How Big? A number of American corporations are so big that it takes some imagination to realize how large they really are. The Bell Telephone System has more revenue and employees than the combined governments of New York State, New York City, and all of the city, county, and other local gov ernments within that state. The largest corporations are exceeded in size by only one organization in this country, and that is the U.S. Government itself. Outside this country, no private organizations, and only a few of the governments, have as much revenue as some of the largest American cor porations have.

Suppose we say that to be called a “giant” a corporation must have property valued at a billion dollars a thousand times a million dollars. How many companies are this big? In 1956 there were about seventy. Not including financial institutions such as banks and life-insurance companies, the largest four corporations were Bell Telephone, sixteen billion dollars; Standard Oil of New Jersey, eight billion dollars; General Motors, 7 billion; and U.S. Steel, four billion. The next five, each having two and a half billion dollars or more, were Ford Motor, Gulf Oil, Socony Mobil Oil, E. I. duPont, and the Texas Co. Certified Financial Planner - Read More.