Forbes America’s Top Private Companies 2024 List

Agribusiness giant Cargill held onto its No. 1 spot on the list for the fourth consecutive year despite a nearly 10% decline in its fiscal 2024 revenue.This is the 37th year since our inaugural list in 1985 that Cargill has ranked as the nation’s biggest private company. The three years Cargill wasn’t No. 1 –in 2006, 2007 and 2020– it was outranked by Koch Inc., the No. 2 company this year and many other years.

Most of these top private companies have no plans to change their status, and instead enjoy the freedom from quarterly earnings reporting and reduced obligations to Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements.

That’s the reason companies on this list tend to stay put. Of the 275 firms on the 2024 list, 48% have been on for the past 10 years, including money management firm Fidelity Investments and E&J Gallo Winery. Still, there is always some movement. Twenty-six new companies entered the ranks this year and 13 fell off. Newcomers include video game company Valve Corporation at No. 139 and homebuilder Perry Homes at No. 242. The largest firm to drop off was SRS Distribution, ranked No. 55 last year; the building products distributor was acquired by Home Depot in June for a total enterprise value of $18.25 billion.

Forbes has been tracking America’s largest private companies since 1985. This year’s ranking, with 275 companies, is the largest since 2008, the last year before the threshold was doubled to $2 billion. Companies are ranked by revenue for the most recently completed fiscal year. For more than 85% of the list members, that means calendar 2023. Others have fiscal years that ended as recently as October 2024.