Fortune

Fortune is an American business magazine, known for its in-depth reporting and for its annual ranking of America’s biggest companies, the Fortune 500.

The early days and the Depression

Fortune published its first issue in 1930, several months after the onset of the Great Depression. It was the brainchild of publisher Henry Luce. Luce and his close friend Briton Hadden had launched Time, which they described as the world’s first news magazine, in 1923, when Luce was still in his mid-20s. As early as 1928 Luce started planning for a second magazine, focused on business, but he kept his plans to himself because Hadden didn’t want him diverting his attention from Time. A few months after Hadden’s death in 1929, Luce brought a formal proposal for Fortune to the board of directors, and they approved it.

A different approach and dissent

Other business magazines already existed (including World’s Work and the System which became Magazine of Business in 1929), but, in Luce’s mind, their coverage tended to be too deferential toward the business leaders they covered. Corporations were gaining more and more power in the world, and Luce thought they needed to be held accountable.

He also saw the new venture as a way of establishing a greater platform for himself. Hadden had dominated Time in its early days, and that magazine was also fairly unambitious in its mandate: to help busy Americans keep up with the news. Luce’s biographer Alan Brinkley wrote that:

Luce considered calling the new magazine “Power” but settled on Fortune, in part because it referred not only to money but also to notions of “chance,” “fate,” and “destiny.”

Management expert Peter Drucker, who wrote briefly for Time, later described Fortune as Luce’s “real love among his magazines.” Luce hired a highly accomplished designer and chose unusually expensive paper that could accommodate high-quality photos. He also hired distinguished artists, including Diego Rivera, to design ambitious covers for the magazine.

On the editorial side, Luce was more concerned about his writers’ literary abilities than their business acumen. He said he could turn a poet into a journalist more easily than he could turn a bookkeeper into a writer. Among his early recruits were Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, and Archibald MacLeish (who won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry).

However, these young writers were radicalized by the experience of reporting on economics during the Depression, and they found themselves at odds with the leadership, which, despite the stated desire for accountability, had a more pro-capitalist bent. Macdonald, who resigned in 1936 after a clash with Luce, wrote in 1937 that “warfare between editors and writing staff” had been “continuous” since 1932.

Agee’s nonfiction opus, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, began as an assignment for Fortune, in which Agee spent a summer living among sharecroppers in Alabama, accompanied by photographer Walker Evans. But when Agee returned to New York, the magazine declined to publish his 30,000-word article. It was published as a book in 1941.

A change in direction and the 500

In 1948 Luce consciously reshaped Fortune into a more conventional business magazine. Its new mission, he wrote in a memo, would be to “assist in the successful development of American business enterprise at home and abroad.” It still published serious commentary by intellectuals including Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith—some of it even critical of capitalism—but this kind of material became much more the exception than the rule.

The Fortune 500 list was first published in 1955 and became an annual feature. During the first four decades, the list was limited to manufacturing companies, but it later came to include separate lists for service companies, such as retailers, banks, and transportation companies. In the mid-1990s Fortune merged them all into one list.

Luce remained editor-in-chief of all his magazines (including Life and Sports Illustrated, which he launched after Fortune) until 1964. He died in 1967.

Fortune after Luce

In 1978 Fortune switched from a monthly publication schedule to a twice-a-month one. Marshall Loeb took over as managing editor in 1986. He modernized the magazine to include charts and graphs as well as articles on social issues that were impacting the business world, including homelessness. The New York Times wrote that “during Mr. Loeb’s tenure, the ‘big story’ that had always been Fortune’s forte was made more explicit.”

In 2018 media conglomerate Meredith Corporation announced that it had finished acquiring Time Inc., Fortune’s parent company. Later that year it sold Fortune to the Thai billionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon for $150 million.

As of 2025 the magazine is published six times a year. Its main competitors are Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.