The second and current incarnation of Viacom Inc. (/?va??k?m/ VY-?-kom or /?vi??k?m/ VEE-?-kom), is an American multinational mass media conglomerate with interests primarily in film and television, which was formed as a spin-off of the original Viacom on December 31, 2005. It is one of two companies which succeeded the original Viacom, alongside CBS Corporation; both are owned by National Amusements, a theater company controlled by businessman Sumner Redstone. The spin-off was structured so that CBS Corporation would be the legal successor to the old Viacom, with the new Viacom being an entirely new company.[3][4][5][6][7] The new Viacom comprises Viacom Media Networks and Paramount Pictures, through which it operates approximately 170 networks and reaches approximately 700 million subscribers in approximately 160 countries.[8] CBS Corporation retains the over-the-air broadcasting, television production, pay-TV subscription service, and publishing assets, which were previously owned by the old Viacom. The new Viacom is currently the world’s ninth-largest media company in terms of revenue, and is headquartered at One Astor Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. The second merger between Viacom and CBS Corporation, creating the combined company ViacomCBS, was announced on August 13, 2019; the merger is expected to be completed by late 2019.

Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. is an American holding company headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, that owns Walgreens, Boots, and a number of pharmaceutical manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution companies. The company was formed on December 31, 2014, after Walgreens purchased the 55% stake in UK and Switzerland-based Alliance Boots that it did not already own. The total price of the acquisition was $4.9 billion in cash and 144.3 million common shares with fair value of $10.7 billion.[2] Walgreens had previously purchased 45% of the company for $4.0 billion and 83.4 million common shares in August 2012 with an option to purchase the remaining shares within three years.[3] Walgreens became a subsidiary of the newly created company after the transactions were completed.[4] The company is organized into three divisions: Retail Pharmacy USA (Walgreens and Duane Reade), Retail Pharmacy International (Boots and other retail operations internationally), and Pharmaceutical Wholesale, incorporating Alliance Healthcare.[5] The new holding company began trading on the NASDAQ on December 31, 2014.[6] The combined business has operations in over 25 countries. Walgreens had formerly operated solely within the United States and its territories, while Alliance Boots operated a more international business. In October 2018, Walgreens Boots Alliance published its fourth quarter earnings report. Fiscal year 2018 sales were $131.5 billion, up 11.3% from fiscal 2017, and GAAP net earnings increased to $5.0 billion.[7] On June 26, 2018, Walgreens Boots Alliance replaced General Electric on the Dow Jones Industrial Index.

The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (/?d?zni/),[3] is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio; it also operated under the names The Walt Disney Studio and Walt Disney Productions before officially changing its name to The Walt Disney Company in 1986. The company established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into live-action film production, television, and theme parks. Since the 1980s, Disney has created and acquired corporate divisions in order to market more mature content than is typically associated with its flagship family-oriented brands. The company is known for its film studio division, The Walt Disney Studios, which includes Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, Fox 2000 Pictures, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and Blue Sky Studios. Disney’s other main units and reporting segments are Disney Media Networks, Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, and Walt Disney Direct-to-Consumer & International. Through these segments, Disney owns and operates the ABC broadcast network; cable television networks such as Disney Channel, ESPN, Freeform, FX, and National Geographic; publishing, merchandising, music, and theater divisions; and Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, a group of 14 theme parks around the world.[4][5] The company has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1991. Cartoon character Mickey Mouse, created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, is one of the world’s most recognizable characters and serves as the company’s official mascot.

Waste Management, Inc. is an American waste management, comprehensive waste, and environmental services company in North America. Founded in 1968, the company is headquartered in the First City Tower in Houston, Texas.[3] The company’s network includes 346 transfer stations[4] 293 active landfill disposal sites,[4] 146 recycling plants,[4] 111 beneficial-use landfill gas projects and six independent power production plants. Waste Management offers environmental services to nearly 21 million residential, industrial, municipal and commercial customers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. With 26,000 collection and transfer vehicles, the company has the largest trucking fleet in the waste industry. Together with its competitor Republic Services, Inc, the two handle more than half of all garbage collection in the United States.

Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with central offices throughout the United States.[9] It is the world’s fourth-largest bank by market capitalization and the fourth largest bank in the US by total assets.[10][11] Wells Fargo is ranked number 26 on the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest US corporations by total revenue.[12] In July 2015, Wells Fargo became the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, edging past ICBC,[11] before slipping behind JPMorgan Chase in September 2016, in the wake of a scandal involving the creation of over 2 million fake bank accounts by Wells Fargo employees.[10] Wells Fargo fell behind Bank of America to third by bank deposits in 2017[13] and behind Citigroup to fourth by total assets in 2018.[14] Wells Fargo is incorporated in DE. [15] The firm’s primary operating subsidiary is national bank Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., which designates its main office as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Wells Fargo in its present form is a result of a merger between San Francisco–based Wells Fargo & Company and Minneapolis-based Norwest Corporation in 1998 and the subsequent 2008 acquisition of Charlotte-based Wachovia. Following the mergers, the company transferred its headquarters to Wells Fargo’s headquarters in San Francisco and merged its operating subsidiary with Wells Fargo’s operating subsidiary in Sioux Falls. Along with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, Wells Fargo is one of the “Big Four Banks” of the United States.[16] As of June 2018, it had 8,050 branches and 13,000 ATMs.[2] In 2018 the company had operations in 35 countries with over 70 million customers globally.[2] In February 2014, Wells Fargo was named the world’s most valuable bank brand for the second consecutive year[17] in The Banker and Brand Finance study of the top 500 banking brands.[18] In 2016, Wells Fargo ranked 7th on the Forbes Magazine Global 2000 list of largest public companies in the world and ranked 27th on the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in the US.[7][19] In 2015, the company was ranked the 22nd most admired company in the world, and the 7th most respected company in the world.[7] As of December 2018, the company had a Standard & Poors credit rating of A?.[8] However, for a brief period in 2007, the company was the only AAA?rated bank, reflecting the highest credit rating from two firms.[20] On February 2, 2018, the US Federal Reserve Bank barred Wells Fargo from growing its nearly US$2 trillion-asset base any further, based upon years of misconduct, until Wells Fargo fixes its internal problems to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve.[21] In April 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Labor had launched a probe into whether Wells Fargo was pushing its customers into more expensive retirement plans as well as into retirement funds managed by Wells Fargo itself.[22][23] Subsequently in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo’s business banking group had improperly altered documents about business clients in 2017 and early 2018.[24] In June 2018, Wells Fargo began retreating from retail banking in the Midwestern United States by announcing the sale of all its physical bank branch locations in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio to Flagstar Bank.

WestRock is an American corrugated packaging company. It was formed in July 2015 after the merger of MeadWestvaco and RockTenn.[2] WestRock is the 2nd largest American packaging company. It is one of the world’s largest paper and packaging companies with US$15 billion in annual revenue and 42,000 employees in 30 countries. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, consolidating offices from Norcross, Georgia and Richmond, Virginia.

Whole Foods Market Inc. is an American multinational supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, which exclusively sells products free from hydrogenated fats and artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives.[4] A USDA Certified Organic grocer in the United States, the chain is popularly known for its organic selections.[5] Whole Foods has 500 stores in North America and the United Kingdom as of March 4, 2019.[2] On August 23, 2017, it was reported that the Federal Trade Commission had approved a merger between Amazon and Whole Foods Market;[6] the deal was closed on August 28, 2017.

Xerox Corporation (/?z??r?ks/; also known as Xerox) is an American global corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries.[3] Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stamford, Connecticut in October 2007),[4] though its largest population of employees is based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010.[5] As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.[6] On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations, essentially those operations acquired with the purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. Xerox focuses on its document technology and document outsourcing business, and continues to trade on the NYSE. Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse[7] and desktop computing.[8] These concepts were frowned upon by the then board of directors, who ordered the Xerox engineers to share them with Apple technicians.[citation needed] The concepts were adopted by Apple and later Microsoft. With the help of these innovations, Apple and Microsoft came to dominate the personal computing revolution of the 1980s. Xerox did release the 6085 desktop publishing system in 1986 (before IBM and Microsoft), but an inferior operating system, obsolete hard drive (a 20MB drive weighed over 40lbs/18kg), and weak software (documents paginated at one per second), doomed the model, as Apple and Microsoft’s hardware and OS software offered much greater functionality. Xerox also released a 4045 desktop laser printer whose cartridges could print 50,000 pages (instead of 5,000), but the model never caught on, and Xerox abandoned future efforts to focus more on its core businesses.

Yum! Brands, Inc., or Yum! and formerly Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc., is an American fast food corporation listed on the Fortune 500. Yum! operates the brands Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and WingStreet worldwide, except in China, where the brands are operated by a separate company, Yum China. Prior to 2011, Yum! also owned Long John Silver’s and A&W Restaurants. Based in Louisville, Kentucky, it is one of the world’s largest fast food restaurant companies in terms of system units. In 135 nations and territories worldwide, they operate 43,617 restaurants, including 2,859 that are company-owned and 40,758 that are franchised.