But just because a company is huge doesn’t mean it is always profitable. Nine companies on this year’s list lost more than $1 billion in 2014, despite being among the heaviest hitters in terms of revenue. Some of these companies won’t surprise you: There are several energy firms on the list of the Fortune 500’s biggest losers, reflecting the enormous decline in oil prices that occurred in the second half of last year. Others can better be explained by poor managerial decisions, like Target’s ill-advised foray into Canada, which the company pulled the plug on in 2014, taking billions in losses in the process.

This year’s all-new digital edition of the Fortune 500 lets readers sort and filter our list based on dozens of different criteria, including profitability. (You can visit the list here to take a deeper dive into the data.) In the meantime, here are 2014’s nine biggest losers.

Energy Future Holdings

Courtesy of Energy Future Holdings

Fortune 500 rank: 446
2014 loss: $6.4 billion

Once the subject of the largest leveraged buyout in history, Texas-based Energy Future Holdings has had a rough go of it in the wake of the financial crisis and a revolution in U.S. energy production that sent prices tumbling. The firm filed for bankruptcy in 2014, buckling under the weight of more than $40 billion in debts. That has led its private-equity sponsors, KKR, TPG, and Goldman Sachs, to write down nearly all of the $8 billion they invested back in 2007.

 

Apache

Courtesy of Apache

Fortune 500 rank: 218
2014 loss: $5.4 billion

Apache[fortune-stock symbol="APA"] slashed its rig count by roughly 70% in 2014, in a response to free-falling oil prices in the second half of the year. The company has also had to take big losses related to write-downs of the value of its oil and gas assets, to reflect the lower prices these energy commodities are garnering on the open market. Finally, the firm has been moving to divest itself of assets in places like Egypt and the Gulf of Mexico, to focus more on its onshore North American holdings.

Caesars Entertainment

Photograph by Getty Images

Fortune 500 rank: 328
2014 loss: $2.8 billion

Like its list-mate Energy Future Holdings, Caesars Entertainment[fortune-stock symbol="CZR"] was the target of one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history just months before the financial crisis struck. The move put a big strain on the gambling giant's balance sheet at a time when it would have benefited from more financial flexibility. Since then, the company has struggled to post profits as its debt load continued to mount. In January, Caesars Entertainment put its largest unit--Caesars Entertainment Operating Co.--into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, setting up a big fight among the firms' many creditors and stakeholders over who will have ownership of the company's many valuable properties. (For an in-depth look at the company's struggles, read this feature from our Fortune 500 issue.)

Anadarko Petroleum

Photograph by Jamie Schwaberow -- Bloomberg via Getty Images

Fortune 500 rank: 162
2014 loss: $1.8 billion

Anadarko[fortune-stock symbol="APC"] had more than just collapsing oil prices to contend with in 2014. Last year, the company agreed to pay $5.15 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a settlement in a suit against an Anadarko subsidiary called Tronox, Inc. The settlement was the largest fine ever levied by the federal government over environmental transgressions, and it was a big contributor to Anadarko's less-than-stellar 2014.

Sears Holdings

Photograph by Joe Raedle -- Getty Images

Fortune 500 rank: 99
2014 loss: $1.7 billion

Last year was a bad one for American brick-and-mortar retailers, who have been fighting extreme weather, stagnant incomes and the increased popularity of online shopping. But Sears Holdings[fortune-stock symbol="SHLD"], operator of Sears department stores and K-Mart, has suffered more than its competitors. The company announced its 11th straight quarterly loss in February 2015, capping off a year in which it completed a spin-off one its best-performing brands, Lands End, as well as shares in Sears Canada, both aimed at bolstering the firm's dwindling cash pile.

Target

Photograph by David Ryder -- Bloomberg via Getty Images

Fortune 500 rank: 36
2014 loss: $1.6 billion

When it comes to discount retailing, Target[fortune-stock symbol="TGT"] is second only to Walmart, the company that tops this year's Fortune 500. Unfortunately for Target, the firm is also following in the steps of its bigger rival in terms of slowing performance in recent years. And 2014 was an especially tough year for the Minneapolis-based firm, as it abandoned its ill-fated Canadian operations, which cost the firm $5.4 billion.

Freeport-McMoRan

Courtesy of Freeport-McMoRan

Fortune 500 rank: 137
2014 loss: $1.3 billion

Freeport-McMoran[fortune-stock symbol="FCX"], the mining and commodities giant, would have had a tough enough time coping with the end of what analysts call the "commodities super-cycle," the tripling of commodity prices that occurred between 2000 and 2011. But the firm also made a big move into the natural gas space with its 2013 acquisition of Plains Exploration & Production Company. The decline in copper prices and even sharper drop in oil prices led the Phoenix-based firm to take big losses in the final quarter of 2014.

KBR

Courtesy of KBR

Fortune 500 rank: 424
2014 loss: $1.3 billion

The former subsidiary of Halliburton Co. has seen one of its largest sources of profits--wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--wind down in recent years, and this development led the company to embark on a strategic review. KBR[fortune-stock symbol="KBR"] announced a major restructuring in December which could ultimately cost the firm upwards of $1 billion.

Genworth Financial

Courtesy of Genworth Financial

Fortune 500 rank: 304
2014 loss: $1.2 billion

Genworth Financial[fortune-stock symbol="GNW"], more than any other insurance company, has been hit hard by the unpredicted consequences of an America whose oldest citizens are living much longer than in generations past. The firm was spun off in 2004 by General Electric, but still owns many long-term care insurance policies that were written before that deal was concluded. For Genworth, 2014 was a year of reckoning, as it wrote down the value of many long-term care policies whose costs its underwriting fees can't cover.

As the incoming CEO of PayPal, Schulman is something of an anomaly in the tech industry. But when the company spins off from its parent, eBay EBAY , later this summer, he'll be the latest major entrant in one of tech's battles du jour: the all-out race to own the future of the digital wallet.

PayPal has a running start. In the first quarter of 2015, the payments giant surpassed the rest of eBay in revenue for the first time, growing sales 14% over the previous quarter, to $2.1 billion. With $8 billion in annual sales, if it were independent today, PayPal would land at No. 353 on this year's Fortune 500 list. But the challenges are formidable. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants to fine it $25 million for aggressively pushing its "Bill Me Later" program. And the company is now directly competing with tech titans like Google GOOG and Apple AAPL , which launched competing payment platform Apple Pay last year.

Schulman is no stranger to claiming new ground in business. He spent 18 years at AT&T T , starting as an entry-level salesman making $14,200 and rising through the ranks at the wireless carrier just as cellphones were seeing widespread adoption.

His recent career has been distinguished by an uncanny ability to hit the under-35 demographic sweet spot. In 2001, Schulman was approached by Richard Branson to lead a new project focused on mobile phones. The idea for Virgin Mobile, a joint venture with Sprint S , was to create a carrier for young adults who couldn't afford expensive cellular plans. Virgin Mobile USA launched in 2002 and was one of the top 10 carriers in the U.S. when Sprint bought Virgin's stake for $483 million in 2009.

Next Schulman jumped to American Express AXP , where he focused on younger customers and others ill-served by traditional banks. Among many new products, Schulman launched AmEx Bluebird, a prepaid debit card aimed at that demographic. Bluebird piqued the interest of eBay CEO John Donahoe, who flew to New Jersey from California last year and offered Schulman a job as head of PayPal. He took it.

Schulman's vision is for the new PayPal to create the dominant payment system for mobile and web commerce. Critically, PayPal's mobile business is booming, with payments up 40% year over year. The company's Venmo app, which allows users to send cash to one another using debit accounts, is seeing huge growth among young users, moving $1.3 billion in payments last quarter.

Yet in the physical world, where 90% of transactions still happen, the company has stumbled. Though tens of thousands of chains have PayPal integrated at the point of sale, its mobile in-store payment system has yet to gain traction in many of them.

For Schulman, the opportunity is vast, but the pressure is mounting. "We think that technology can help to reimagine what the management and movement of money can look like," he says. If PayPal doesn't lead that transformation, someone else will.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘PayPal Gets A Millennial Whisperer.’

"Intelligence everywhere" has been a buzz phrase since MicroStrategy used it in the last Internet boom. But mobile computing and improved data analytics are steadily moving us toward that long-hyped goal. My colleague Erin Griffith has an amusing and eye-opening story in our Fortune 500 issue about a new software service, Crystal, that helps you tailor email messages to the known preferences of the recipient, based on publicly available data. (It informed her that I preferred a formal grammatical structure - not bad for an editor, is it?) It’s worth reading.

I'm sure neither Crystal nor the new Apple software are as good as advertised, and will continue to commit howlers for our amusement. But "intelligence "everywhere" to guide daily decision making, in business and in life, is fast becoming a reality.

In you have five spare minutes in the day, watch Bill Hader’s amusing video that opened the developer conference. More news below.

Launched two months ago by a Nashville-based startup of the same name, Crystal knows the email style and preferences of just about everyone in the English-speaking professional world. It knows that Ammirati prefers short, blunt language and that I like sarcasm. If you've ever written anything on the Internet, Crystal probably knows how you like to correspond too. By analyzing data from publicly available sources like social media and private peer reviews on its own site, Crystal categorizes professionals into 64 personality types and extrapolates their work and communication styles from there.

Ammirati was skeptical when he installed the Crystal plug-in for Gmail, which starts at $19 a month for individuals to use. (It will cost $99 for companies.) But after a month, he's sold. He estimates that around 80% of the 100 emails he sends each day are "semi-warm," or sent to people he doesn't know well. "I found it to be amazingly, magically accurate," he says. It's hard to measure whether his emails are actually more effective with Crystal--perhaps the introduction he wrote would have been well-received despite it--but it gives him confidence that his intentions will be properly understood. In today's mobile-first world, anyone can dash off an email without much thought. A tool like Crystal forces the sender to think more about the person on the other side of the screen. It's like spell-check for empathy.

Such technologies are increasingly important as work communications move away from in-person meetings around a conference room table and toward virtual chatrooms and instant messages. A friendly smile makes it easy to deliver a joke to your boss in a live professional setting. But in a digital environment, should you compensate with a smiley face emoticon or an "LOL"? (The answer, for me, is no. Crystal says Fortune editor Alan Murray prefers a formal grammatical structure and dislikes casual greetings. My sincere apologies for all those emoji, sir.)

Companies have used personality assessments to standardize hiring and training since the invention of the Myers-Briggs test in the 1940s. But social media and its tsunami of data have made that information easier to get, no tedious test required. A new class of companies--including Knozen, a quiz-based personality app; Conspire, an email-analysis service; and Crystal--spit out similar workplace insights based on employees' daily activity and input from peers.

The rising interest in this kind of information coincides with the economy's migration from blue-collar jobs to knowledge-worker positions. It's especially prevalent in the technology industry. Human resources departments, elevated to the C-suite with titles like chief people officer (or the Silicon Valley version, chief happiness officer), have swelled in influence, and they're more willing than ever before to embrace data to make personnel decisions. That's a dramatic change from the 2000s, when companies had little interest in adopting HR software, says Knozen CEO Marc Cenedella, who at the time led finance and operations for Hotjobs.com. Today, he says, "it's almost flipped. They are interested in every new tool there is."

