Ever since we began building the Global 5000, Walmart has been in the #1 spot. It is the largest company in the world (by revenue). The company was started by Sam Walton and “back in the day” he and Walmart got a lot of pushback and negative press for wrecking small retailers and ruining small downtown areas.
But that was nothing like what we see today. In recent times, there has been very loud criticism of company leaders who have become very wealthy. Many of them are part of the high-tech landscape — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and of course the current leader – Elon Musk. Bezos, of course, does not run Amazon any longer – but Amazon still gets a lot of criticism.
Throughout all this, we do not hear the knock on Sam Walton any longer but just look at the chart below. This shows the revenue of Walmart compared to the revenue of Amazon over the past 10 years. Walmart has been dominant. Amazon is catching up (hence all the publicity and focus) but Walmart barely gets noticed. Very odd.
