tesla, I joined largely to help to be a part of the team would build the muscle to get them public. And it was an exciting process to go through for sure what all companies have to do is really internally start to build the kinds of processes and scaffolding that help them with certainty, make their quarters. Once you're public, it's very different from being private. There's no gimmes, no mulligans if you miss, uh, your stock value is gonna be decimated. So you have to be prepared not to miss. And that's most of the work in terms of getting a company ready to be public. And that can get down as simple as kind of the weekly sessions you're having on demand and supply balance to make sure that you're hitting your forecasts and then financial planning to make sure that you're getting a forecast is hittable. So all of those things go together to be able to, to, to prove to a company internally that it can win and it's ready to be public. I think autonomy is going to play out really in, in two ways. One is uh in Robo Taxi, but there has been this view that there's this panacea. If uh if you replace the driver with a with a computer, the cost change uh and the cost they change for the better and therefore profitability for people like Uber and Lyft will go up for companies like Uber and Lyft will increase. And the fact of the matter is is that the driver today brings the car, so the network doesn't pay for the car, the driver cleans the car, the driver maintains the car, the driver fuels the car, that's all going to be the responsibility of somebody. And So even though there's this panacea of, hey, the driver's cost drops out of the P and L and therefore the profitability soars. I think it's a panacea that gets replaced with fleet cost that somebody has to bear. And so I think there's an, there is a path in robo taxi. Uh but it may be not as attractive as it seemed at the beginning in parallel to that, we're kind of at a moment where cars of today may be compared to like flip phones. And so I think uh personal autonomous vehicles are every bit as interesting as uh as the Robo taxi story. But we've got to get to uh autonomous vehicles first and that's proved to be a, a climb with a lot of false summits in the US. We have roughly 50,000 traffic fatalities a year and 95% of those are caused by human error. So the whole goal of autonomy is eliminating those fatalities. It's 50,000 families that don't go through a tragedy, but it turns out our, our roads are some of the safest in the world. So if you expand out the traffic fatality count globally, it's 1.5 million people die annually in traffic accidents that are human, largely human cause. And so the reason to do autonomy is just that it's to eliminate fatalities. Number one, number two, it's to give mobility to people that don't have mobility options. Today, I have a friend who's blind. Uh And when we introduced uh autonomy at Tesla, he called me immediately and said, when am I going to be able to take my first drive by myself? When am I going to be able to drive a car? And that stuck with me? Uh And so he's been a motivation for my involvement in autonomy because there will be people that today don't have the mobility option to drive a car by themselves. He'll be able to hop in a car and go where he wants for the first time in his life. Safety has got to come first. And so what Cruz has done is really expand a safety first culture. There were a lot of voices within Cruz that were demanding safety be the primary consideration or expansion and growth. And we totally agree with that at GM. So we've taken the best of GM resources to help crews pivot that culture to be safety first because when you're doing breakthrough technology like this, it's important to make advancements. But you've absolutely got to do that with a framework that says we're going to keep people safe as we do this. The safety team has a seat at the senior management table and they've got, they've got a veto right on what gets released and what doesn't get released. And so that safety capability and talent has been elevated to the highest level of care. There's this concept in manufacturing that, that's now common it was taught to us by the Japanese. And that is that any individual worker, if they see something going wrong can stop the production line. Where's the big deal? Uh When you stop the production line at a car factory, you're talking about millions of dollars an hour uh uh results in that stoppage. So it's a big deal to hand that capability uh or that agency to a worker. And so that's at the heart of the cultural change. Uh at cruise is, is enabling people to pull the cord and essentially stop the line. I've got a lot of confidence in the cruise team. They're returning to the mission, they're returning to the roads with autonomous driving because they've got more data and really more experience than anyone else in the autonomy space now with the safety first mentality and framework. And I think it's going to be the best of both worlds in terms of a very bright future for the cruise team. DVX ventures is, is a little bit different. We're a company creation platform and we were formed because I had this vision of being able to systematically create companies from scratch. Like I'd done six times in a row before I'd done joined Tesla. So during that journey of starting and scaling and then getting liquidity on six companies. I slur it right down like how you take a company from zero to a million in sales, a million to 10 million, etc and, uh, and develop these playbooks. And so DVX really was burst out of those playbooks to say, uh, could we start companies from scratch, scale