(Note: Last December I began work on a series of posts focusing on the geography of wealth and corporate power. After a single post on the location of corporate headquarters, I had to suspend my work on this topic. This post includes maps that I made at that time, based on data from late 2025.)
In the GeoCurrents post of December 11, 2025, I mapped the locations of the headquarters of world’s largest publicly traded corporations (by market capitalization). As these maps show, most of these firms are headquartered in the United States. Most of the top U.S.-based firms, in turn, are located in the West Coast and Texas. I was surprised at how few have their head offices in New York, the historical core of American capitalism. I then decided to make a historical series of maps showing the changing locations of the corporate headquarters of the top 25* publicly traded companies in the United States (again, by market capitalization). Finding the necessary data, however, proved impossible in the time period that I allotted for the task. As an expedient, I turned to AI, getting the information that I needed from ChatGPT. As such information is not necessarily reliable, these maps should be considered preliminary.
The first map shows the situation in 1890, when railroad companies dominated the list. As can be seen, New York City was then the core of American capitalism, with nine of 24 top corporate headquarters. Chicago was in clear second place, with two railroad-oriented firms and two meatpackers. (as Carl Sandburg’s famous poem opens, “Chicago: Hog Butcher for the World, … Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler”). The only other city with multiple top-25 corporate headquarters was San Francisco, with only two. The sole city in the south was Durham, home of the monopolistic American Tobacco. The smallest city on the map was Butte, Montana, which at the time had 10,723 residents (although that figure would rise to almost 40,000 in twenty years). Butte reached this position because of the extraordinarily rich ores extracted by the Anaconda Copper Company. The key role of railroads in 1890 can be seen by the location of leading firms in secondary cities in the western Midwest: Omaha (population 140,452 in 1890), Topeka (31,007), and Saint Paul (133,156). New England, the original heartland of the American industrial revolution, is notable for its lack of major corporate headquarters.
The map of major corporate headquarters in 1920 shows some major changes from that of 1890. Over the intervening thirty years, railroad companies declined in importance, largely replaced by heavy-industrial firms. New York and Chicago retained their positions, and a clear belt of corporate power had emerged across the mid-Atlantic and southern Great Lakes regions. The rise of the automobile industry is reflected by the addition of Detroit, South Bend, and Akron to the map (note that only General Motors is mapped in Detroit; Ford is missing because it was a privately held company at the time).
The map showing the situation in 1960 is surprisingly little changed from that of 1920. A small city far from the corporate heartland hasd, however, joined the list: Bartlesville, Oklahoma, with 27,893 residents in 1960. Bartlesville owed this position to Phillips Petroleum, which was founded on the productive oilfields of northeastern Oklahoma. Today, its two descendant companies, Phillips 66 and ConocoPhillips, are based in Houston, which has emerged as the core city of the U.S. oil industry.
By 1990, the New York City metropolitan area had further cemented itself as the center of American corporate capitalism. Slightly more than half of the country’s largest publicly traded companies were at the time headquartered there, as were seven of the top ten. In contrast, the upper Midwest saw a substantial drop from 1920, reflecting the relative decline of heavy industries. In contrast, pharmaceutical and consumer-oriented firms had come to occupy a more prominent position. Because of this shift, the South appears on the map for the first time since 1890, represented by Coca-Cola in Atlanta and Walmart in the small city of Bentonville, Arkansas (population 11,257 in 1990). The only corporation in the western half of the country that made the 1990 map was Chevron, an oil company based at the time in San Francisco. In 2024, Chevron announced that it would relocate to Houston.
The 2025 map reveals a completely transformed geography of major corporate headquarters, deviating sharply from all other maps in this series. The New York City area dropped precipitously, to be replaced by the San Francisco Bay Area, home to most leading high-tech companies. Austin and Seattle gain a prominent position for the same reason. Together, the Bay Area and the Seattle metro area were home to the top six firms. Overall, this map is more geographically balanced than any of the preceding ones. Intriguingly, the only company and city found on both the 1890 and 2025 maps is the consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble of Cincinnati. Procter & Gamble’s roots extend to the time when fat from hogs was used to make soap. As early as 1840, Cincinnati had become the world’s largest pork-processing hub, earning it the nickname “Porkopolis.”
The geography of leading corporate headquarters is continuing to experience rapid shifts. The prominence of California’s Bay Area might soon be heightened, owing to the widely anticipated initial public offerings (IPOs) of the AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic. Both are based in San Francisco, and both are expected to be valued at up to one trillion dollars, easily putting them in the top twenty-five. OpenAI, however, is currently embroiled in a major lawsuit with Elon Musk that might threaten its future.
But as the map also shows, several leading companies have recently left the San Francisco Bay Area. Their departure was largely due to concerns about taxation and regulation. Tesla relocated to Austin in 2021, as did Oracle. Texas will likely gain another top-25 firm when SpaceX undergoes its expected IPO. SpaceX began its relocation from Hawthorn, California to Starbase, Texas in 2024. Starbase, located near the southern tip of the state, is, however, more of an industrial facility than a city or even town, with an estimated population of 500. If SpaceX subsequently merges with Tesla, as many expect, its headquarters will almost certainly remain in Texas.
The pace of corporate relocation may be increasing. Oracle, for example, recently announced that it will be moving to Nashville by 2030, even though it had moved to Austin only in 2021. The military technology firm Palantir, with a current market capitalization of around $350 billion, transferred its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Denver in 2020, largely because of the protests that it had experienced in California. Only four years later – after facing additional rounds of protest in Denver – it announced its relocation to Miami.
* Or 24 in the case of 1890, due to data limitations.