Tabla de contenidos para August/September 2021 en Fortune

FOUR YEARS AGO, Fortune published a cover story delving into what we dubbed “Blockchain Mania!” At the time, enthusiasm—or, let’s be honest, hype—about the vast potential of the revolutionary technology underpinning Bitcoin was exploding. “Initial coin offerings” were raising big bucks from investors. The price of a single Bitcoin had shot past $3,000. And the total market value of all cryptocurrencies exceeded $135 billion. Looking back, those numbers seem quaint. As with most revolutions, the crypto-uprising didn’t advance in a straight line. Bitcoin spiked in the months after our 2017 story, then crashed. Trend-chasing investors moved on, and blockchain initiatives inside big corporations floundered. But all the while, the crypto ecosystem continued to expand and evolve. Recently, digital coin prices have scaled new peaks, attracting first-time investors and institutional…

THE EARLY-AUGHTS TITANS OF TECH, masters of the digiverse, envisioned an online world that mimicked our physical reality. Operating under Westphalian sovereignty, the would-be technocrats shepherded consumers into distinct and insular borders, defending market share as one might defend his or her own territory. This walled-off approach has permeated our digital lives for the better part of a generation, but familiarity can breed contempt, and contempt can breed opposition. Enter Roham Gharegozlou, the 35-year-old cocreator of digital trading-card games NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties and an oft-heralded anti-Zuckerberg. Gharegozlou is more of an open-borders guy. He believes a rapid proliferation of blockchain platforms, cryptocurrencies, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will bring an end to the data monopolies that fuel the success of Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, and Apple. Ironically, his proclaimed…

THERE ARE A MULTITUDE OF WAYS to look at the Fortune Global 500 ranking of the world’s largest companies. The most direct, of course, is from the top down. For an eighth straight year, the list begins with Walmart at No. 1, after the retailer racked up $559 billion in revenue. But another illuminating prism through which to view the Global 500 is to identify the biggest company in each of the 31 countries on the list, as in the graphic. Of that group, French insurance giant AXA, No. 46 with $128 billion in revenue, is the oldest, tracing its history back to 1816. The youngest is Chinese utility State Grid, founded in 2002, which ranks No. 2 with $387 billion in sales. Together, these 31 national champions boast $3.9…

THIS EDITED Q&A HAS BEEN CONDENSED FOR SPACE AND CLARITY. “Online trading changed everything about the industry… Today we’re in a new wave of accessibility and democratization.” THE EVOLUTION OF AN EXCHANGE You first joined Nasdaq in 1993 as an intern. How does Nasdaq today compare to the company you joined then? FRIEDMAN: Nasdaq was a for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit National Association of Securities Dealers, now FINRA. And it was just a stock exchange. When we separated from FINRA and turned ourselves into a shareholder-owned organization in 2000, that shaped what Nasdaq has become. Today, we’re global, we’re a technology company, and we’re a public company. In your time away from Nasdaq, you took the Carlyle Group public. 1 What did that experience teach you about how to serve the companies…

BRYCE YOUNG—a 19-year-old college sophomore and the likely starting quarterback for the Crimson Tide this season—is getting paid big, thanks to eager sponsors and new rules from the NCAA. Alabama head coach Nick Saban revealed in late July that Young has amassed name, image, and likeness deals worth “nearly seven figures” after playing in just seven games and throwing 22 passes last year. “That’s because of our brand,” said the savvy Saban, with a wink to future recruits. The NCAA was forced to change its rules on name and image deals after the U.S. Supreme Court found existing rules violated federal antitrust laws. Young isn’t alone. Other college athletes like Auburn QB Bo Nix are already endorsing brands on social media. While it’s a boon for players at marquee…

ELON MUSK HIMSELF could hardly have dreamed up a more idyllic setting for a Bitcoin miner. Founded in 2017, Bitfarms is a Canadian company with five highly specialized computing centers located near the raging Yamaska and Magog rivers of Quebec, east of Montreal. The facilities are electricity-guzzling server farms filled with machines running algorithms 24/7 to solve mathematical puzzles and unlock new units of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin—in a process known as “mining.” But because they run entirely on hydropower, these server farms in the Canadian countryside might just represent the greenest crypto mining operation on the planet. And it’s not just Bitfarms’ environmental footprint that is exemplary. So too are the Nasdaq-listed company’s profit margins—especially as the price of Bitcoin has soared over the past year. Consider the company’s amazing…

IT WAS THE END of a sweltering summer’s day in Riyadh, with the mercury hitting 110˚ F. In a social hall in Saudi Arabia’s capital, producers and executives from the animation studio Myrkott doled out pizza and salads to a buzzing group of actors, illustrators, and staff. Then they switched on a big-screen TV and settled in to stream the latest Netflix release, which had dropped precisely at midnight as June 30 became July 1. The crew was binge-watching their own new eight-part series, Masameer County, their first production under a five-year deal signed with Netflix in September 2020. Under the deal, Myrkott will create original movies and TV shows for the streaming giant—in Arabic, with plotlines specific to Saudi life. Within hours of the premiere, the Myrkott crew had…