Beyond HR departments, Crystal has seen adoption among salespeople communicating with clients, business-development executives doing outreach, and managers who want to strengthen their relationship with their teams. Crystal founder Drew D'Agostino believes his company's personality data can help in any work situation--not just with email. Personality differences seep out in high-pressure situations, he says: "Crystal can give us the opportunity to step back and say, 'This is how I approach problems. This is how you approach problems. Let's keep that in mind when we solve this.' "

But first some of us have to get past the creepy Big Brother factor. Must Crystal broadcast, for example, the fact that I'm frequently late? It may be true (okay, it's definitely true), but I'd rather not have a scarlet "L" permanently attached to my professional reputation. D'Agostino and Knozen's Cenedella each say that my reaction--embarrassment followed by swift indignation--tends to happen when the data-driven assessment is dead-on. In other words, if an algorithm can use my digital exhaust to determine that I am habitually tardy, it's probably not a secret.

"The view existed whether or not we were there to reveal it," Cenedella says. "Our point of view is, Isn't it better for you to know, so then you can do something about it?"

I would still prefer to ruin a first impression on my own, thank you very much. But I may be an outlier. It's more common for Crystal users to be proud of their profiles and share them, flaws and all, on social media or with co-workers, D'Agostino says. For him the reaction validates Crystal's goal to improve people's understanding of one another.

"People email me, saying, 'It now makes so much sense why I had this argument with my wife, or why I hate when my boss does this,' " he says. "It's going to make relationships healthier."

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘Empathy, Thanks To Algorithms.’

Now read Crystal’s tips for emailing the CEOs of the Fortune 500.

We could easily speculate as to which hot startups and fast-growing businesses are destined to join the Fortune 500 in the next decade. We could even pull directly from our annual fastest-growing public companies list, which last year was dominated by the shale, financial services and housing/real estate sectors.

But our speculation would be just that. Rather than take wild guesses, we've turned to data. The following list takes the average compound annual growth rate, or CAGR, over the last five years for the Fortune 500 and uses that figure to extrapolate each company's growth for the next 10 years. Assuming that past growth equals future growth is not a perfect methodology. (For example, our top pick, Energy Transfer Equity, has grown thanks to an $18 billion acquisition that it will likely take years to absorb and not be repeated.) Beyond that, one has to assume there are limits to how much a company can grow. The first six companies on our "Fortune 500 of 2025" list have projected revenues of more than $1 trillion. That's more than double the 2014 revenue of Wal-Mart, the No. 1 Fortune 500 company on this year’s list, and feels like a bit of a stretch. Still, it's a fun thought exercise.

The list is notably dominated by what's thought of as the four horsemen of the tech industry: Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Even though they're all large, maturing businesses, they have continued to roll out new products, acquire exciting startups, and push into new lines of business at an aggressive pace. Their revenue growth reflects that.

And if you're reading this from the year 2025, feel free to let us know how wrong we were.

1. Energy Transfer Equity

Courtesy of Energy Transfer Equity

The company, ranked No. 53 on the Fortune 500 list, grew revenue by 14% last year and tripled its annual profits, even amid a global drop in commodity prices. If the company [fortune-stock symbol="ETE"] continues to grow at the same pace it did for the last five years, by 2024--and therefore our 2025 Fortune 500 ranking--it would have $5.8 trillion in revenue. That's unlikely-most of the company's growth came from a big acquisition, and last year Energy Transfer Equity did just $56 billion in revenue.

2. Apple

Photograph by Stephen Lam -- Getty Images

If Apple [fortune-stock symbol="AAPL"] continues its recent revenue growth over the next 10 years, it will hit $4.5 trillion in sales in 2024, making it the country's second-largest corporation.

3. Facebook

Photograph by Nelson Almeida -- AFP/Getty Images

Ten-year-old Facebook [fortune-stock symbol="FB"] has only been a public company for three years, but its 58% revenue growth, driven by mobile advertising revenue, rivals that of a young startup.

4. Express Scripts Holdings

Courtesy of Express Scripts Holdings

The company's [fortune-stock symbol="ESRX"] $29 billion merger with Medco in 2012 helped boost its give-year growth rate, despite shrinking revenue and profits in 2014.

5. Leucadia National

Courtesy of Leucadia National

The "baby Berkshire Hathaway" conglomerate owns businesses as diverse as banks, plastics companies, timber operations, energy companies, a ski resort, and a beef packing business. It has grown through acquisitions, most recently its 2012 merger with Jefferies Group, worth $3.8 billion. Despite its relatively small $12.4 billion in revenue in 2014, if Leucadia [fortune-stock symbol="LUK"] continues at the same growth rate for the next decade, it would manage $1 trillion in revenue in 2024.

6. Amazon

Photograph by Philippe Huguen -- AFP/Getty Images

Even with $88 billion in 2014 revenue, Amazon [fortune-stock symbol="AMZN"] remains a growth story. The company increased revenue by 19.5% over the prior year. (Profits, in typical Amazon fashion, were non-existent.) If Amazon continues that growth trajectory for a decade, it would have just over $1 trillion in profits in 2024.

7. Exxon Mobil

Photograph by Luke Sharrett -- Bloomberg via Getty Images

If the oil company, which holds the second-place spot on this year's Fortune 500, continues its current five-year growth rate, Exxon Mobil [fortune-stock symbol="XOM"] will bring in $691 billion in revenue in 2014.

8. Wal-Mart Stores

Photograph by Gunnar Rathbun -- Invision for Walmart

That's right--we're predicting that in 10 years, Amazon will be bigger than Wal-Mart, the country's largest corporation [fortune-stock symbol="WMT"] for three years in a row. (Amazon was No. 29 on the Fortune 500 this year.) Even with modest growth--Wal-Mart's revenue increased just 2% between 2013 and 2014--its size alone will keep it high on the Fortune 500 list of the future if it can continue defend its market position from online competition.

9. Google

Photograph by Robert Galbraith -- Reuters

By 2025, we'll know how many of Google's crazy moonshots have actually paid off and which ones look more like pipe dreams. We'll also know whether the company [fortune-stock symbol="GOOG"] successfully transitioned its money-printing search engine--which performs best on desktop browsers --onto mobile. If it does, expect Google to climb to the elite ranks of the Fortune 10 (it's No. 40 this year), with $653 billion in revenue.

10. World Fuel Services

Courtesy of World Fuel Services

The fuel services company [fortune-stock symbol="INT"], listed at No. 68 on this year's Fortune 500 list, could see revenue grow to $640 billion if it continues its current growth rate.

The Dallas-based connected car startup has developed a device that, when plugged into a vehicle’s diagnostic port, provides a Wi-Fi hotspot as well as a suite of apps and services. Vinli just announced that it has raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Samsung Venture Investment Group. Cox Automotive, The Westly Group, and automotive systems supplier Continental also participated in the round.

Beyond the money, these investors each offer critical resources to Vinli. Samsung has marketing, manufacturing, and distribution expertise. Cox Automotive, a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises and owner of brands Kelley Blue Book and AutoTrader.com, has relationships with more than 40,000 car dealerships. Westly Group is a well-known VC firm that has had some success investing in cleantech companies, notably Tesla Motors TSLA .

Joining Vinli’s board of directors are Luis Arbulu, director of strategic investments at Samsung Global Innovation Center, and David Liniado, vice president of new ventures for Cox Automotive.

Vinli plans to use the funds to “aggressively grow its sales,” expand partnerships in the automobile and tech industries, and invest in engineering, as well as research and development. Vinli, which grew out of Dialexa Labs, also launched an Indiegogo pre-order campaign for its $99 device and announced a partnership with T-Mobile.

While Apple AAPL , Google GOOG and automakers scramble to provide connectivity platforms for new vehicles, millions of old cars are left in the dark ages.

In the U.S. alone, more than 253 million cars are an average of 11 years old, according to Vinli. That leaves a big opportunity for any company that can develop an universal way to connect those old cars to a smartphone or computer.

The Vinli dongle supports both iOS and Android, and includes GPS, 4G, LTE, Wi-Fi hotspot and advanced crash reporting capabilities. The startup has created an open platform so developers can create apps and other solutions for the platform. Vinli says consumers will have access to more than 150 apps via its app store, including SmartThings, ParkHub, and SafeDrive.

Vinli is manufacturing the devices now with the first units expected to ship in August.

--Andrew Nusca

One Wilshire Boulevard

WEST COAST: LOS ANGELES

Sandwiched between bourbon bars and boutique hotels, this unassuming high-rise in downtown L.A. is a hotspot for telecom firms. Why? Because it's where fiber-optic cables from Asia and North America meet.

Towering. Massive. Immense. In a city as low and sprawling as Los Angeles, you can't miss the skyscrapers that stud the city's bustling business district, especially as you drive along the freeway toward the city's downtown district. It's easy to assume that these tall buildings house Hollywood executives or California bankers. Many do. But one of them, a 30-story structure called One Wilshire, is the most highly connected Internet point in the western U.S.

Miles of undersea cables link the Pacific Rim to One Wilshire. It is estimated that one-third of Internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia passes through the building. For this reason scores of service providers, online content distributors, and carriers call One Wilshire home. Verizon VZ , AT&T T , Amazon Web Services AMZN , and Netflix NFLX have all set up shop in the structure. Its biggest tenant is CoreSite COR , a national data center and collocation provider, which leases its space to more than 300 companies.

At the heart of the building is the Meet Me Room, a sort of neutral ground for the building's tenants to interconnect. It's in this room, which contains rows upon rows of cabinets like lockers lining a high school hallway, that CoreSite's data-center operators manage the flow of traffic throughout the facility. If one of the companies in the building wants to connect with another, CoreSite staff in the Meet Me Room ensure that a handshake takes place and traffic gets swapped. If One Wilshire is a carrier hotel, the Meet Me Room is its lobby.

One Wilshire was erected in 1966 as a standard office building. The 664,000-square-foot structure served the role for many years, but as traditional corporate tenants moved out in the early 1990s, telecommunications companies moved in, attracted by its proximity to AT&T's switching center two blocks down the road. At the time, such infrastructure was nascent, and telecom companies congregated in single locations. As the Internet boomed, so did One Wilshire, and the facility eventually became the de facto connection point for Southern California and beyond. How important is it? Consider: In 2013 it sold for nearly half a billion dollars and the highest price per foot ever paid for a downtown L.A. office building.

Given Los Angeles' reputation for earthquakes, there remains concern that a natural disaster could strike One Wilshire. If that happens, tenants would funnel Internet traffic to other facilities in the region, as far away as Arizona or Nevada. Down, but not out: The modern Internet lives on to fight another day.

--Jonathan Vanian

60 Hudson Street

EAST COAST: NEW YORK

It was built in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash as one of the most advanced telecommunications hubs in the world. Eighty-five years later it's making neighbors of nations at the speed of light.

If a building could talk, 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan would have decades' worth of tales to tell. Completed in 1930--the same year that Fortune first went to press--the former Western Union Building towered over its New York City neighborhood. It was built to be a nerve center for the telegraph era. Today it's a nexus for the Information Age.

Sixty Hudson is one of the world's most important buildings for Internet connectivity--one of about a dozen, according to Andrew Blum, author of Tubes, a book about the Internet's infrastructure. It sits on the doorstep of America's financial and media hub and carries Internet traffic from the rest of the world to North America. Its Art Deco lobby and massive brown-and-red-brick fa?ade, which zig-zags back from the street and up 24 floors, are enduring symbols of its historic role as a first stop for transatlantic cable traffic.

Proximity to the major population centers of the U.S. was a key reason 60 Hudson was built where it stands today, less than a mile from the New York Stock Exchange. In a time of split-second financial transactions, on-demand movie streaming, and anywhere Internet, the building's coveted location--paradoxically--remains critical. "This building is important more than just to New York," says Jonathan Hjembo, an analyst for research firm TeleGeography. "It has key interconnections to Europe and to Latin America."

