There’s no shortage of reasons these days for business leaders to lose sleep over what-ifs. What if tariffs crush my supply chain? What if inflation impoverishes my customers? What if AI makes my company obsolete? What if some other technology makes my company obsolete while I’m worrying about AI?
Everybody’s got the Sunday scaries, every day of the week. Many measures of CEO confidence plunged in April after President Trump unveiled a stunningly broad and deep round of tariffs. Consumer optimism has plummeted still further, even after the administration scaled some of them back. Giants like General Motors, UPS, and Delta Air Lines have withdrawn their full-year earnings guidance, because they have no clue whether an unforeseen policy plot twist might kneecap their profits.
Amid all this agita, you might be surprised to learn this: The Fortune 500, our authoritative list of America’s largest companies, has never been more stable.
In this year’s edition, our 71st, only 22 companies from the previous year were displaced—the second lowest total in the past 30 years. Check out this year’s top 10: Seven of those companies have been part of that exclusive club every year for the past decade. Walmart has been No. 1 for 13 years in a row, for crying out loud. Where’s all this creative destruction we keep hearing about?
This is the point at which an attentive reader might say, “Wait a minute, isn’t the Fortune 500 backward-looking?” That’s exactly right: It’s based on companies’ most recent full-year financial results (and deftly shepherded by list editor Scott DeCarlo). That said, at the moment the near future doesn’t look measurably different from the recent past: The bad outcomes that CEOs fear haven’t appeared yet on their companies’ income statements—or in the inflation rate, or in the jobless numbers.
By some measures, the Fortune 500 has never been more stable. But economic uncertainty makes “more of the same” feel increasingly unlikely.
It feels, in short, like the moment in an old movie where someone says, “It’s quiet. Too quiet.” Despite the relative calm, there’s a general feeling that economic or policy upheaval is just over the horizon, and that it could have a dramatic impact—maybe even COVID-or Great Recession–level dramatic—on large U.S. companies.
Take tariffs, the biggest elephant in the boardroom. If indeed they’re here to stay, even in reduced form, they’re just beginning to bite. Case in point: Walmart and many small sellers on Amazon (No. 2 on our list) depend heavily on Chinese suppliers; both are now beginning to pass on the cost of increased import levies to consumers. That’ll mean higher prices, which generate more revenue—unless they scare too many buyers away, and it’s a wash or worse. If a company gets this balance right, it can sustain or even increase its profits—but what are the odds of that? And of course, the whole dynamic might trigger a recession. Multiply this squirrel-brain calculus across 500 companies generating nearly $20 trillion in annual revenue, and you can hardly blame a prudent CFO for deciding to withdraw that earnings guidance—and maybe start happy hour early.
For a counterweight to this anxious mindset, we can turn to the soon-to-semi-retire Berkshire Hathaway CEO, Warren Buffett—a 94-year-old icon of Fortune 500 stability who often
chides investors and business leaders for expecting stability. What CEOs hate the most, they say, is uncertainty. But to demand certainty, Buffett argues, is to ask for the impossible. “It was uncertain on September 10, 2001, people just didn’t know it. It’s uncertain every single day,” he said in a 2010 interview. “But uncertainty can be your friend.”
When uncertainty escalates into volatility, it can open up new possibilities. Upheaval shakes people and companies out of their habits and assumptions. Few people truly enjoy a crisis, but good leaders see the opportunities a crisis can contain.
If crises do unfold in the next 12 months, a lot of companies will truly struggle and suffer. The best leaders, we hope, will find ways to defend their interests while also looking out for their employees and their communities. Some companies inevitably will fall off the Fortune 500—and each loss will create space for another company’s story of success and resilience.
It’ll hurt. It’ll be fascinating. And Fortune will chronicle it and help you understand it.
This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “America’s biggest companies prepare for the unknown.”
