How Much Profit Do the World’s Biggest Companies Keep?
Key Takeaways
- Nvidia generates $55.60 in profit for every $100 in revenue, the highest margin among the Fortune Global 500’s 30 largest companies.
- Big Tech dominates the top of the ranking, with Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta each keeping more than $30 of every $100 in revenue as profit.
- At the other end, several of the world’s largest retailers, health care companies, and energy firms keep less than $5 per $100.
The world’s biggest companies generate enormous revenues, but the share that ultimately becomes profit varies widely.
This graphic ranks the world’s 30 largest companies by how much profit they generate for every $100 in revenue, based on Fortune Global 500 data. Profits are after taxes, extraordinary credits or charges, accounting changes, and noncontrolling interests, but before preferred dividends.
Why Tech Keeps More of Every $100
Revenue measures how much money flows through a company, but not how much ultimately reaches the bottom line. Across the world’s largest companies, Big Tech stands apart in how much of that revenue becomes profit.
Profits rounded to the nearest 10 cents.
The gap is striking even among corporate giants. Microsoft generates $36.10 in profit for every $100 in revenue, compared with roughly $3 for Walmart and Costco. Enormous revenue does not necessarily translate into an equally large profit margin.
Much of the difference comes down to business models. Software and digital platforms can serve additional customers at relatively low incremental cost, while retailers, manufacturers, and energy companies must continually pay for inventory, labor, raw materials, logistics, or production.
AI Is Rewriting Big Tech’s Business Model
The margins shown above reflect today’s business models, but AI is making many of those models more capital-intensive. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. Hyperscaler capital spending is on track to reach $785 billion in 2026 and rise to nearly $1 trillion in 2027.
Nvidia is a major beneficiary of this investment. As a dominant supplier of AI chips, it sits at the center of the infrastructure buildout, while its CUDA software ecosystem can make switching to rival chips more difficult for developers.
On the flipside, the scale of AI investment is raising capital costs across Big Tech. As infrastructure spending climbs, those costs could begin to reshape the margins that currently put many tech companies near the top of this ranking.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on the world’s largest companies outside the U.S.
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Ranked: The World’s 10 Biggest Foreign Investors
Tech firms made many of the world’s largest investments in 2025, led by a Taiwanese company’s $100-billion investment in Arizona.
Which Companies Invested the Most Abroad?
Key Takeaways
- Five of the world’s 10 largest foreign investors in 2025 were tech companies.
- TSMC led the ranking with $100 billion in announced investment tied to its Arizona expansion.
- The top 10 companies accounted for more than a quarter of the $1.3 trillion in new foreign investments announced globally.
In 2025, multinational companies announced more than $1.3 trillion in new foreign investments, up 2.2% from the previous year. The largest commitments spanned semiconductor fabs, data centers, energy projects, and other major infrastructure.
This visualization ranks the 10 largest foreign investors of 2025 using announced investments from The fDi Report 2026. Only greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) announcements are included, meaning mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and intercompany loans are excluded.
Why TSMC Invested $100B in Arizona
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest semiconductor fabricator, topped the ranking after announcing an additional $100 billion investment in its Arizona operations in 2025.
TSMC is also the world’s largest non-U.S. company by market capitalization. Amid record profits and rising demand for its chips, the company planned to use the investment to accelerate production at its facilities in the Phoenix area. The expansion is projected to create more than 18,000 jobs.
The table below ranks the world’s 10 largest foreign investors in 2025 by announced capital expenditure.
TSMC first pledged roughly $12 billion in 2020 to open an Arizona fabrication plant. These facilities, known as “fabs,” were designed to reduce semiconductor supply-chain risk by shifting some production away from Taiwan.
The company steadily expanded its investment over the following years as U.S.-China tensions increased, particularly around advanced chip technology. TSMC plans to produce some of its most advanced chips in Arizona as part of a 2024 deal with the U.S. government.
Despite labor challenges and higher costs, TSMC has continued to deepen its investment in Arizona. Following additional pledges in 2026, the firm’s overall greenfield investment in the state stands at $265 billion, making it the largest foreign investment in U.S. history.
Free-Flowing Tech Capital
TSMC stood well ahead of the field, but tech companies dominated the ranking overall, taking five of the top 10 spots.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ranked second with $45.1 billion in announced investment. Nearly $40 billion of that total came from plans to build a major data center in Brazil, a project expected to create roughly 5,000 jobs.