Today 60 Hudson's massive clay conduits hold miles of fiber-optic cable, not just copper telegraph wires, says former Telx exec Ben Gonyea. Their tremendous density remains a calling card. When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated 60 Hudson a historic site in 1992, it estimated that the structure once housed 70 million feet of wire and 30 miles of conduit. That was well before the Internet became a fixture in our lives.

It's anyone's guess how much wire or Internet traffic 60 Hudson accommodates today--the information is confidential and difficult to obtain. Here's what we do know: Telx, one of two major data-center providers in the building, is home to about 350 carriers. The other, Equinix EQIX , hosts about 150. So the next time you sell a share or order a package, remember: Your bits are likely flying through the Art Deco portals of 60 Hudson Street.

--Barb Darrow

International Internet Hubs

North America isn't the only game in town. Here are four key facilities on other continents.

Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX)

ASIA, LOCATED AT THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

The Hong Kong Internet eXchange is different from other exchanges in that its main purpose isn't to link out to the wider world. (Unsurprising for a city administered by China, though HKIX is spared from its Great Firewall.) Instead, the facility is meant to serve as a booster for the city's own internal connectivity. In fact, the whole point of the operation--better termed an intranet exchange--is to prevent traffic from having to route internationally (as in through the U.S., which dominates global Internet infrastructure like no other country). Call it a defensive play: While hiding out in the city in 2013, former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post that Chinese University, where HKIX is located, was a prime hacking target for the notorious U.S. spy agency: "We hack network backbones--like huge Internet routers, basically--that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one." The NSA declined to comment.

Amsterdam Internet exchange (AMS-IX)

EUROPE

Fiber-optic cables in the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX)Photo: Klerkx--Laif/Redux

The Venice of the North has long been an important center for commerce and trade. The same holds today, electronically. Geographically situated between a number of important digital destinations--Frankfurt, London, Paris--the Amsterdam Internet Exchange serves as one of the biggest traffic routers in the world, channeling roughly 700,000 terabytes a month. Deloitte estimates that the digital infrastructure of the Netherlands added up to 19,000 jobs to the Dutch economy in 2013. AMS-IX is not quite the modern digital equivalent of the Dutch East India Co., but it is an incredibly important nexus in the global fabric of the Internet.

DE-CIX Frankfurt

EUROPE

Switches inside the DE-CIX Internet Exchange in Frankfurt.Photo: Michael Danner--Laif/Redux

This German Internet exchange is a well-placed way station in the world's data-coursing nervous system. According to TeleGeography, DE-CIX Frankfurt--the flagship in a family that includes facilities in New York, Istanbul, and Dubai--is the No. 1 Internet traffic hub on the continent. During peak traffic times, the exchange can move data at a rate equivalent to processing 4 billion emails per second. While Germans reacted with outrage to revelations concerning the extent of the NSA's surveillance in their country, their indignation was checked when they learned that the BND, a German spy agency, had tapped the wires at DE-CIX.

PTT Metro S?o Paulo

SOUTH AMERICA

This Brazilian facility is the biggest and most trafficked Internet exchange in all of Latin America. Nearly 600 networks (including Facebook FB and Google GOOG ) have taken up residence in the exchange--as many as the company's 24 other facilities combined. Because so many transatlantic submarine cables land ashore along Brazil's gigantic, meandering coastline, the country has quickly become a telecommunications hotspot. The nation has pushed aggressively to expand its digital infrastructure and rely less on the U.S. and its well-known tech giants, especially after learning that it was the second-most-snooped-upon by the NSA--after the U.S., of course.

--Robert Hackett

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘Guardians of the Digital Galaxy.’

Yet for all her fascinating political history, when she turned in her time log for my book on 1,001 days in the lives of professional women and their families, she told me "I could be, maybe, the least interesting person on the planet." Certainly, her days were regimented: up at 5 a.m. for CrossFit, ending precisely at 10 p.m. on school nights. But here's something that was interesting: she spent a lot of her work hours grabbing coffee with people.

When I asked her about this caffeine habit, I learned it was a matter of strategy, not addiction. She can hunker down at work when she needs to. However, since it's her relationships with reporters and various political power players that open doors for her company, she doesn't just stay at the office. She invests time in these relationships whenever possible. Hence the coffees all over her schedule. While I've been told many times that parents "can't" do happy hours, Miller shared that she'd even figured out how to navigate the Republican strategist world, with its occasional required booziness, and get home at a reasonable hour. "I do what I call 'mom o'clock,'" she said. "I meet for a cocktail with a reporter at four thirty." By 5:30 p.m. they've bonded, and Miller can be home by 6:15. This schedule may not look like other people's schedules, but for Miller, it means she can have both a thriving family life and professional influence.

I think these are smart strategies for others to consider, too. If you want to have it all--a life that involves professional success and plenty of time for personal pursuits as well--then you need to be strategic about how you spend your work hours. Invested well, work hours generate great returns. The problem is that when you have a full life outside of work, you often face the temptation to focus just on the work in front of you. Yet part of achieving happiness in both work and life is feeling like your career is going somewhere. You are broadening your scope, one coffee and happy hour at a time. Achieving such growth requires a balance between hard-nosed efficiency and a more abundant perspective on time. It's not about face time, it's about being what I call "strategically seen."

There are lots of ways to do this. First, don't talk yourself into false choices: "I'm a working parent and therefore I can't go to networking events." You don't have to go to post-work events every night. No one wants to spend every night away from home, even if all you're caring for are houseplants. If you keep such interactions as a possibility, though, people will still ask you. You will stay in the loop. Try giving yourself a budget of three events per month. There are 30-31 days in a month, so three events is roughly 10% of your nights. Ninety percent of the time you're with your family, but that 10% invested at work can go a long way. If you're a manager, taking your team out three times a month will temper any no-nonsense instruction with more relaxed time together, and that will keep you from being interpreted as cold (which can hurt your upward feedback--not fair, necessarily, but it happens).

Second, make the most of any work travel. If you're already away from your family, you may as well pack your days with get-togethers. If you're going to a conference, don't rely on serendipity. Find out who will be attending that you'd like to see, and invite people for a small gathering early on. If people can't come to that, make appointments for breakfast, coffee, or drinks. Don't worry about missing the panels. Panels serve as a way to get big name people to attend the conference. They're not the point, so go ahead and hang out in the hallway. Be your most extroverted self, and say hello to anyone who looks intriguing. Say yes to the karaoke invitation for post-panel hours.

Finally, like Miller, look for ways to be seen during the day. Your inbox will always be a mess, so when faced with the choice, go grab lunch or coffee with someone rather than emptying it out. If dinner isn't in the cards, go out for breakfast. Use your breaks to chat with people about their lives and interests. We take breaks anyway, often surfing the web with spare minutes here and there. Better to use this time to invest in relationships. Efficiency is great, but business is never just business. People who make success possible recognize this, and structure their lives to be strategically seen (and still make it home more often than not).

Adapted from I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (C) Laura Vanderkam, 2015.

Cummins and Columbus, from Past to Present: In 1958, Architectural Forum magazine hired Ezra Stoller to photograph the home of Cummins CEO J. Irwin Miller in Columbus, the company's hometown. That encounter led to more commissions, between 1962 and 1971, for which Stoller shot pictures of Cummins's factories and Columbus itself. Here, his vintage photos are paired with new images captured for Fortune by Ryan Donnell.

On the line, then and now: Cummins workers put the finishing touches on engines in a Columbus factory in 1962 (left); engine blocks destined for Nissan pickups await machining in that same factory today.Vintage Photo: Ezra Stoller--Esto; Photograph by Ryan Donnell For Fortune

Cummins first found success riding the postwar boom; it's one of only 57 companies that have appeared on the Fortune 500 every year since 1955. But more impressive is how the company has sustained that success in a tumultuous time for U.S. industry. When many manufacturers fled to cheaper overseas labor, Cummins took a more sophisticated tack, investing in its domestic workforce and facilities while establishing fifty-fifty joint ventures abroad. And when many automotive companies fought Washington on clean-air regulations, Cummins embraced them--and then used its mastery of clean-tech diesel to build a moat around itself. "We like things where the business is hard to do," says Rich Freeland, Cummins's president and chief operating officer. "Only a few people can get there, and we think we can."

That sort of confidence, along with a corporate culture that emphasizes investing in employees and their communities, has helped Cummins evolve into something truly unusual. It's a multi-national, technology-driven, very contemporary company that retains some qualities of an Eisenhower-era, take-care-of-your-workers industrial giant--a business model so traditionally American that it now seems practically un-American. It's a combination that has Cummins poised to continue capitalizing on the growing global trucking industry, and one that could keep it firing on all cylinders for many years to come.

Though you would never confuse Cummins with Apple AAPL or HP HPQ , it, too, got its start in a garage. In 1919, Clessie Lyle Cummins, an auto mechanic and chauffeur in Columbus, persuaded his boss, a local banker named William G. Irwin, to invest in an exotic engine technology developed by the German engineer Rudolf Diesel.

At the time, few Americans had heard of diesel, and those who had heard of it figured the bulky design was best suited for generators and farm equipment. But Cummins saw the possibility of using it on the highway, and through the 1920s and '30s his eponymous company churned out increasingly powerful, sophisticated engines, with the goal of serving the burgeoning commercial trucking sector.

Assembling engines for Dodge Ram trucks at a Cummins plant today; workers on one of the company's original assembly lines in 1962.Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune; Vintage photograph: Ezra Stoller--Esto
Click to enlarge.

The advent of World War II and the postwar expansion of the highway system and the interstate trucking industry created an unquenchable demand for immensely powerful engines, and diesel was unmatched in that category. Under the leadership of Irwin's nephew, J. Irwin Miller, the company grew from $26 million in gross sales in 1944 to $1.26 billion in 1977--14-fold growth after adjusting for inflation.

If Clessie Cummins was responsible for creating the company, Miller deserves credit for making it a global powerhouse. He was an unlikely candidate for the role of industrial magnate: Born into wealth, he went to Yale and Oxford, where he played classical violin, rowed crew, and gravitated toward circles of architects and artists. Once in place at Cummins, though, Miller proved to be a natural executive. He understood the long-term potential of overseas growth, so even as Cummins made a mint on domestic trucking, it began to expand internationally. Miller opened Cummins's first overseas factory in 1956 in Scotland; six years later he formed a fifty-fifty joint venture to build heavy-duty engines in Pune, India--decades before most American firms dared invest in that country. In 1975, Miller was one of the first American executives to visit China after President Richard Nixon normalized relations.

Miller paid equal attention to the company's hometown. To attract top-flight engineering and management talent to rural Indiana, he had the corporate philanthropy, the Cummins Foundation, sink millions into local schools. And he offered to pay the architect's fees for any public building project that agreed to choose from a list of firms he provided; as a result, Columbus has one of the greatest concentrations of modern architecture in the country. I.M. Pei designed the public library. Eero Saarinen did a local church. Richard Meier designed a school; Robert A.M. Stern, a hospital. "It's a matter of enlightened self-interest," says Hester at the local economic development board. "Cummins can attract employees who but for these amenities would not come here."

One of Cummins's major architectural commissions in Columbus, Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church, is shown here reflected in a window of another, I.M. Pei's Cleo Rogers Memorial Library.Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune

Miller's public activism extended beyond Columbus, as Charles Rentschler, a former Cummins executive, documents in The Cathedral Builder, a new biography of Miller. In 1960 he became the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, and he used his business and religious ties to push Midwestern congressmen to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was strongly pro-union and fought against Indiana's right-to-work law when it was first introduced. "I wouldn't know how to run a big company without a strong union," he told a Fortune reporter in 1957. (Even today about 40% of Cummins's global workforce is unionized.)