The biggest fear by far haunting the worlds of business and investing is the I-word, short for the curse of looming inflation. Consumer and producer prices are waxing at their fastest pace in over a decade, posting downright scary numbers. In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices jumped by 0.9%, or 10.8% on an annual basis, and had risen 5.4% in the past 12 months, the highest reading since August 2008. Since June 2020, the cost of dining out has swelled by 4.2%, apparel by 4.9%, home energy by 6.3%, and “transportation services,” a category including airline tickets, by 10.4%. Used cars and trucks got a jaw-dropping 45% pricier, and at the gas station, you’re paying half again as much to fill your tank as…

EACH YEAR, Fortune partners with research and analytics firm Great Place to Work to analyze survey feedback from millions of employees, creating lists of the best workplaces. We measure the level of trust among colleagues, company values, and effectiveness of leadership across industries, identifying companies that excel. Universally, employees who speak highly of their company’s culture note the value of collaborative teams that go out of their way to support one another. NerdWallet, Better​.com, and Asana each ranked on the Best Workplaces for Millennials list as well as the overall Best Medium Workplaces list. Based on employee reviews, these three companies share a key quality: inclusivity. Companies that adapted quickly to the challenges of the pandemic also ranked high. Employees appreciated being kept in the loop—despite overarching uncertainty—and feeling…

THIS SUMMER I TOOK MY FIRST STEP toward becoming a “degen.” The word—short for “degenerate gambler”—comes from the zany, $1.5 trillion cryptocurrency world, where cheeky speculators have embraced it as a term of endearment. My toe dip into the club? A pool party held by a digital-only organization that would be happy, someday, to replace your bank. The event was a “loss-less lottery” run by an app called PoolTogether. Leighton Cusack, who cocreated the project two years ago, prefers a different name for the game: a prize-linked savings account. While traditional savings accounts spread meager interest among all depositors, PoolTogether regularly delivers a big payday to a handful of winners. At the end of July, the app had almost $200 million in total deposits and was sharing nearly $100,000 in…

IT WASN’T LONG AGO that cryptocurrency investing could be (and often was) dismissed as “niche.” In the summer of 2016, the value of all the crypto in the world was barely $10 billion, and in the popular imagination the technology was associated as much with online drug dealing as with venture capital dealmaking. Today it’s a different world: Anyone can buy crypto using a Robinhood account; S&P 500 companies hold digital coins on their balance sheets; and Bitcoin at $30,000, a bullish pipe dream just a year ago, now counts as a serious slump. (The total value of the crypto market, meanwhile, hovered near $1.5 trillion in late July.) Crypto’s current status reflects more than just the avid trading of tokens themselves. The crypto and blockchain sectors are maturing into…

ONE OF THE MOST hopeful signs of recovery from the pandemic slowdown was the global surge in consumer appetite for new cars. But that momentum was brought to a screeching halt by a crippling semiconductor shortage—one that left auto manufacturers slowing or even stopping production as they scrambled to secure enough chips to build vehicles. The unexpected spike in demand wasn’t the only factor in the shortage: A series of unpredictable disasters also tangled the semiconductor supply chain. A freak cold snap in Texas in February shut down factories at top chipmakers. Drought in Taiwan around the same time threatened to dry up the island’s semiconductor supplies (since chipmaking requires pools of water to wash away industrial chemicals). Then, in March, a fire tore through a factory at Japan’s…

DEFINITIONS, EXPLANATIONS, AND FOOTNOTES ARE IN "NOTES." 1-164 / 500 The pandemic has upended the business world in countless ways, but it didn’t disrupt the top spot on the Fortune Global 500: Mega-retailer Walmart landed at No. 1 on our list of the world’s largest companies by revenue for an eighth straight year. (See "Notes" for the full methodology behind the rankings.) With $57 billion in net income, Apple, No. 6, regained the title of the Global 500’s “most profitable” company (held by Saudi Aramco the past two years). Amazon grew sales by more than $105 billion and jumped to No. 3. And China ecommerce giants JD.com (No. 59) and Alibaba (No. 63) bounded into the top 100 for the first time, as did social media colossus Facebook (No. 86).…

DEFINITIONS AND EXPLANATIONS METHODOLOGY Companies are ranked by total revenues for their respective fiscal years ended on or before March 31, 2021. All companies on the list must publish financial data and report part or all of their figures to a government agency. Figures are as reported, and comparisons are with the prior year’s figures as originally reported for that year. Fortune does not restate the prior year’s figures for changes in accounting. REVENUES Revenue figures include consolidated subsidiaries and reported revenues from discontinued operations, but exclude excise taxes. For banks, revenue is the sum of gross interest income and gross noninterest income. For insurance companies, revenue includes premium and annuity income, investment income, realized capital gains or losses, and other income, but excludes deposits. Revenue figures for non-U.S.…

“ONE FINDS EVERYTHING at La Samaritaine!” went the popular slogan of Paris’s iconic Art Nouveau department store overlooking the Seine. That’s no longer true, as evidenced by the Samaritaine’s highly anticipated reopening this June as a luxury emporium after a 16-year closure and $900 million restoration by luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. The eccentricity of the landmark’s former incarnation—where locals shopped for everything from light bulbs and garden supplies to dresses and stationery—has been replaced by a sleek and splashy curation of designer clothes, upscale beauty brands, a Cinq Mondes spa, and 12 food and Champagne concept spaces spread across four buildings. President Emmanuel Macron’s presence at the store’s inauguration, alongside LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault, Mayor Anne Hidalgo, and 800 applauding store employees, is a signifier of the Samaritaine’s…