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THE COVER STORY |
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How We Chose the TIME100 Companies of 2026 |
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BY SAM JACOBS
Editor in Chief, TIME |
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In 2016, Sundar Pichai told his employees that Google was going to be an “AI-first company.” At the time, the statement struck some as a nonevent and others as premature: the investments in and attention to artificial intelligence seemed out of step with the company’s core business of internet search and advertising. Then in 2022, when OpenAI launched a splashy chatbot and Anthropic soon followed, Google again looked out of step. The early results of Pichai’s effort to catch up were, let’s be honest, not pretty. |
This January, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, hit a $4 trillion market capitalization, becoming only the fourth company in history to do so. Gemini, Google’s main AI product, now accounts for around a quarter of AI traffic worldwide, up from nearly 6% at the start of 2025. What once looked like a misadventure turned out to be a pivotal chapter in the story Pichai began telling a decade earlier. |
This sixth edition of TIME100 Companies—led by Emma Barker Bonomo; our largest outing yet, spanning 205 companies across 20 sectors—is about that kind of storytelling. One thread running through this year’s list is the power of narrative: the ability of a company and its leader to articulate a vision worth following, and to keep communicating it long enough for the rest of us to catch up. |
The three leaders featured on our covers make that clear. |
For Pichai, it was about conviction—a long bet held until the world caught on. For Rhode founder Hailey Bieber, storymaking was the product. Before launching a single SKU, she built a media platform on YouTube, programming her channel “like a network,” says collaborator Michael D. Ratner. Soon after Rhode sold to E.l.f. Beauty in mid-2025 in a transaction valued at up to $1 billion, the brand had Sephora’s biggest ever North America and U.K. debuts. “We focus on storytelling,” Bieber says. “We focus on inviting you into this whole entire world.” And for Jimmy Donaldson—MrBeast on YouTube—the ability to create a captivating plot is the business plan. Beast Industries, valued at north of $5 billion, now employs 750 people and is building out a TV show, a payments platform, a snack line, and more. His team is positioning him as a 21st century Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse rolled into one; Donaldson suggests that pitch might undersell it: “If I said some of the things I would want to do 10, 20 years from now, they’d be like, ‘This guy is f-cking crazy.’” |
Seen side by side, the companies on this list are clearly different from one another. Corning has been leading its industry for 175 years; Breeze Airways has existed for less than a decade. Amazon and Foxconn each employ more than a million people; Fishwife and N8iv Beauty are startups with a handful of employees. What connects them is the ability to tell a story compelling enough that others will follow. |
Our focus on company leadership has only deepened since we first launched TIME100 Companies. Today, through newsletters like In the Loop and Future Proof with Justin Worland, interview series like The Leadership Brief, and programming like TIME100 Philanthropy, we keep returning to company leaders because, increasingly, they are the ones shaping the world. |
As we look for the next class of companies that will transform our lives, we will not underestimate the importance of telling a story. |
READ THE STORY » |
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What I’ve been reading this week |
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