Though Miller died in 2004, the company continues to reflect his philosophy of serving stakeholders beyond its shareholders--including customers, employees, and the community. In 2012, after the Columbus city council rejected a plan to provide universal curbside recycling, Cummins led a consortium of local firms to pay for the program's capital costs, including trucks and toters, a $500,000 commitment. "I meet other mayors who say I'm lucky to be mayor of Columbus," says Kristen Brown, a sixth-generation resident--and a daughter of a lifetime Cummins employee--who was elected in 2011. "They say, 'I'd love to have a Cummins.' "

Miller's legacy was put to the test in 1997, when the Environmental Protection Agency began investigating whether special shutoff switches in the company's engines could be used to disable emissions controls. They could, apparently to the surprise and dismay of Cummins engineers. The next year the EPA forced Cummins and several other manufacturers to agree to reprogram the devices and sign an $83.4 million consent decree, the highest civil penalty in environmental enforcement to date. The EPA then moved forward the deadline for new, lower-emission engines from 2004 to October 2002.

CEO J. Irwin Miller funded big civic architecture projects--including this Eero Saarinen-designed bank--to help Cummins lure talent to Columbus.Photo: Frank Scherschel--The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Some at Cummins wondered whether a company built on dirty, heavy-duty diesel could survive the EPA's order, says Freeland, the president and COO, who has been with the company since 1979. Cummins's leadership considered suing, but eventually cooler heads prevailed, and rather than fight the EPA, Cummins decided to work with it. "We said we'd double down, because we thought there was a way to be different," Freeland says. Cummins was, after all, the leader in diesel technology. If it could quickly meet the EPA's new standards, it stood to reap enormous benefits.

Under Theodore M. Solso, who was chairman and chief executive from 2000 to 2011 and is now chairman of General Motors, Cummins set out to become the first diesel company to hit the EPA targets. "The whole industry said there was no way anyone could meet it," Solso now recalls. But Solso made meeting the goal a centerpiece of a bigger internal revolution. In the early 2000s he implemented Six Sigma management systems and ended the wildly popular (but profit-reducing) practice of offering discounts on most sales. Above all, he poured money into research and development, traditionally a weak spot for diesel makers. From 2002 to 2007, Cummins boosted annual R&D spending by 60%, to $321 million, with almost a quarter dedicated to meeting future EPA engine standards. That emphasis yielded important new technologies, including advances in "deep spray" injection, a process that reduced engines' emissions without sacrificing efficiency by pushing fuel farther into the cylinder.

Cummins did indeed hit the EPA's standards first, and saw it pay off almost immediately. By 2010, Caterpillar CAT and Detroit Diesel, its two largest domestic rivals, had bowed out of the on-highway heavy-duty diesel market, which Cummins now dominates with a 39% share. Annual revenues have more than tripled since 2002, when that EPA deadline kicked in, and experts within and outside the company say Cummins's early commitment to a low-emissions strategy will help it maintain its lead as regulations ratchet up over coming decades.

Technicians at work on a prototype engine in 1962; a present-day prototype at rest in the Technical Center.Vintage Photograph: Ezra Stoller--Esto; Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune

"The on- and off-highway emissions standards were the best thing that ever happened to Cummins," says Mike Brezonick, editor-in-chief of Diesel Progress magazine. "They make such better engines now. It was the equivalent of the Manhattan Project." The company also controls about 41% of the North American market for after-market components that lower emissions on other companies' engines, a huge new source of revenue. "You hear in the news that pollution controls are hurting jobs," says John Wall, the chief technology officer. "For us it's the exact opposite." Last year the components business brought in $5.1 billion, or a little over a quarter of total revenues.

Cummins continues to work closely with the EPA on the next generation of standards. Wall, coincidentally, had been meeting with agency officials the day before giving an interview to Fortune. "We'll take [regulators] through technologies being developed, explain how long it will take to get them to market," Wall says, hoping that the industry's needs are on their minds when the rules are finally written. That kind of cooperation has made Cummins a poster child for emissions controls; Solso and his successor, current CEO Tom Linebarger, have both stood beside President Obama as he announced rounds of clean-air standards.

Cummins's clean-engine investments mesh in important ways with its other major strategic initiative of the past decade and a half: its rapid growth overseas. Under Solso the company opened dozens of new foreign joint ventures and deepened its investments in East Asia and Latin America. By 2005, China and India alone were generating $1.9 billion in sales, almost 23% of Cummins's total. Today, of its 54,600 employees, 63% work outside the U.S., up from about 50% a decade ago.

Cummins engineers working at drafting tables in 1963; doing similar work with the help of computer-aided design software at the CumminsTechnical Center.Vintage Photograph: Ezra Stoller--Esto; Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune

As developing nations improve their own clean-air standards, Cummins's lead in meeting U.S. rules could leave it well positioned to take advantage. And its diversity, both in product lines and markets, has already bolstered Cummins enormously by severing it from the chains of cyclicality in the diesel-engine industry. During the downturn of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cummins struggled and had unprofitable years, but it emerged from the Great Recession relatively unscathed, thanks to its broad exposure to the developing world.

The benefits of global breadth were on display in Cummins's most recent quarterly earnings call. The company forecast big dropoffs in truck engine sales in China and Brazil, but it also said that U.S. demand would be more than strong enough to offset the declines, and investors shrugged off the news. Cummins stock is up 105% over the past five years, compared with 95% for the S&P 500, and it remains an analyst darling.

Blue-collar technicians and white-collar engineers often team up on Cummins assembly lines, as in this 1962 photo. Today, a digital clock tracks the time spent on particular tasks.Vintage Photograph: Ezra Stoller--Esto; Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune

Cummins is far from the only U.S. manufacturer to have expanded overseas, of course. But unlike many big companies that fly solo, Cummins insists on splitting ownership fifty-fifty, and it stocks its overseas offices with local talent. Going half-and-half has allowed Cummins to get into tough markets, like China, that might resist a company that tried to force its own terms. And it means that Cummins gets a better sense of local conditions more quickly. China in particular is littered with the hulks of failed ventures by U.S. companies that didn't understand the territory. In 2013, for example, Caterpillar, one of Cummins's rivals, had to write down $580 million after it gobbled up a Chinese mining-equipment company, Siwei. Caterpillar said it had discovered, months after the deal closed, that Siwei's value had been inflated by "accounting misconduct" at the Chinese company.

As it expands globally, Cummins looks to local talent to boost not just its rank and file but also its management. Its leadership development program, an 18-month executive education program, trains 15 promising employees from other countries--including China, India, and Brazil--to become leaders either in their own countries or in other regions where Cummins operates. "It's part of our belief in building capability locally," Freeland says. "We're not there to extract value."

The offices and printing plant of the Columbus Republic newspaper designed by Myron Goldsmith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, shown shortly after completion in 1971, and today. Appropriately enough for a factory-town paper, its bright-yellow printing press was visible to the public.Vintage photograph: Ezra Stoller--Esto; Photograph by Ryan Donnell for Fortune

Developing local talent is also important because of the way Cummins tackles overseas product development. Instead of taking products made for the U.S. and tweaking them (or "de-contenting" them, in industry lingo) to fit local needs, the company approaches each region as a blank slate and develops engines and other products to match it. That's more expensive upfront, but it means a better and more profitable fit in the long run. It's also a running source of ideas and products that might find export markets of their own. For example, Cummins's ISF 2.8-liter engine was designed for the Chinese commercial truck market, where engines tend to be smaller and lower in power than in the U.S. and Europe. But it turns out that for the U.S. market, the ISF works perfectly in pickup trucks, and a version of it will soon be available in the Nissan Frontier.

Cummins also invests heavily in the overseas communities it enters, in projects that show how corporate citizenship and a strategy for the company's future can complement each other. Among its initiatives: an engineering college for women in India, which now enrolls about 1,800 students, many of whom the company hopes will help it meet its goal of a 50% female workforce in that country. Efforts like these follow the example that Irwin Miller set decades ago in Indiana, Wall says: "We take this model with us all around the world." Brezonick of Diesel Progress also sees a little bit of Columbus in the company's global investments. "When push comes to shove," he says, "they're a straight-shooting Indiana company." Albeit one with employees in Pune, Xiangyang, and S?o Paulo.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘An Engine Maker's High-Tech Makeover.’

Just like 20 years ago, the top 10 companies in this year’s Fortune 500 include Ford Motor F , General Electric GE , General Motors GM and Walmart WMT , though not in the same order. Exxon and Mobil are still ranked near the top, only now they're part of the same company. But, AT&T T and IBM IBM have fallen just outside the top 10, while Sears Roebuck (now Sears Holdings SHLD ) is now far from the upper echelons of the list, and Philip Morris goes by a completely different name.

But what about the people who led those companies two decades ago? Some of those men (yes, all men) have settled into quiet retirement, while others are still making news. And, not surprisingly, a couple of them have passed on. In every case, though, these former CEOs had to face the same big question: What do you do after leading one of the world's biggest companies?

Here's a look at what the CEOs from the top 10 companies of 1995 have been up to.

1. John "Jack" F. Smith, Jr., General Motors

Photograph by Dennis Cox -- The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

1995: Then in his fourth year as GM's chief executive, Smith had been touted in a Fortune feature story a year earlier as the engineer of "the biggest turnaround in American corporate history" at the iconic automaker. In 9 years as CEO, Smith oversaw a massive overhaul at GM, streamlining operations and phasing out the underperforming Oldsmobile division, as well as the company's expansion in Asia.

Today: After leaving GM in 2003, Smith spent three years as non-executive chairman of the board for Delta Air Lines and also served on the board at Procter & Gamble and Swiss Reinsurance. Smith is now retired and his former executive assistant at GM, Mary Barra, has the reins of the company. GM is no longer at the top of the Fortune 500 -- it's No. 6 -- but its annual revenue is something of a blast from the past, barely edging out the company's 1994 sales total.

2. Alexander Trotman, Ford Motor

Photograph by Richard Sheinwald --AP

1995 - Trotman was wrapping up his fourth decade at Ford in the mid-90s while serving out a 6-year stint as the Mustang-maker's first foreign-born chairman and CEO. Trotman, who was born in the U.K., ascended to the company's top position a year after Ford posted a record loss, but the company recorded more than $5 billion in profits in 1994.

Today - Trotman died in 2005. He retired from Ford at the end of 1998, following a boardroom battle over the selection of his successor, and later served as a director of the U.K.'s Imperial Chemical Industries.

3. Lee R. Raymond, Exxon

Photograph by Jonathan Elderfield -- Getty Images

1995 - Raymond was in the early stages of his 13-year tenure as CEO of Exxon (and, later, ExxonMobil) in 1995. A few years later, Raymond was one of the chief architects of one of the biggest mergers in corporate history: Exxon's $80 billion combination with Mobil. In 1994, the combined annual revenue of the two companies was $160 billion. Ten years later, when Raymond retired, ExxonMobil [fortune-stock symbol="XOM"] brought in more than twice that amount, placing the company atop the Fortune 500.

Today - Raymond reportedly took home a $400 million retirement package when he stepped down in 2005. Since then, he has served in various posts, including as president of subsidiary Mobil Holdings Ltd. along with stints as chair of the National Petroleum Council and American Petroleum Institute.