them and really have impact on the economy. Technology is we start with three things have to be true. First is you got to have a big market that's provable. The second is you have to have significant profit pools that makes it worth your while. And the third is we've got to have a moat or an angle that we think is super unique to us so that we can win. And if we've got those three, uh we're essentially an idea, generation factors. And when those ideas pop, then we start to put product out in the market and start to experiment with a feedback loop from the market really quickly. Uh and those that gain traction, then we eventually turn into companies uh and then hire teams and scale them. We describe ourselves as as venture capital 2.0 in the sense that we are not investors, we are hands on operators. Uh And so, uh when we launch a company, one of the partners is the first CEO. And so the companies I launch, I'm the first ce these companies, we're that hands on and then we build the team around us and eventually step out as CEO. And so we're able to spot what good product looks like, what good markets look like, what good people look like. What good tech looks like. We know that because we've been operators and we can help build that into the company from the very start. So what we try to do is really de risk an idea and get a company started and then can hand the baton to a really experienced entrepreneur or even an entrepreneur with potential that can grow that company into something really special. So there are two ways that uh that V CS make money. One is for the fees that they charge for the amount of dollars they have under management. And the second is, is the upside in the company. And what's evolved over the past five or 10 years is VC motivation has become more and more fee oriented in the sense that they want to raise more and more capital to generate fees. The problem is, is that, that's a kind of a risk free model. And at the core of venture, we want to take a risk, we want to take the appropriate risk. And so we feel like DVX, like uh there's a, there's an evolving trend towards uh putting our money where our mouth is and we call this VC 2.0. And so we don't charge our investors fees. We take like them a share of the upside. And so we are completely aligned with them uh in that the only way we make money is if they make money. And I think we're going to see more and more of that in the VC market as investors get wise to the need to have a, an investing partner who takes appropriate risk and is compensated by succeeding rather than merely collecting fees, I think. Well, there are, there are more than 1000 unicorns that are uh that are waiting to get public, but there are it, it today's pace, 30 to 50 companies to get public. And so that means that a year. So that means that uh out of those 1000 plus uni unicorns, uh a lot of those aren't going to get public or get bought. Uh And so the incentives have to be aligned in the future so that uh the venture investors are taking the same risk really as their, as their investors and are getting paid for successful outcomes versus getting paid for evaluation. We've got a cybersecurity company that has really innovative technology, unique technology where we can see in this inside the stack of a company of a company's software and that allows us to spot vulnerabilities for them. We score those vulnerabilities and hand them back a daily health scorecard about how they're doing with their cyber risk. And that company is our fastest growing company. It's hit the ground running and it is taken off. We've got a clean tech company where we asked ourselves the question, could we save 40 percent of the energy costs of buildings in the US and developed a really super simple firmware solution that stays on top of thermostats that really provides technology that helps that building save 40 percent of its energy cost. A company called Kirby that, that brings software to dealers. So dealers can do mobile service so any dealer can look like Tesla in the sense that they can come fix your car at your home, at your office, uh like uh like magic E and then disappear after your car is fixed. So you didn't have to take your car anywhere to get it fixed. The biggest impact on my experience in my career in leadership has been to have mentors. It is an unfair advantage and I didn't realize this when it was happening at the time. But I had a mentor in my first job uh in high school. I had a mentor in my uh in my first job out of college and a mentor in my first company. All of those mentors made me better. Uh And then I learned like to grab mentors both vertically and horizontally vertically. People that have uh that have seen the movie before they're ahead of you on the journey, maybe by 5, 1015 years. Uh and then horizontal member uh mentors uh fellow CEO S fellow leaders in your uh in your kind of market and maybe same age range and experience where you can bounce things off of each other. Uh You may not be able to bounce off of your colleagues, your peers, your boss. And for me, the biggest leadership hack is having mentors. The worst piece of advice I've gotten is to build a company for an outcome. In other words, build a company for a big valuation. What you need to do instead is build a great product that people love and the company will follow. Uh and you'll have a great big company at the end of the day. But if you end up pursuing the wrong goal first, which is just get big, you tend to cut corners on the product and the company doesn't tend to last. And so I think the worst piece of advice I've got is, is just build big. Uh, I'd rather build great.