Big Tech firms including Alphabet ($25.1 billion) and Microsoft ($17.7 billion) also announced sizable foreign investments. Alphabet subsidiary Google, for example, pledged more than $5 billion for a large data center campus in Belgium to help meet growing demand for Google Cloud.
The Non-Tech Firms Want In Too
Digital infrastructure also shaped the investment priorities of companies outside the tech sector, particularly in Europe.
Emirati state-owned investment firm MGX Fund Management, for example, focuses heavily on global AI technologies. The company announced about $43.4 billion in investment, including a major French data center project aimed at creating one of Europe’s largest campuses of its kind.
Meanwhile, Canadian firm Brookfield Asset Management also targeted Europe’s AI and digital infrastructure market. Brookfield pledged about $28.2 billion in greenfield FDI in 2025, primarily for projects in France and Sweden. Its announced investments are expected to create roughly 4,800 jobs.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
For a breakdown of the sectors driving global FDI, check out The Top 10 Sectors for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on Voronoi.
Ranked: America’s Highest-Paid CEOs in 2025
See America’s highest-paid CEOs in 2025, led by Elon Musk’s record $132.3 billion compensation package.
How CEO Pay Stacked Up in 2025
Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk’s 2025 compensation package was valued at $132.3 billion, roughly 153 times the second-highest package and nearly 36 times the other nine top-10 packages combined.
- Nine of the top 10 highest-paid CEOs received compensation packages valued at $100 million or more.
- Median compensation for the 100 highest-paid CEOs reached $39.4 million in 2025, up 35.8% from 2024.
America’s highest-paid CEOs received some extraordinary compensation packages in 2025, driven largely by major equity awards.
This graphic ranks leading U.S. CEOs by total compensation awarded during the year, and it comes from Equilar and The New York Times.
Compensation includes salary, bonuses, stock and option awards, and other benefits. Stock and option awards are valued at grant date, meaning these figures do not necessarily represent cash received or gains ultimately realized by executives.
Ranking CEOs by Compensation in 2025
The below table breaks down the top 25 CEOs by compensation awarded:
Worth more than all the other pay packages on the list combined, Elon Musk’s $132.3 billion compensation package for Tesla stands out.
But unlike a conventional salary or cash bonus, that figure represents the grant-date value of a long-term Tesla stock award. How much Musk ultimately receives depends on Tesla reaching a series of ambitious milestones over the next 10 years.
How Musk’s $132 Billion Pay Package Works
According to regulatory filings, Musk’s performance award is divided into 12 stock tranches. Each generally requires Tesla to hit both a market capitalization target and an operational target.
Tesla’s targets span both its market value and operating performance. The market cap milestones rise from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion, while the operational milestones cover vehicles, self-driving car subscriptions, robots, robotaxis, and Adjusted EBITDA.
What Musk Gets for Hitting the Targets
Each completed tranche represents shares equal to roughly 1% of Tesla’s adjusted share count and gives Musk the ability to direct the voting rights associated with those earned shares.
However, earning those voting rights is different from receiving the full economic benefit of the shares. Musk generally must remain in continuous service at Tesla through the applicable 7.5- or 10-year vesting period before the shares vest.
The final tranche requires Tesla to reach an $8.5 trillion market capitalization and complete all 12 operational milestones.
What the $132 Billion Figure Means for Musk
Importantly, the $132.3 billion figure is the grant-date value assigned to Musk’s compensation package, not cash paid to him in 2025.
As of September 2026, Forbes ranked Musk as the world’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of roughly $923 billion. His wealth includes significant holdings in Tesla and SpaceX, alongside interests in other businesses.
Several CEOs Received Nine-Figure Packages
Even without Tesla, executive compensation reached extraordinary levels in 2025.
Figma CEO Dylan Field received the second-largest package at $864 million, followed by Welltower CEO Shankh Mitra at $821 million and Opendoor CEO Kasra Nejatian at $741 million.
Rivian’s RJ Scaringe ranked fifth at $403 million, while Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah received $281 million.
Across the 100 highest-paid CEOs, median compensation reached $39.4 million in 2025, up 35.8% from the previous year.
Learn More on the Voronoi App
If you enjoyed today’s post, check out What’s Behind Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Net Worth on Voronoi.
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