Fortune (magazine)

Fortune is an American business magazine with its headquarters in New York City. It is published on a global scale. Fortune Media Group Holdings, a company controlled by Thai millionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon, publishes the magazine. Henry Luce launched the journal in 1929, and it has been in continuous publication since since. Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek are its main competitors for national business magazine readers, and it differentiates itself from the pack with lengthy feature stories that delve into great detail on a particular topic.

The magazine provides ranked lists on a regular basis, including the Fortune 500, which has been published yearly since 1955 and is a rating of corporations based on sales. The magazine is also well-known for publishing the Fortune Investor's Guide every year.

Fortune was established in 1988 by Time Magazine co-founder Henry Luce as "the Ideal Super-Class Magazine," a "distinguished and de luxe" publication "vividly portraying, interpreting, and recording the Industrial Civilization." Fortune was founded as "the Ideal Super-Class Magazine" by Henry Luce in 1929 as "the Ideal Super-Class Magazine." Luce's business partner, Briton Hadden, was not excited about the concept – which Luce had initially intended to call Power – but Luce persisted with it until Hadden died unexpectedly on February 27, 1929, and it became a reality.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 happened in late October 1929, heralding the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. Luce said the following in a letter to the Time Inc. Board members in November 1929: "We are not going to be too hopeful. We will acknowledge that the current economic downturn may endure for up to a year at a time." The first issue of the newspaper was published in February 1930. Thomas Maitland Cleland served as art director, and Luce served as editor. Parker Lloyd-Smith served as managing editor. Single copies of the first issue cost one dollar (which would be $15.49 in 2020). Unconventional wisdom holds that Cleland mocked up the cover of the first issue with a $1 price on it because no one had yet decided how much to charge; the magazine was printed before anyone realised what had happened, and when people saw it for sale, they assumed that the magazine must have truly valuable content. In reality, there were 30,000 members who had already signed up to get that first 184-page edition when it was published. By 1937, the number of subscribers had climbed to 460,000, and the magazine had made half million dollars in yearly profit.