The Tesla CEO has a reputation for being unconventional and unpredictable, but his accomplishments are undeniable. These are the leadership tactics he deploys when building and running companies.

3 of Elon Musk's highly unusual leadership principles

How you fun. Elon Musk is one of the most fascinating business people in the world. His approach is so unconventional. The guy has a very belligerent management style. He's very hard to work for. Were he not the owner or the lead shareholder or the controlling shareholder? All of these companies, some of which don't even have boards of directors, any conventional board of the actors. Were he a hired hand would have fired him a long time ago. But look what he's accomplished. Everyone wants to know how he does it right? What are his daily management principles? It really made it worthwhile to dig in and look at kind of the tools that he uses that have built him an empire but also an empire that many question may be built on sand. One of the principles I learned about it from one of his engineers who spent 10 years with him at spacex is that he loves to keep turning over the workforce. There were a lot of people doing things that didn't seem to have a lot of value. And I think that's true. Probably most Silicon Valley companies maybe not to the degree to which it was at Twitter. But yeah, there's a potential for significant cuts. I think out of the companies without affecting their productivity. In fact, increasing their productivity, his personnel policy is extremely demanding and extremely belligerent. This engineer was telling me if I made a mistake in February, I'd spend the next 11 months worrying about making a second mistake because if you make two mistakes a year, you're out at this point. I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth. I can tell you how every damn part in that car is made. He demands that everyone know everything there is to know about what he calls the idiot index and the idiot index is knowing what the raw materials are that go into every part, what the cost of each of them is adding them up and then knowing what that finished part costs. And if you don't know that number twice, you're out. Musk's greatest talent may be his ability to sell a vision. He doesn't want his shareholders or his investors to think too hard about returns on equity or what dividends are going to be or any of these kind of conventional metrics because you can never get to a $650 billion market cap for Tesla using conventional metrics. You really have to believe and he gets people to believe it's going to move to just a truly massive scale scale that no company has ever achieved in the history of humanity. The vision is essentially the Teslas that are out on the road and the ones he's going to sell in the future are going to be worth multiples of what you paid for them. Here's why he's going to send you self driving software that you can install in the car. You drive the car nine hours a week on average. But with this software, your car can circulate all day as a Robo taxi, 50 hours a week, you've got this money making car picking people up. Therefore, the Tesla that you paid $40,000 where it's going to be worth $200,000. Therefore, he's saying, who cares about what our margins are? Who cares that they're going down? The point for us is to sell as many Teslas as possible. We're going to discount, we can sell this software for so much money. That's where the big money is going to come from. This is a tech company, not a metal vending car company, like all the others that have market caps that are 10% of Tesla. Frankly, Tesla, cars are robots on wheels. Um Anything that's connected to the internet is effectively an endpoint actuator for artificial intelligence. One of his tactical strengths is his ability to spin these situational arguments that we'll use completely different points of view depending on what he wants to accomplish for the same company at the same time. For example, in the case of X, it's in his interest to paint a very bad short term portrait of what's going on there. That philosophy is aimed at his banks, the worse they think things are going, the better his chance of buying out the debt at a huge discount because they can't get rid of the debt because the interest rates are too low. On the other situational side, he's looking at the future. It's another gauzy vision that he's promoting about how it's going to be worth $150 billion be among the biggest market cap companies in the country. And that's aimed at satisfying all of his big investors who are probably not so happy right now. Kind of a good cop, bad cop argument in the short term. We're doing horribly that's aimed at the banks in the long term. We're going to do great. That's aimed at placating the shareholders. I think there's a certain music man element to Elon Musk and that his arguments have to be taken with a lot of skepticism and that has not been the case so far. But now you're in a situation where a lot of people are getting disappointed. Clearly, all of the big names that he pulled into X. These folks can't be happy with what's happened to the valuation of that. He's got 13 billion in debt. The interest rates are eating him alive. They're absorbing most of the cash flow. A lot of Tesla investors are not happy either with the decline in the margins and the decline in the share price, who knows how much lower it's going to go? So really things are not going well for him now and we may be in for something of a revaluation of his promises and pledges.

