Fifty-six of the companies listed on the new Fortune 500 list are Texas-based -- and 11 are based in Dallas proper, with Centex being the highest ranked at No. 153 and our old friend Affiliated Computer Services bringing up the rear at 424. Just missing the list was Brinker International, at No. 502. Better luck next year, y'all. You and yer lousy $338 million in profits. Pitiful.
But when you include the entirety of the metroplex, well, that number gets a whole lot bigger.
To fully appreciate how wealthy the DFW is, you must include all the companies HQ'd, say, in Irving (s'up, No. 2 ExxonMobil?), Plano (looking good, No. 111 Electronic Data Systems), Grapevine (hey, don't get off the couch, No. 426 GameStop) and, certainly, Fort Worth (how's it hanging, No. 155 D.R. Horton). Turns out that 24 of the Fortune 500 companies are located in the metroplex, unless I did the math wrong, which would explain why I don't work for one of them. Could be 25. Or 23.
The best thing about the list is the way Fortune has it configured online. You can view it by city or state, by winner or loser, by industry, by the gender of the CEOs. You could spend all day browsing the thing. And then you could read in the Fortune 500 issue yet another story about Ram Charan, the so-called "CEO Whisperer" recently featured in Newsweek who has an office in Dallas he never, ever visits. --Robert Wilonsky