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Fortune drives the conversation about business. With a global perspective, the guiding wisdom of history, and an unflinching eye to the future, we report and reveal the stories that matter today—and that will matter even more tomorrow. With the trusted power to convene and challenge those who are shaping industry, commerce and society around the world, Fortune lights the path for global leaders—and gives them the tools to make business better.
Our History
Henry Robinson Luce founded Fortune magazine in 1929 in the wake of the Great Depression and the death of Yale classmate Briton Hadden, with whom he cofounded Time magazine and the Time-Fortune Corporation (later Time Incorporated) in 1922. In a 1929 prospectus for advertisers, Luce wrote that Fortune should be "the Ideal Super-Class Magazine" for "wealthy and influential people." It should be, he added, "surpassingly beautiful" and "so richly illustrated and so distinguished in appearance that it will be instinctive to turn the pages. And having turned the pages, his reader will discover the editorial content of such arresting vitality that, were it but mimeographed on cheapest newsprint, he would still pay dearly for it." Its price? $10 per year, "a barrier so high that only the reader both enthusiastic and well-to-do will vault it."