Fortune's 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list ranks global companies that have seen the most growth in revenues, profits, and stock returns over a three-year period.

This industry showed the fastest growth in the past three years

Franchise_Lists

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list, Fortune’s yearly roundup of companies enacting positive impact on people and the planet.

59 companies that are changing the world: From Tesla to Chobani

Electric vehicles, food waste prevention, and helping displaced people find jobs are some of the priorities on this year’s Change the World list.

To change the world. This recognizes companies that are using the profit motive and using their business models to have a positive impact on people and on the planet. It's also important to us that you are making money. We do want to make sure that this is not charity but business. The list isn't ranked. I like to use the metaphor of a hall of fame, for example, in football or baseball. Each year, a new class of great performers gets elected to the hall of Fame, but nobody really tries to rank them by how good they are relative to each other. This year, especially with climate change awareness. Becoming more and more urgent. We zeroed in a little more tightly on efforts to sharply lower carbon dioxide emissions. We gave quite a bit of space to companies in the United States that are working to accelerate the rate at which Americans convert from internal combustion engines to electric drivers are worried that they might not have access to electric chargers if they buy an ev one of the companies that's doing the most to fight against that is a company called Charge point. They operate a huge network of charging stations across North America and all these evs are going to need batteries as well. So we are recognizing a South Korean company called SK on. They have been partnering with Ford and Hyundai and Volkswagen and other companies to essentially build battery factories here in the United States. So that the United States has a safe supply chain, food waste actually generates quite a bit of greenhouse gas when it rots in landfills. So we look at companies that are trying to make sure that less of the food that we produce winds up getting thrown away. This year. In particular, we saw more companies than usual that are working on figuring out how to reach displaced people. There's a record high number of displaced people in the world right now and a lot of companies are trying to figure out how can I give them the skills to have some economic security? How can I help them find the right place to settle, help them become my customers by making their lives more economically stable. For example, we're recognizing Chobani which launched a few years ago what's called tense Partnership for refugees. This is a coalition of about 300 companies worldwide that have all committed to providing job training and jobs for the displaced populations that does not immediately generate a profit, but it does create a workforce that can then work for those companies. So in the long run, they are benefiting by filling their own labor needs with a population that really needs the help. There's a lot of attention being given by companies to helping younger people and people who aren't sort of financially established in their lives get a little bit of traction in the broader economy. Isu they help younger people and people who have been having financial difficulties, build up their credit scores. So what is Susu will do is help these people essentially earn credit for things like on time rent payments is Suu reports. Those to credit bureaus, the credit bureaus register them and it bumps up the payers scores that's going to help them down the road when they need to borrow money for an auto loan or to get a mortgage. Abbi the big health care company, they have a very innovative a program designed to help younger employees use the company's 401k program to help them pay down their student loans whenever they make a payment on those loans. The company puts a matching contribution in their retirement savings. That's important because often younger people have to really choose between saving for the future and paying off their education. Thanks to some recent changes in federal tax law, a lot of other companies are going to be able to follow their lead. Starting next year, the population of companies that are trying to have a positive social impact is definitely growing younger workers, millennials, Gen Z very much want to work for companies that have a positive purpose. More and more companies are recognizing that to invest in protecting the planet, to invest in building up the skills of the people in their communities is going to essentially protect their revenue and their profits and allow them to continue to operate and continue to create wealth. Fortune publishes the change the world list partly because we're still quite bullish and quite optimistic about the ability of business to solve different social problems. In fact, in a lot of instances, we think that businesses can act and make a difference when governments are struggling to do so. At the same time, we are a really established business media brand. Our voice means something in the business community. And we believe that by recognizing companies that are making a difference, we're adding another incentive for people to do great things and boast about them.

Tesla

Tesla in Fortune Rankings

Tesla stock chart

Videos