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.’”
