Gallery: A Century of Capitalist Cathedrals Built by the World's Biggest Companies
Copyright © 2007 - Louis C Vest01exxonmobil-baytown-0
__Exxon Mobil__ Apple claimed the World's Most Valuable Company title from Exxon Mobil, which held the title for several previous years. (A world run by ones and zeros apparently still needs gas to make it go.) According to government figures, the company's Baytown refinery outside Houston is the country's largest, handling more than 560,000 barrels of oil per day. *Image: [OneEighteen](http://www.flickr.com/photos/oneeighteen/2514446326/")/Flickr*
02microsoft
__Microsoft__ At less than half of Apple's current stock market value, Microsoft still ranks as the world's third-largest company. Its sprawling Redmond, Washington, headquarters sets the standard for suburban corporate campuses, where tens of thousands of employees can work side by side without noise or pollution, since the site's only output is knowledge work. Amid parks, ponds, and modern, low-slung buildings, workers crank out software that still generates tens of billions in sales every year. Adjusted for inflation, Microsoft at its stock market peak in 1999 was worth $856 billion – more valuable than Apple today. *Image: Microsoft*
Don Shreve,Don Shreve Shreve Imaging03walmartwaltons
__Walmart__ Walmart has taken great pride in preserving the five-and-dime in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Sam Walton's retail empire got its start. Admission is free to the Walmart Visitor Center housed behind the folksy storefront, which resembles nothing so much as the kind of independent Main Street retailer that goes out of business when Walmart sets up shop on the outskirts of town. *Image: Wal-Mart*
04ibm-watson
__IBM__ The midcentury sleekness of its Saarinen-designed research lab a few dozen miles up the Hudson from New York evokes an era when International Business Machines still mostly made machines — hardware that made IBM the most valuable company in the world. Now that it specializes in services instead of stuff, IBM still ranks fifth among the world's most valuable companies with a market cap of about $225 billion. And the company's capacity to make computers shouldn't be underestimated: [The world's fastest](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/top500-llnl/) is made by IBM, and the Watson supercomputer that [trounced its human competitors at Jeopardy](http://stag-komodo.wired.com/business/2011/02/ibm-watson-speed/) was invented at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, pictured above. .*Image: IBM*
05gm-hq-small
__General Motors__ Not so very long after the U.S. auto industry itself came into existence, General Motors built this multi-towered neoclassical monument that would serve as its Detroit headquarters during the decades that the car took over the American landscape. GM spent a few of those decades – from the '20s to the '50s as the world's most valuable company, but today doesn't rank among the top 150. Now valued at around $34 billion, the most powerful physical testament to GM's power and influence isn't any building that it built, but the roads paved to serve the cars coming off its assembly lines. *Image: [Library of Congress](http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/item/mi0172.photos.089833p/resource/)*
06standard-oil
__Standard Oil__ Before software or big-box stores or even cars, there was Standard Oil. The name of the company itself tells you all you need to know about John D. Rockefeller's multi-tentacled monster. Founded in 1870 in Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ordered that Standard be split up into 34 separate companies, including two that eventually became Exxon and Mobil. By most accounts, Rockefeller's wealth adjusted for inflation would still make him the richest person in American history. (Pictured: Standard Oil Refinery No. 1, Cleveland, Ohio, 1889.) *Image: [Wikimedia Commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Oil.jpg)*
07nemours-mansion
__DuPont__ Originally founded as a gunpowder maker at the turn of the 19th century, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company prospered during the first half of the 20th century as the American inventors of better living through chemistry. While its synthetic materials such as polyester, nylon, and neoprene became synonymous with the Space Age, the du Ponts loved to build mansions that looked back to the family's ancestral origins. The ornate 300-acre Nemours estate (pictured above) brought neoclassical French opulence to the Delaware countryside, where it remains a popular tourist attraction. (Nemours was built by Alfred I. DuPont while he was still with the chemical company, which booted him about a decade later. His trust now funds children's hospitals.) E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company itself is now worth about $46 billion — not enough to rank it among the world's top 100 companies, but enough to keep someone in mansions for the foreseeable future. *Image: [Simon](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/walhalla/4982978901/)/Flickr*
