Fortune 500

“We’re smaller than our bigger peers, but we’re mighty from a brand recognition perspective.” bit.ly/4b1c6jM The summer travel season is set to heat up and many consumers want luxurious resort stays. Hyatt Hotels Corporation’s leisure travel bookings for July 4 are up 25% year over year at resort properties in the Americas. Despite inflationary pressures, consumers continue to prioritize leisure travel with the higher-earning demographic still driving growth, according to Hyatt CFO Joan Bottarini. About 50% of the company’s revenue, globally, is leisure-based travel, 20% is business, and about 30% is group travel, Bottarini said. 

In 1955, Fortune magazine published the first list of the 500 largest companies in the U.S. by revenue—albeit with a less catchy title. bit.ly/3KAx5PE At the top of the “Annual Directory of the 500 Largest Corporations,” with $9.8 billion in revenue, was General Motors, followed by Standard Oil of New Jersey, which was later renamed as ExxonMobil. Rounding out the top five were United States Steel Corporation, GE, and the meat packing company Swift, which eventually merged with JBS USA. The top 50 companies, which had a combined revenue of $69.4 billion, were in the manufacturing, defense, energy, and other similar sectors, because the original #Fortune500 was not a complete snapshot of the largest players of the U.S. economy. Instead, the original list focused on these more tangible industries, and it wasn’t until 1994 that the methodology opened to include all companies that file their financial information with a government agency.

NVIDIA’s technological prowess has lifted the chip giant to the commanding heights of the red-hot AI space. But a former employee provided a key insight into CEO Jensen Huang’s management philosophy that has also been key to the company’s stratospheric rise. bit.ly/4bTLrH9 Rene Haas, CEO of U.K. chip designer Arm, worked at Nvidia in the early 2010s and told the Financial Times that Huang organized the company around projects rather than traditional hierarchies, allowing him to access any layer of management and get answers directly. “It’s a very unique culture,” Haas told the FT. “The benefit of that is transparency and speed. And I think that is one of the things that Nvidia is really, really good at. They move very, very fast, they’re very, very purposeful.”

Nobody is safe from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s now permanent efficiency measures, not even the company’s upper echelons. As of last year, Meta employed an army of 300 vice presidents staggered into five levels of seniority that are now the prime targets of Zuck’s efficiency cuts, Business Insider reported, citing three people with knowledge of the company. In previous years, there were half as many VPs at Meta, Business Insider noted, and Zuckerberg reportedly wants to slice the roster down to 250. The VP massacre comes after Zuckerberg first declared 2023 the “year of efficiency” last February, which resulted in more than 20,000 layoffs that year, according to BI. bit.ly/4b25hyK

A handful of bankers have been let go by Wells Fargo after the financial giant discovered the staff were “simulating keyboard activity” instead of actually working. The more than dozen employees were all in the firm’s wealth- and investment-management team, and were “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work. ”The issue was raised in a filing to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which was seen by Bloomberg. “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokeswoman told Fortune. bit.ly/3zake4d

The chief financial officer of $19 billion Tyson Foods has been suspended from work hours after local police in Arkansas arrested the executive for allegedly driving while intoxicated.According to police records, John R. Tyson was booked around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday. Tyson posted bond, and law enforcement released him nine hours later after charging him with driving while intoxicated, careless driving, and making an improper turn. The charges are the Tyson scion’s second-known scrape with the law. Just months after he was appointed to the CFO role in 2022, Tyson was found asleep in a stranger’s bed in her Fayetteville, Ark., home. Police said the woman resident did not know Tyson. The CFO was arrested for public intoxication and criminal trespass after the incident; he later apologized to employees in an email and said he would get counseling for his drinking. bit.ly/4ci3NBm

Our annual survey of #Fortune500 CEOs is here—and AI is a prime preoccupation. bit.ly/4c9nw66 As a group, these leaders are relatively sanguine about what commentators describe as the most disruptive technology of our era. Only 22% of our CEO respondents, for example, identified “technology transformation” as one of the top threats to their business over the coming 12 months. They were also relatively modest in describing their goals for AI. When we asked where their companies were finding the most productive uses for generative AI, 44% chose “customer service and interaction,” and an identical percentage chose “finance and back office.” (Respondents could choose more than one answer.) By contrast, relatively few chose creative-class-threatening options like “coding,” “sales and marketing,” and “R&D.”

“There’s no point in starting a company unless you want to make a contribution to society.” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told a Fortune #BrainstormTech dinner in 2018 that launching his company was full of “despair” and “torture.” “It’s incredibly hard to start a company. It’s incredibly hard to start a business,” Huang added. bit.ly/3XuYxWG

It was the beginning of 2021 when Greg Lavender, at the time the CTO at VMware, received a career-altering phone call from then-CEO Pat Gelsinger. Gelsinger, who had steered VMware for more than eight years, would be leaving the cloud-computing firm to return to chip maker Intel, where he had spent three decades of his career. bit.ly/3yPPcP1 “I wish you a lot of luck,” Lavender recalls telling Gelsinger. “I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.” The pair worked together for three years at VMware and Lavender’s plan was to ride it out as CTO a bit longer until retirement. But Gelsinger called again two months later, asking Lavender to steer Intel Corporation’s software division. Lavender put his retirement plans on hold and joined Intel as CTO in June 2021. Lavender went on a listening tour with customers, who were quick to share that Intel had been tone-deaf. “Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come,” was the overriding message Lavender came away with. “The loyalty only goes so far with the brand.”

Starbucks is trying to make your breakfast a little more affordable. The coffee giant is joining the bandwagon of several other fast-food chains trying to lure in customers with deals by announcing a new “pairings menu,” which gives diners the ability to pair a tall hot or iced tea or coffee with some of the coffee bar’s staple bites, like a butter croissant or breakfast sandwich, for just $5 to $6. Starbucks says the deal is available for a limited time. The new deal is one of many made by fast-food chains being squeezed by higher food costs and inflation, which have, in turn, been squeezing consumers’ wallets. This comes after Starbucks reported a “disappointing” second quarter, in the words of the company’s own CEO Laxman Narasimhan, and the latest of many quarters with missed results. bit.ly/45oFcZm