4. David Glass, Wal-Mart Stores

Photograph by Michael L. Abramson -- The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

1995 - Glass was well into his 12-year stint (1988 to 2000) at the top of what is now the world's largest company by annual revenue. He had a tough act to follow in his predecessor, legendary founder Sam Walton, but Glass did as much as anyone to turn Walmart into the global behemoth it is today. In 1994, the company's revenue was $83 billion, more than five times better than when he took the job, and it would grow to $165 billion by the time he retired.

Today - Glass stepped down at the beginning of 2000 to focus on baseball. After spending the previous seven years as CEO of the Kansas City Royals, Glass bought full control of the baseball team later that year. As an MLB owner, Glass is often criticized for stinginess when it comes to the payroll of the small-market Royals, who have posted only three winning seasons since Glass took over. But Glass's team did advance to the World Series last year for the first time in nearly three decades before ultimately falling to San Francisco.

5. Robert Allen, AT&T

Photograph by Jon Levy -- AFP/Getty Images

1995 - Allen endured a stormy tenure atop AT&T. In 1995, the company was still smarting from Allen's ill-advised decision to buy computer company NCR, costing AT&T billions. In 1996, Allen took heat for cutting 40,000 jobs while defending his own pay raise.

Today - Allen stepped down in 1997 and spent the next decade as a board member at PepsiCo [fortune-stock symbol="PEP"]. Allen also served as a public trustee of the Mayo Clinic and as an independent director of Bristol-Myers Squibb [fortune-stock symbol="BMY"] before his retirement. In 2005, when AT&T was sold off to "Baby Bell" SBC Communications, Allen called the deal "probably the best thing that could happen to AT&T."

6. John "Jack" Welch Jr., General Electric

Photograph by Stan Godlewski -- Getty Images

1995 - "Neutron Jack" was in the latter half of his legendary two-decade run as chief executive at GE -- a run that would end, in 2001, with the company's market value up nearly 3,000% from the time Welch's tenure began. 1995 was also the year that Welch famously outfitted GE with Six Sigma, the cultish corporate management philosophy focused on quality control. Four years later, Fortune named him "Manager of the Century."

Today - When Welch retired, he walked away from GE with a severance package worth more than $400 million that initially included use of a Manhattan apartment and a private jet. Welch has had a high-profile retirement, with frequent television appearances and writing gigs in which he offers his expertise on anything from management theory to criticisms of government jobs reports. (Welch even wrote several columns for Fortune, until he quit in 2012.) The former GE guru also penned a New York Times bestseller with his wife and he lent his name to an online MBA program offered by Strayer Institute.

7. Louis Gerstner Jr., IBM

Photograph by Don Emmert AFP/Getty Images

1995 - IBM might not be in a position to attempt its latest turnaround were it not for Gerstner's efforts at the helm of Big Blue. Gerstner took over as CEO in 1993, with IBM's mainframe business in shambles, but the CEO cut costs (and thousands of jobs) and transformed IBM by shifting its focus to software and services. IBM's market value improved from $29 billion to $168 billion under Gerstner's watch.

Today - Gerstner left his role as IBM's CEO and chairman in 2002. Until 2008, he served as chairman of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, where he is still a senior advisor. He previously served on a number of public company boards, including American Express [fortune-stock symbol="AXP"], Bristol-Myers Squibb, and The New York Times. Gerstner is also a best-selling author, thanks to his account of IBM's turnaround, and he is currently chairman of the board for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

8. Lucio Noto, Mobil

Photograph by Henny Ray Abrams -- AFP/Getty Images

1995 - The other primary architect of the massive 1999 merger between Exxon and Mobil, Noto was in just his second year as CEO of Mobil in 1995 after more than three decades at the oil giant.

Today - Noto took on the role of vice chairman of the combined ExxonMobil, but stayed at the company for only about a year, leaving in 2001 to become a managing partner at energy investment vehicle Midstream Partners. Noto has served on various corporate boards and is currently a director of Penske Automotive Group, RHJ International and cigarette-maker Philip Morris International.

9. Edward Brennan, Sears Roebuck

Photograph by Mark Elias -- AP

1995 - Sears Roebuck was the country's largest retailer when Brennan became CEO in 1986, but the company's dominance waned during his tenure as Walmart ate up market share, and Brennan spun off many of Sears' financial services holdings. By 1995, the company had long ago abandoned its Chicago headquarters in the former Sears Tower and Brennan was on his way out as CEO.

Today - Brennan died in 2008. After stepping down at Sears, in 1995, Brennan served on corporate boards at AMR Corporation (American Airlines' parent), McDonald's, and 3M. Meanwhile, Sears sold to rival retailer Kmart in 2005, although the combined company continues to struggle with slipping sales and an annual revenue far below what Sears alone saw in 1994.

10. Geoffrey Bible, Philip Morris

Photograph by Timothy A. Clary -- AFP/Getty Images

1995 - Australian-born Bible took over Philip Morris in 1994 when the tobacco company's sales were still rising thanks to a diverse array of holdings, including Kraft Foods and Miller Brewing. But years of tobacco industry lawsuits and heightened government regulations took a toll and Philip Morris sold off some of its biggest holdings before eventually rebranding itself as Altria Group [fortune-stock symbol="MO"] in 2003, one year after Bible stepped down.

Today - After leaving Philip Morris, Bible on the boards of various companies, including News Corp., as well as SABMiller, where he continues to serve as a non-executive director.

Jain and Fitschen follow recent departures of Brady Dougan from Credit Suisse and Peter Sands from Standard Charter. In the U.S., most big banks have changed leadership since the financial crisis. One notable exception is Jamie Dimon at J.P. Morgan. That could be why he tied with Tim Cook as the most admired CEO among his Fortune 500 colleagues - he has managed to stay on the bucking bronco.

And speaking of co-CEOs, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky profiles Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd in our new Fortune 500 issue. Hurd was chased out of HP after his relationship with a marketing consultant surfaced, but has come back strong at the tech company. "I don't think what I'm doing at Oracle has anything to do with redemption," he says.

You can read the Hurd story here. Enjoy the day.

Now, though, Hurd faced a very modern conundrum: In the Internet Age, it's nearly impossible to escape your past. For evidence, he had only to look at the results of a Google GOOG search of his name. High on the list was the website fuckyoumarkhurd.com, his reward for having methodically slashed costs at the famously hidebound HP during his five years at its helm. The site contained all manner of negative stories about him. Worse, search results persistently yielded photos of Hurd with Jodie Fisher, the reality-TV actress who'd helped him manage HP customer events around the world. Back in 2010, Fisher had hired the press-release-wielding lawyer Gloria Allred to allege that Hurd had harassed her, which set in motion the events that culminated in his departure from HP.

Anyone would be upset. Hurd, with a finely tuned sense of self-image, was livid. "All he could talk about was how he was seething about what happened at HP," says an executive who preceded Hurd at Oracle and has since left.

To solve the problem, Hurd turned to a former investigative journalist named Glenn Bunting, who had repositioned his career as a media adviser for businesspeople with problems they wished would disappear. Bunting, who had held senior positions at the Los Angeles Times, had learned the black arts of crisis communications working for one of the field's top practitioners, Mike Sitrick. It was through Sitrick that Hurd met Bunting, who shepherded the former CEO through the trying circumstances of his fall from grace.

Hurd's instruction was simple: Fix my Google results. So on Oracle's dime, Bunting embarked on a campaign to gin up new content about Hurd that would displace the seamy and steamy material that turned up in an Internet search. A combination of Bunting's efforts and the passage of time did the trick, and chatter about the circumstances of Hurd's exit from HP finally receded.

As that pall has lifted, a much sunnier picture is emerging: Hurd has thrived at Oracle, where he happily accepted the downward move of becoming co-president alongside Ellison's longtime financial and operational consigliere, Safra Catz. Ellison rewarded both last September by naming Hurd and Catz joint CEOs of Oracle, bumping himself to executive chairman.

Hurd with Safra Catz (left) and Larry Ellison (holding wineglass) at an Oracle event in September 2010, soon after Hurd joined the company.Photo: Tony Avelar--Bloomberg via Getty Images

Suddenly Hurd is on top again. "A lot of people were skeptical of his ability to go from the limelight to the shadow," says Tom Hogan, CEO of a mobile software company called Kony, who worked under Hurd at HP. "Now he's emerging from the shadow with the co-CEO title. And it's because he truly loves working for Larry."

The story of how Mark Hurd returned from tabloid fodder to Fortune 500 leader is an epic corporate comeback. It's a good yarn, and one that Hurd, who has significantly increased his profile of late, appeared eager to tell. Bunting, who continues to serve as Hurd's personal publicist, approached Fortune, proposing an article about his comeback. Then, concerned there would be too much focus on the past, Hurd decided not to participate after all.

It's a saga worth recounting nonetheless. And as Hurd knows full well, it's not over by a long shot. He's rising at a pivotal time for the 38-year-old company. Oracle is busily playing catch-up on an industry transition toward subscription-based, or "cloud," computing that it badly missed.

Moreover, Hurd has now positioned himself as the possible sole CEO of the future. Of course, potential heirs to the Oracle throne have traditionally lasted about as long as Ellison's marriages (there have been four of the latter at last count). There's also another contender or two for the top job. All of which is to say, Mark Hurd won't be able to ease up anytime soon.

Hurd is blunt and not shy about taking issue with almost anything. In a written statement, he dismissed the thesis of this article: "Redemption? While I appreciate the sentiment, I don't think what I'm doing at Oracle has anything to do with redemption. I am thrilled to be at Oracle working with our team." The statement doesn't quite capture Hurd's typical tone. He has vehemently denied any misbehavior at HP; to say he is unrepentant would be an understatement. (Hurd added, about his old company, "I don't have much time to reflect on the past. I do have great memories of my time at HP, the fantastic results we achieved, and the people who made those results happen.")

HP didn't view Hurd so rosily when he resigned. (Contrary to public perception, he was not fired.) The company concluded his behavior had been inappropriate--but cleared him of violating its harassment policy. Still, he suffered an irreparable rift with key board members, who felt he hadn't been straightforward with them.

It would be more than a year before details of an accusatory letter Allred wrote to Hurd became public. It contained a narrative of his alleged sexual advances to Fisher, including the claim that he once walked her to an ATM to show her the size of his account balance. Following a settlement of undisclosed terms, Fisher stated that Allred's letter contained inaccuracies. But she never explained which parts were wrong.

Precisely one month after the scandal broke, Ellison delivered a masterstroke. Comparing what he called the stupidity of HP's board to Apple's AAPL long-ago decision to fire his friend Steve Jobs, Ellison hired Hurd as president of Oracle, responsible for sales and marketing.

Before sealing the deal, however, Hurd had to pass muster with Catz, a steely and powerful presence at Oracle who is fiercely protective of Ellison--and her relationship with him. "Safra spent six hours with Hurd before Oracle went public with the news that he was joining the company," says someone with contacts at Oracle's highest echelons. "She told him he wouldn't live long enough to regret getting between Larry and herself or attempting to unseat Larry."

Oracle co-CEO Catz at the company's recent media day.Photograph by Laura Morton--Getty Images for Fortune

Oracle employees took the soap opera surrounding Hurd in stride. After all, Larry Ellison has often been linked to younger women, some of whom became his wives. And not long before Hurd's arrival, the company witnessed the spectacle of the former girlfriend of his predecessor, Charles Phillips, plastering photos of the star-crossed couple on billboards in New York and other cities. "We got used to scandal and bad behavior," says an Oracle veteran.

