Fortune 500 2024 By Metro Area(MSA)
 

Please check your MSA to verify. I was scrolling in the interactive map and counted that way----

Fortune 500 2024 By Metro Area(MSA)
55 New York
31 Chicago
23 San Francisco
22 Houston
21 Dallas
20 San Jose
19 Washington DC
17 Atlanta
15 Boston
15 Minneapolis
12 Seattle
11 Miami
11 Philadelphia
10 Denver
10 Phoenix
9 Bridgeport
9 Los Angeles
8 Charlotte
8 Richmond
7 Cincinnati
7 Detroit
7 Pittsburgh
6 Cleveland
6 Milwaukee
6 St Louis
5 Columbus
5 Nashville
5 Providence
5 Tampa
4 Hartford
4 Omaha
3 Austin
3 Fayetteville, AR
3 Indianapolis
3 Memphis
3 Oklahoma City
3 Raleigh
3 San Antonio
3 San Diego
2 Birmingham
2 Boise
2 Des Moines
2 Las Vegas
2 Louisville
2 Tulsa
2 Virginia Beach


https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/2024/

I know SF and SJ are officially separate but they are so integrated it just doesn't make sense. Especially when it comes to who works where.

DFW has only 21. From the Dallas Business Journal:

“The Dallas-Fort Worth metro has 21 companies on the latest Fortune 500. That was down slightly from last year, and there were several notable changes to the ranking.”

https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2024/06/05/fortune-500-north-texas-companies.html

I remember the old days, when NYC was so far in the lead, with over a fifth of the Fortune 500 HQs.

I counted 60 for the NY MSA, with an additional 9 in Fairfield County, and 2 in Allentown, for a total of 71 in the NY CSA. I used this compilation so not sure who much it differs from the graphic posted by Fortune: https://www.50pros.com/fortune500

It's true that in the 1970's and 1980's, NY region had a ton of public companies decamp to the Sunbelt. In the 1970's especially, there was really crazy corporate outmigration.

In more recent decades, it isn't that the region is losing companies, it's that tech companies not located in the region have such high valuations, crowding out more traditional finance, insurance and the like that would have made F500 in the past. Also a lot of these traditional high value companies are now private.

It's absolutely crazy to me how much of an under-performer LA is when it comes to F500 companies. Just 9 in a metro area of 12+ million. Just one more than Richmond, VA which has a metro population of just 1.3 million.

San Diego only having 3 seems crazy to me too.

I think it's more that the Fortune 500 list looks wildly different than it did in the 1970s. The geography of the list almost certainly changes more because of business factors (valuations, mergers/acquisitions, bankruptcy) than from companies moving. Most of Texas' Fortune 500 list is dominated by oil & gas, which is a sector made up of companies that were never located in New York (or Chicago, or Detroit, which have lost just as much ground on the list).

I mean, it doesn't really matter. A corporate HQ doesn't mean the same as in the past, and there are plenty of economic generators that don't have anything to do with where a public firm formally considers it's HQ office. It's more of a civic cheerleading/chamber of commerce type thing.

I don't think LA was necessarily healthier when General Dynamics or whatever was a F500 HQ in LA area.

I didn't say it mattered, just that it's surprising that such a large region has such a low presence of large company HQs. Of course this isn't news to me, but it is kind of jarring to see how low LA ranks on these lists when they're published every year.

I do think HQs matter a lot more to smaller cities, though. If P&G moved its HQ out of Cincinnati, it'd be absolutely devastating for the community and economy there. A city LA's size, which has so many different economic engines, would be able to absorb such a hit much easier.

A couple of observations- I’m surprised Vegas only has 2 companies considering its name recognition and growth in the last few years. For a party city, Miami’s not doing to shabby for itself and despite its problems, Detroit is still chugging along. Btw, what about the MSA’s with at least one Fortune 500 company ?

Birmingham has 2; Regions and Vulcan Materials

This is how LA earned its most famous nickname: The Bridgeport of the West Coast

Akron MSA has two, and the Toledo MSA has three.

Using your link, I count 31 F500 HQs for Chicagoland.

OP's list says 28.

I wonder where these discrepancies are coming from?




Chicago used to be home to a very big O&G company, Standard Oil of Indiana. They changed their name to "Amoco" in the 80s, and then they later got absorbed into BP, and while there are still a fair number of BP jobs here, along with the HUGE refinery over in Whiting, IN, the combined company is now HQ'ed out of London.

Back when Standard Oil of Indiana was a huge deal, they built this noteworthy edifice for themselves. It was the fourth tallest building on the planet back when it was completed in 1973.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...682px-Aon_Center_in_Chicago_May_2016.jpg
Source: wikipedia

It's because a lot of boring companies in the Industrial Midwest are far, far larger than the companies from LA that everyone has heard of. For example:
https://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20th-century-fox-statistics/

So a few years where they hit $400 million in revenue, but mostly they're between $100-250 (this is just movie revenue, not everything the company does).

There are TONS of companies (even family-owned companies) out there next to random exits on the interstate highways consistently bringing in $100+ million.

This list, as I was alluding to in another thread, highlights just how far in front the Bay Area is in terms of technocentricity.

Bay Area (24)
Adobe
Airbnb
Alphabet
AMD
Apple
Applied Materials
Broadcom
Cisco
Ebay
HP
Intel
Intuit
KLA
Lam Research
Meta
Netflix
Nvidia
PayPal
Salesforce
Sanmina
ServiceNow
Uber
VMware
Western Digital

Seattle (4)
Amazon
Coupang
Expedia
Microsoft

NYC (2)
IBM
Kyndryl Holdings

Austin (2? 3?)
Dell
Oracle*
Tesla* (? depends if you count this as a tech company; that list categorized them as motor vehicles & parts)
*notable that both Oracle and Tesla came from the Bay Area

Atlanta (1)
NCR

Miami (1)
Chewy

Denver (1)
Qurate Retail

Nashville (0)

Portland (0)

^ Just added those last few since someone described those as tech havens.

Phoenix is correct and unchanged from 2023 at 10.

That Phoenix has 10 and LA has 9 is a good illustration of the point about Fortune 500 not necessarily meaning well-known. Phoenix's companies include a (literal) trash companies, a mining company, metal processing company, transportation, etc.

Bringing in where though? For F500 publicly traded companies most of it goes to the shareholder class, not necessarily where the HQ is located. For this reason I would argue that it's better for a city to have a bunch of small and medium sized businesses than a few huge publicly traded companies. More of the added value stays local.

This is probably also reflective of when each city grew, but coming to Phoenix from Cincinnati it was surprising the seeming lack of investment in community projects (zoos, museums) and events in Phoenix.

It felt like you couldn't go anywhere in Cincinnati without encountering a sporting event (tennis), museums, zoo, and/or art exhibit that wasn't sponsored in part by P&G and/or Kroger. Then again, those companies boomed during part of the "city beautiful" movement, IIRC?

Waste Management sponsors the Phoenix Open, but hell if I know if Petsmart or Freeport-McMoran, etc., do anything with the Heard, Art Museum, zoo (which is privately owned I think) or even the Arizona Science Center?

Then again, Phoenix attracts much larger convention crowds and sporting events (Super Bowl, Final 4) than Cincinnati.