Hurd has not only flourished at Oracle but succeeded in getting along with Catz as well as Ellison. "Mark has been deft at contributing without competing with or criticizing Larry or Safra," says the same well-informed source. Hurd's main job is to help his massive sales force close deals with the world's biggest companies. Says this source: "He's great at his role, which is bagging elephants."

Hurd and Oracle, it turns out, are ideally suited for each other. The 58-year-old spent more than two decades at tech equipment maker NCR NCR , rising through the sales-and-marketing ranks to become CEO before being recruited in 2005 to replace the recently fired CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina. Along the way he developed a reputation for directness, by-the-numbers analysis, and a zest for closing deals with customers and currying favor with investors. If Hurd didn't always care for the niceties of making employees feel good, he always got results.

In Oracle he found a rough-and-tumble environment known for its bruising sales and engineering cultures. A former Oracle executive describes the company's people as driven yet pompous and territorial. Oracle has a reputation throughout the enterprise technology world for pushing around even its best customers, especially after they have installed technology that would be prohibitively expensive to remove.

Oracle execs are known for their bombastic dismissal of competitors. Catz, who in addition to sharing the CEO title with Hurd is Oracle's principal financial officer, once told a group of incredulous investors her company was going to kill upstart Workday WDAY , which sells subscription software for managing human resources departments, "before they get out of the crib." (Now a decade old, Workday sports a decidedly grown-up $15 billion public market valuation and is a key competitor. Oracle declined to comment on Catz's statement.)

Employees are quickly made to feel their place at Oracle. "I was there 20 years," says another ex-executive. "The quality of people is very high. But you will never find Oracle on a list of the 50 best places to work. There are very few people in the spotlight, and the attitude is that everyone is replaceable." For those who come in through acquisitions, the experience can be jarring. Before a deal closes, Oracle requires the to-be-acquired company to seek approval on any expenditure above $10,000. The company's well-oiled M&A machine, which reports to Catz, has a template for a 100-day integration plan that explains to acquired employees exactly why Oracle is buying their company and whether they'll still have a job.

When Hurd arrived at Oracle there was considerable fear, given his reputation for cost cutting. He was reviled at HP for slashing its multibillion-dollar research budget, but he wasn't wrong: HP's vaunted labs hadn't produced much innovation in years. Hurd streamlined a bloated company--and Wall Street loved him for it.

Oracle, by contrast, was neither bloated nor broken. Catz had tightly maintained profit margins and made sure that acquisitions fit into the company's financial plan. Oracle's bigger problem was repositioning its product line toward subscription-based software as well as retraining its sales force to sell it. One of Hurd's key initiatives has been to hire thousands of college students to conduct tele-sales for Oracle. The churn on the young recruits is as high as 50%, but the program achieved two objectives. It lowered Oracle's selling costs for part of its sales effort and quickly freshened up the roster of salespeople. Meanwhile Hurd has reorganized the company's sales force by product, buyer, and competitor, and doubled its size. Though that change hasn't fully paid off yet, revenues are steadily climbing, and analysts are optimistic.

Hurd slotted in peacefully with the small handful of peers at the apex of the corporation, but he retained his sharp-elbowed ways elsewhere. He quickly clashed with Oracle's head of North American sales, Keith Block, whose derogatory instant messages about his new boss showed up in court documents as part of an Oracle legal dispute with HP that wasn't related directly to Hurd's departure. Block griped that Hurd avoided international travel, contending he should "be a fucking global president." Block also suggested there "wasn't enough room for us both" at Oracle. He was right about that part. Block left in 2012, shortly after the messages were disclosed. He has since become president of competitor Salesforce.com, where he has recruited heavily from Oracle.

Ellison and Hurd watching tennis at Indian Wells, Calif., in 2011.Photo: Paul Buck--EPA

Hurd is notoriously competitive, about sports as well as business. In 2013 he showed up dripping with sweat for a sales meeting at Ellison's private golf course complex near Palm Springs, Calif. He explained to a group of customers and Oracle executives that he had been working out with a tennis pro in preparation for an upcoming match. "It's not that he doesn't have good instincts," says one sales executive now at a competing software company. "But he was always so unpleasant. People aligned with his what, if not his how."

For all the attention on the three best-known Oracle executives--Ellison, Hurd, and Catz--the burden of helping Oracle make a critical and tricky technological transition rests on its younger, lower-profile president, Thomas Kurian. Oracle people refer to Kurian, who is 48 and has worked at Oracle for nearly 20 years, in reverential tones. He is the proverbial smartest person in the room and a demanding and workaholic manager who schedules meetings in increments of as little as 10 minutes. Promoted to president shortly after Hurd and Catz were named CEOs, Kurian is also widely regarded as Ellison's most valued technical adviser. He is, says one top Oracle leader, "a pulsing giant brain that is most like Larry."

Kurian's mission today is to shepherd Oracle's shift from making traditional business software its customers own and keep installed on their own servers to pay-as-you-go subscriptions for software delivered over the Internet and stored in the cloud.

By its own admission, Oracle got a late start on cloud computing. In a way, Ellison was ahead of the curve in the late 1990s with a mistimed product he called the "network computer." But the Internet wasn't far enough along for Ellison's idea, so he shelved it even as he helped the next generation of companies focus on the trend. "Larry knew the cloud was coming," says Andre Boisvert, a former top Oracle executive who went on to be president of software maker SAS Institute. "But he'd been burned by the network computer. He thought the market would wait for him. But it didn't. Then he said, 'Forget what I told you yesterday.' He lost a bit of credibility."

Kurian, who speaks just louder than a whisper and refers to the Oracle executive chairman as "Mr. Ellison," began reengineering all of Oracle's products nearly a decade ago. But given that cloud software was still in its infancy, he moved cautiously. "Back in 2006, 2007, when we started the engineering effort," Kurian says, "nobody thought that cloud was going to be so fundamentally important." Actually, someone did: Competitors from Workday to Amazon Web Services AMZN were far more successful winning subscription business, especially among cost-conscious smaller companies.

Oracle president Thomas Kurian at the company's recent media day.Photograph by Laura Morton for Fortune

Oracle didn't debut its first cloud offerings until 2012, but it has since come on strong. "Now, on average on a daily basis, 62 million people log in and use our cloud for various things," says Kurian. Although subscription-based software accounts for only about 5% of Oracle's $38 billion annualized revenue, it dominates Oracle's public commentary and is an all-hands-on-deck effort internally. Kurian oversees three-times-a-week engineering meetings that run from 2:30 to 7:00 p.m. He says Ellison attends every meeting when he is in town, which is most of the time.

Oracle's cloud pitch is a classic package deal: Buy everything from us rather than cobbling together programs from disparate vendors. It's the same approach the company successfully used in an earlier era in which it consolidated the database-software industry through acquisitions. Its efforts seem to be paying off. "Oracle has the biggest number of features in the cloud world," says Vinnie Mirchandani, an independent software analyst who has written extensively about Oracle competitor SAP SAP . "Not all of them sell well, and some aren't the best, but they are the broadest. No question."

On the last day of April, Oracle hosted a handful of journalists in its offices for what it billed as its first-ever media day. The event signaled a new openness by Oracle, a company whose founder's yachting, girlfriends, and real-estate-buying exploits receive more attention than its products. The event featured presentations by Oracle's top three executives but not Ellison, giving a real-time view of the top contenders for his job. (Other than relinquishing his title, Ellison has said nothing about retiring.) Catz, who is 53 years old and almost never talks to the press, stated she won't stick around at Oracle when the 70-year-old Ellison leaves. When "Larry drives off in one of his fancy cars," she said, "I'll be in the passenger seat."

Informed sources confirm that Catz has no designs on running Oracle alone. Indeed, it was Hurd's idea that she be elevated alongside him, a recognition of her critical role. As well, those in the know say Kurian harbors a thinly veiled ambition to be Oracle's boss. A well-placed source says Kurian has been assured he will get the position when Hurd and Catz's time is over.

For now, though, the job is Hurd's to lose--assuming Ellison ever decides to bequeath it. After keeping a relatively low profile for his first several years, Hurd has raised his head of late. He appears on CNBC to talk up Oracle's prospects--the company's stock price has doubled during his tenure--and he gives frequent interviews to the press and makes prominent industry speeches.

Hurd's public comments tend to focus on Oracle's complexity, with fulsome references to Ellison's leadership and vision. In February, at an event in San Francisco hosted by industry pundit Mark Anderson, Hurd name-checked Steve Jobs, whom he knew when he was at HP. "Steve told me one time, 'I don't want to do your job. I don't want to have to fly and go see customers. You actually go see customers and you talk to them, and they say mean things to you. It just doesn't sound like fun to me. In my job, customers come to see me.' " The message: Enterprise technology is a tough business. In April, Hurd addressed a forum at Boston College's business school on the subject of "Survive or Thrive? How Will You Modernize Your Business?"

Hurd clearly prefers some publicity opportunities to others. In early May, after previously canceling an interview for this article, Hurd agreed, via Bunting, to speak. As the date approached, however, Hurd begged off again, this time citing what he said were instructions from Oracle's general counsel. The so-called quiet period leading up to Oracle's release of financial results prohibited an interview, Bunting said. The prohibition apparently didn't apply to Kurian, the company's president, because he was interviewed by Fortune during the same quiet period with the company's blessing (with the caveat that because of the quiet period, Kurian wasn't permitted to discuss financial matters). Hurd, through Bunting, then offered up a third plan for an interview--after the quiet period and after Fortune's publication deadline.

As this article went to press, Hurd was slated to give a "fireside chat" with a Harvard Business Review editor at a technology event called the Nantucket Conference. The event, attended by the news media, was scheduled to take place less than two weeks before Oracle reports its 2015 fiscal year results.

No matter how high his profile is, one obstacle Hurd faces to becoming the sole boss at Oracle is that the company has always been run by a technologist, which he is not. "Mark is a great operator," says Boisvert, the former Oracle executive who has known Hurd since his NCR days. "He has an uncanny ability to look at reams and reams of numbers and understand what's going on. But he's not necessarily a technology visionary. You give him a product, and he knows how to position it and go sell it. He's not someone who wakes up and thinks about how to disrupt an industry."

The subject of succeeding Larry Ellison has been fraught for years. One person familiar with the company's succession planning describes past pretenders to the throne as having entered the "Bermuda Triangle" of Oracle's executive suite. What has tended to be the undoing of previous executives has been allowing their star to publicly outshine Ellison's. Observes someone who has been in the Oracle orbit for years: "Larry is amused until he is annoyed."

For now, however, Hurd is on top. Ellison is said to be thrilled with his leadership, and those in the know say Hurd's promotion to co-CEO was intended to fend off suitors who try to entice him with chief executive jobs elsewhere. By one measure, Hurd has one of the smallest portfolios of any major-company CEO. Despite having 95,000 employees reporting to him, he has responsibility neither for finance, legal, or human resources (Catz's domain) nor engineering (Kurian's). And he serves at the pleasure of one of the industry's founding figures, and a mercurial one at that. Hurd has been redeemed, all right. Staying at Oracle will be his continuing challenge.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘The Redemption of Mark Hurd’.

Raising funds wasn't easy, to put it mildly. Wendschuh approached seven investing groups, by his estimate, made hundreds of presentations, and asked more than 450 individuals to put up cash. Four months of grueling effort yielded him $2 million. So far business has been good. Ebbu's first line of extracts has been flying off the shelves in four Colorado dispensaries since it launched in April. The profit margins are huge: Ebbu makes its extracts for $2 and sells them for $35. "You can make a lot of money in marijuana," Wendschuh says. "If you make it, it will sell. It's unreal."

A year after he struggled to raise money, the situation is far different. At a Marijuana Investor Summit in Denver, an April event that drew 1,000 investors, Wendschuh says he was besieged by millions of dollars' worth of unsolicited offers to invest in his operation. Others pitched him marijuana-focused accounting, consulting, recruiting, or security services.

Call it the three stages of development: First comes the product itself, second come ancillary products, and third comes the infrastructure of related services. By that measure, the legal cannabis business is rapidly accelerating into stage three, as an ecosystem of financial and other services quickly grows up.

Sales of pot--the legal variety--soared to $2.7 billion last year from $1.5 billion the year prior, according to the ArcView Group, an investment and research firm focused on cannabis. Medical marijuana is now legal in 23 states and Washington, D.C., with five of those jurisdictions permitting recreational use. Next year voters in another half-dozen states will consider legalization. Meanwhile, there's a bipartisan effort to remove federal restrictions on medical marijuana in the states where it is allowed. "There is going to be a massive, massive market," says Troy Dayton, CEO of ArcView.

That has prompted ArcView's 470 member investors to pour some $41 million into 54 weed companies of late. Recipients include Eaze, which aims to be the Uber of pot delivery (it got $11.5 million), and Medicine Man, a Denver dispensary that nabbed $1.6 million.

Today there are about 300 publicly traded cannabis companies vs. just 13 in 2013. Among those 300, 40 raised a total of $95 million in 2014 and the first quarter of this year. (A few cannabis companies are sketchy: The Securities and Exchange Commission has de-listed five stocks for pump-and-dump schemes.)

Until recently the reputational and legal risk kept institutional investors away. The window cracked open earlier this year when billionaire Peter Thiel's investment firm Founders Fund made a multimillion-dollar investment in Privateer Holdings, which raised $82 million for its cannabis businesses, including Marley Natural (in partnership with the family of the late reggae singer Bob).

Today at least seven small financial firms, such as Posei-don Asset Management, Salveo Capital, and Emerald Ocean, are raising money to fund pot companies. Even some family offices are investing, according to Viridian Capital Advisors, a firm that tracks the category.

"The industry is losing its taint as a drug industry and is becoming a much more sophisticated market," says Scott Greiper, Viridian's president. Advanced lighting, soil, and cultivation systems are being developed. Data analytics promise to reveal what's selling at retail and track marijuana from seed to sale. Biotech companies are trying to pinpoint the strains of cannabinoid that can benefit diabetes, epilepsy, and glaucoma. Those advances, he says, are in turn attracting more seasoned investors.

Like any other market, pot now has an industry association, trade publications, women's entrepreneurship conferences, vocational schools (for growers), and a 13-week startup accelerator program called -CanopyBoulder. This year CanopyBoulder will help 20 cannabis startups launch, offering $20,000 investments for 9.5% stakes.

There are marijuana-focused services like law firms, public relations firms, marketers, accountants, insurance companies--even janitorial services. They tout special knowledge about cannabis regulation or, in the case of the janitors, expertise in odor containment.

For all the excitement, getting a company started isn't easy. Marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government. As a result many banks won't do business with companies that touch the plant, forcing them to hop from bank to bank or pay vendors, employees, and taxes in cash. "I've lost five banks, and a colleague has gone through 19 banks," says John Davis, owner of Northwest Patient Resource Center, a dispensary in Seattle. To avoid becoming a target for criminals, Davis spent $100,000 outfitting his operations with concrete walls and layers of security for the times he has to deal in cash. (Last month a federal bill was introduced that would shield banks from potential liability for serving legal marijuana businesses.)

The U.S. tax code also prevents marijuana operations from claiming any business expenses on their taxes, and federal law prohibits distributing cannabis products across state lines. So if a company wants to expand, it needs to open a new plant in another state. "Everything in this industry is harder, and it's constantly evolving," says Privateer Holdings CEO Brendan Kennedy.

The prospect that the roadblocks will disappear appeals to pioneers, says Dayton. Competition meanwhile is limited. As he puts it, "The opportunity to be a market leader is wide open."

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine.

If people could poke around Villa Montona, the 27-acre estate of the 75-year-old racing great, they'd be impressed. In addition to the Lamborghini in the garage, there's a stockpile of trophies, plaques, and other mementos that sit three deep in display cases on the first floor. Most are from Andretti's racing career, which spanned five decades and included 111 wins and four IndyCar series championships. But others, like his designation as a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, are also a testament to his post-racing life as an eclectic entrepreneur and investor--one who earns much more today than he ever did behind the wheel.

Andretti en route to winning the Indy 500 in 1969 (in middle car).Photograph by Neil Leifer--Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

Being surrounded by souvenirs lets Andretti do something he did not do when he won them--savor his achievements. "Back then I just focused on work," says Andretti. "Nothing was going to stand in my way." He inherited this determined streak from his father, a farm administrator bent on ensuring a brighter future for his family after World War II. The family's hometown, Montona, Italy, was annexed by Yugoslavia after the war (it's now part of Croatia). After seven years in an Italian refugee camp, the Andretti family arrived in Nazareth in 1955 with $125.

Mario was then just 15. Three days into their American life, he and his twin brother, Aldo, got their first glimpse of dirt-track racing, at Nazareth Speedway. Four years later they were building stock cars, and Mario was passing himself off as a 21-year-old so he could score a racing license.

Andretti started racing professionally in 1964--in stock cars, sports cars, and single-seaters--and found triumph at every turn. In winning the 1967 Daytona 500, the '69 Indianapolis 500, and the '78 Formula 1 championship, he became the first to complete the rarest trifecta in racing. What drove him was a desire to provide for his three children and his wife, Dee Ann Andretti, a Nazareth native. (They've now been married for 53 years.) "I was lucky to have a woman who really supported me," Andretti says. "She probably would've liked to have picnics and Fourth of July barbecues. But I'm working on all the holidays, all the Sundays."

Many fans were surprised that Andretti kept racing into his fifties, but the idea of retirement spooked him. When he did decide to hang up his fire suit in 1993, at 53, it was with the '94 season--his Arrivederci Tour--still to race. "I really didn't have a plan," he says. He did have money; he had earned more than $11 million on the track and also got paid for licensing deals, speaking engagements, and endorsements. But that wouldn't be enough to finance the racing endeavors of Andretti's sons, Michael and Jeff, and his nephew John, and living off savings wouldn't satisfy his own high-revving spirit.

Andretti being carried on the shoulders of racing-team owner Andy Granatelli after winning the 1969 Indy 500.Photograph by Neil Leifer--Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

Adjusting to a slower pace, Andretti began to leverage some of his assets: a name synonymous with speed and experience marketing it. Andretti's business manager, John Caponigro, a former legal counsel to the CART racing series, encouraged him to parlay his corporate affiliations into something more lasting. To that end, in 1997 Andretti partnered with M.J. Castelo, a former Texaco marketing executive, to create Andretti Petroleum, intending to build it into a wholesale fuel distributor and chain retailer.

Today that company, along with related entities, owns 37 gas stations in California. Andretti talks with Castelo several times a week about everything from front-end planning to closing deals. "He's got a great seat-of-the-pants feel for business and a pretty uncanny knack of being able to work with and read people," says Castelo. While Andretti Petroleum declined to provide revenue figures, Andretti says the business is his family's biggest source of income and "probably the best thing that could have happened to us as far as stability."

Andretti's true off-road passion, however, is wine. A regular visitor to Napa Valley, he had befriended winemakers who invariably cautioned him against risking money in such a fickle game. But an Andretti wine sold through a licensing deal in 1994 was so successful that the following year he and Joe Antonini (the CEO of Kmart SHLD , a longtime racing benefactor) bought a distressed Napa vineyard. "It was a weak moment in my life," Andretti says now, sarcastically.

After considerable investment to overhaul the vines and the staff, the Andretti Winery opened in 1996. It now distributes 30,000 cases a year across 30 states. As a business it holds its own, Caponigro says, but Andretti sees it as a labor of love, not a meal ticket: "I don't want it to get any bigger."

Wine and fuel provide just two of Andretti's revenue streams. He still does a range of endorsements and earns money driving, via the Andretti Experience, a white-knuckle ride-along that he gives to fans at IndyCar races in a specially made two-seater. In other words, he's nowhere near ready to idle around his house. "I can definitely say I'm still living the dream," he says.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘A Racing Champ's High-Octane Encore.’

This Airstream--28 feet long, eight feet wide, and about 7,000 pounds--was to be our home for the next five days and four nights. My roommate, Miguel, and I have experience sharing tight spaces. We lived together as college freshmen and sophomores, in bunk beds both years. This situation was quite a bit nicer. I would have an almost queen-size bed in the back (they can't call it a full queen-size bed because the curves of the Airstream demand pleasing curves along the mattress, and the rounded corners disqualify), and Miguel would sleep up front on a really soft, fake-leather couch that converted to a double bed. There were a stove, a dining nook (also convertible into a bed), a bathroom, a shower, and more storage space than we knew what to do with, much of it preloaded with high-end pots and pans and kitchenware.

Our trip was a throwback with a modern twist, an all-American version of glamorous camping--glamping--out to the great big red-rock canyons in Utah and back. But we didn't buy the shimmery silver American icon; we rented it--and the GMC Denali to pull it. This wasn't a one-off journalistic stunt. For the first time in history you, too, can now forgo plopping down upwards of $100,000 to buy an Airstream and instead spend about $4,000 to $10,000--length of trip and trailer depending--to rent one and temporarily live this dream. The rental company, Airstream2Go, is the only licensed and authorized Airstream rental in the world. It has a good pedigree. Its founder and CEO, Dicky Riegel, ran Airstream for several years (and tripled sales); he then ran Airstream's parent company, Thor Industries THO (No. 668 on the Fortune 1,000), based in Elkhart, Ind. Now Riegel is off on his own, with fleets in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and, in the summer, -Bozeman, Mont.

Most of Airstream2Go's clients are first-time RVers looking for a five-star experience.Courtesy of Airstream2go

Riegel started Airstream2Go for three reasons. First, he wanted to try something new and different and -create his own thing. A startup fit the bill. Second, he loves Airstreams dearly, bleeds silver, as they say, and owns two (one he's converted into a pool house, and the other he hauls with his vintage Chevy pickup). And third, he was tired of saying no to all the people who asked--and this happened at least once a day, every day--if it was possible to rent one. The cult of the silver bullet is stronger than ever, and the backlog to buy one can be years. Now that Riegel is a customer of his former company, Airstream2Go's 30-plus Airstreams built in 2013 are all already presold, much like rental-car fleets.

But there's a problem, a rather obvious one, with renting out a big, beautiful American icon, and that is that one does not simply hop in and drive off the lot with a multiton, $100,000 object in tow. This became abundantly clear to me days before our trip, when I awoke in a cold sweat after a dream about a years-ago experience hauling a rickety old moving trailer. The anxiety grew as I began contemplating further aspects of the trip, like where we'd park the rig and how we'd navigate gas stations and deal with our toilet tanks and ... the list went on and on.

The next day I got an email from Sage Fennig, an "ambassador" with Exclusive Resorts. Last fall Airstream2Go partnered with Exclusive--a luxury destination club wherein members pay a fee to have year-round access to very plush lodgings all over the globe--to offer three trips: one up the California coastline, another in and around Yellowstone National Park, and a third in the Southwest, through Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon. We were going on an abbreviated version of this third trip. Exclusive Resorts handles all the logistics in getting you to and from the Airstream, including air travel and an overnight in Vegas, and Fennig did all this for us. She also put me in touch with Cory Lawrence, the owner of Off the Beaten Path, an adventure-travel outfitter based in Bozeman that works with all Airstream2Go customers on their trips.

I called Lawrence, who told me that while there were suggested itineraries, no one's vacation ever follows those to the letter. That's why we were talking, in fact, to figure out what I was after. His company was in the business of creating what he called "bespoke, localized, authentic" travel. While some of Airstream2Go's clients from Europe and Australia had some experience "caravanning," for most Americans (the majority of Airstream2Go's customers) this was their first RV foray. "It's a five-star experience," Lawrence said. "It's taken out of camping the three things that make people most nervous: How'm I gonna eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom?"

Pulling into gas stations is easy. Other vehicles get out of the way.Photograph by Ryan Bradley for Fortune Magazine

Still, a nagging thought arrived: This was a five-star experience in a trailer park. "Actually," Riegel told me, "these aren't trailer parks. They're campgrounds. People don't live there." Lawrence said that far from the "Dixie flag, shotgun, and Rottweiler stereotype, what happens a lot is you get to go behind the curtain and enter the world of RVers. And they do have money. And they recreate. It's a friendly tribe." Most of the folks who came back from Airstream2Go trips ended up gushing about this tribe they'd entered, if only temporarily.

By the time our flight arrived I was relatively calm about the prospect of hauling. I was made all the calmer once we met Josh Rogers, the fleet manager and our expert teacher in all things 'Stream. He showed us into the interior, and then, for more than two hours, Rogers schooled us on the ins and outs of trailer hitching and unhitching, as well as plugging in electric, water, and--most important and grossest of all--waste. Miguel took us around the block slowly, with nice wide turns, and then, for an extremely brief moment, he backed up. A video monitor on the GMC's dash displayed what was happening in the rear, and we were shown the "trucker's grip" (palms down, both hands gripping the bottom of the wheel). Finally, we were assured that both of our campsites during our journey were "pull-throughs," so we would probably not even need to reverse while hitched. And with that, we were sent on our way.

Before setting off, our driver gets schooled in all things 'Stream--hitching and unhitching, plugging in electric, dealing with waste.Photograph by Ryan Bradley for Fortune Magazine

Reader, I'm sure it was unintentional, but we were misinformed. Neither of our campsites was a pull-through. We backed up. Oh, we backed up. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are many wondrous aspects to journeying with an Airstream in tow. Mona Heath, general manager at Airstream2Go, said we'd get joyful honks and thumbs-up from passersby. We received neither. What did occur was an unsettling wobble and very subtle push from behind--the weight of the trailer at high speed nudging our car along--if we passed much over 60 mph. It was better, we found, to stay between 50 and 55. There is something magical about setting such a slow pace and not worrying a whiff about vehicles of all kinds, including semitrucks, passing us by. The vast desert landscape revealed itself more clearly. We were moving at a speed more closely aligned with the clouds in the sky. The other wondrous aspect was far more basic but I'd -wager even more magical: When we had to go, we simply pulled over, hopped in the trailer, and went.

Hitching and unhitching.Photograph by Ryan Bradley for Fortune Magazine

Much has changed since 1931, when Airstream's founder, Wally Byam, a Los Angeles lawyer, founded the -company. But the essential retro-futuristic -whimsy of an Airstream has only grown in popularity. Today there are more Airstreams on the road than ever before, and, remarkably, most of those were made in the past decade or so. The Airstream, built in Jackson Center, Ohio, still looks great, and as photogenic as anything on the road, but it's more and more common---indeed, as we pulled into our campsite, an RV park just outside Zion, we passed two other Silver Bullets, parked within sight of our hookup spot.

A word on our spot: It was in a laughably difficult-to-navigate corner. I am nearly certain that the folks at the campsite figured they were doing us a great favor by saving such a plum space--boasting as it did a view of the Virgin River, a cow pasture, and the rust red cliffs against the horizon. But no. I was driving at this point, and I cannot tell you exactly how long it took to inch that 28-foot metallic Twinkie into our slot. Miguel thought it was maybe half an hour. At least half the campground came out to see these two newbies try to thread the needle on Dead Man's Curve. I entered a Zen-like trance of pulling forward and moving in reverse, again and again and again, all while taking orders from a very friendly horde of extremely tanned old-timers wearing flip-flops and drinking cocktails out of brightly colored plastic cups. I would see some of these guys around days later, and they'd nod at me solemnly, acknowledging what we had been through. Maybe, possibly, I was one of their tribe now. Nothing I did for the rest of the trip was nearly as difficult--not hooking up or draining the waste tanks, not fixing a bad connection on the water hose, not even pulling into a crowded gas station (the thing about having a really big car towing a really big, shiny trailer is that people tend to see you, and maybe take pity, and certainly get out of your way)--and nothing left me with such a giddy glow in the aftermath, even after I learned I'd pulled in a little bit catawampus, and our trailer listed slightly to the left.

Nothing was as difficult as getting the trailer into its spot.Photograph by Ryan Bradley for Fortune Magazine

When we returned, five days and four nights later, we pulled into that Vegas lot with huge grins. We'd had an adventure, learned some skills. Still, it struck me as odd that the sort of high-end folks who were the core of Exclusive Resorts' and Airstream2Go's business would be lining up to take a similar trip. There was a lot of work involved and some stress too. I called Riegel from the front seat of the Denali and asked him why his clients, who could have pretty much any vacation under the sun, would want this one. He laughed and said, "Yes, yes, that is exactly what's so surprising about it, and what we were betting on." So many vacations, he said, particularly luxury vacations, are characterized by "doing nothing and having everything done for you and happen around you." Airstream2Go was the opposite. "You're at the helm. It's not quite Chevy Chase in Vacation, but you kind of get the point, particularly if you're with friends or family. There's something you don't get, you can't get, on other trips: a sense of achievement." I told him about parking, backing into that spot. "You've conquered a little bit of fear," Riegel said. "And come back with a great story you get to tell, so the trip will live on. What could be better?" I told him I didn't know.

For rates, visit airstream2go.com/rates.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘Airstream Dream.’

Saturday Morning Post: The Weekly View from Washington

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry on Thursday became the tenth official candidate to jump into the Republicans' 2016 free-for-all. And it seems likelier than not that he'll be joined in short order by as many as five more governors, among others, crowding into a field already too unwieldy to fit on a single debate stage. As Perry relaunched this week -- attempting to shake off his disastrous 2012 bid and elbow back into contention -- he salted a red-meat speech about projecting military strength abroad and limiting government at home with some populist lines. "The American people see a rigged game, where insiders get rich, and the middle class pays the tab," he told a crowd gathered at an airport hangar in suburban Dallas. "There is something wrong when the Dow is near record highs, and businesses on Main Street can't even get a loan... Capitalism is not corporatism. It is not a guarantee of reward without the risk."

It's more modish than usual these days for White House aspirants to tilt against the power structure they're seeking to lead. And for governors, the opportunity to highlight their distance from the Washington morass by playing up their independence is especially hard to resist. But Perry and the rest -- a group that includes John Kasich (Ohio), Bobby Jindal (Louisiana), Scott Walker (Wisconsin), Chris Christie (New Jersey) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush -- face a credibility challenge. Over three terms as Texas' chief executive, for example, Perry presided over his own brand of corporate welfare, doling out more than $6.5 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies to keep or lure big employers. We crunched data from Good Jobs First, a left-leaning group that compiles information on state economic development efforts, and found that among the governors likely to make the race, Perry was outdone only by Jindal in spending public dollars toward job growth. As Good Jobs First executive direct Greg LeRoy notes, the data comes with an asterisk, since the states abide by varying standards of transparency.

But everybody on the list paid dearly for ribbon cuttings. None can claim to have hewed to a free-market approach. And for several, the practice has spawned controversy at home. Kasich has caught heat for privatizing the state's jobs agency and then pushing through legislation to close its books to the state's auditor. Up in Wisconsin last month, an audit of one of Walker's two economic development arms found financial controls so lacking, he had to abandon plans to merge them. Christie's administration has disproportionately directed funding deals to campaign donors. Jindal has doubled tax giveaways in development packages while the state suffers a debilitating budget crunch. And Perry's Texas Enterprise Fund dished hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to outfits that never formally applied for them, a state auditor found -- part of an economic development strategy the Wall Street Journal's editorial page called out as his "crony capitalism problem." It adds up to a glass-house hitch that should humble governors thinking of leaning on a corporatist critique of their Washington rivals.

The only other current Star Wars video game is Electronic Arts' Star Wars: Battlefront, which EA EA created as part of a 10-year licensing deal with Disney. Battlefront and Infinity 3.0 are the first two Star Wars games to be launched since Disney DIS shut down game development at LucasArts in 2013 after buying Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound for $4 billion in October 2012. Both games are aimed at different audiences, however.

"I don't think that they impact one another much at all," Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities, says. "Battlefront is more mature, Infinity 3.0 is more juvenile. There's very limited crossover."

Creating a Star Wars game for the toys-to-life category is a good bet for Disney. According to research firm the NPD Group, toys-to-life games have sold over $2 billion of games, toys, and accessories in the U.S. alone. Disney by itself has sold over $1 billion of Disney Infinity toys and games since launching the franchise in 2013.

And according to John Vignocchi, vice president of production at Disney Interactive Studios, “The strength of the Walt Disney Company lies in its IPs. In addition to Disney and Pixar films, Star Wars, and Marvel, there's also great content in the game from Disney Parks, Disney Cruise Line, ABC, and ESPN.”

In the Disney Infinity games, everything is a toy within the virtual world, and it's this virtual toy concept that allows Star Wars characters like Yoda to team up with Marvel super heroes like Iron Man, as well as Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Frozen's Anna and Elsa.

"This is one of the largest rosters of playable Star Wars characters in a game," Ada Duan, vice president of digital business and franchise management at Lucasfilm, says. "I've worked on a lot of Star Wars games and this is one of the best lightsaber experiences ever made." Infinity 3.0 will include characters from all six main films, with characters from additional films and animated TV series to be added over time.

Vignocchi says game developers have been influenced by classic Kenner and Lego Star Wars toys when building virtual X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon for the new game. Gamers will not only be able to play as characters from the films, but also pilot vehicles and ride creatures from the films while exploring locations from across the entire Star Wars universe.

By the end of this year, there will be 100 playable Disney Infinity playable characters inside the game. And that number will continue to grow as new Star Wars figures, as well as toys from other Disney films like Inside Out and new Marvel movies, are added. Vignocchi says releasing toy vehicles for the platform is also a possibility in the future, but for now there are plenty of virtual toys to play with.

With Pachter forecasting sales of 4 to 5 million copies of Disney Infinity this year, the Force is strong with this franchise.

“All that’s been said can be said at this point because it has to go through regulatory approval. The deal is pretty self-evident from a strategic perspective, I think,” James told Fortune of the acquisition. “It’s a straight-up consolidation of an adjacent piece of Silicon that really commands quite a premium. There’s a way that we think through integration we can make it better.”

For Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, the deal represents the chance to boost its data center business. Notably, it’s more than twice as big as Intel’s previous largest acquisition, which came in 2010 when the company acquired McAfee for $7.68 billion.

The Altera deal will also be important for Intel’s growing Internet of Things (IoT) business, James said. That idea -- of diversifying Intel’s portfolio -- falls in line with what company CEO Brian Krzanich told The Wall Street Journal about the deal, which has been painted as a bold move to lessen Intel’s laser focus on the personal computer market. The hope is that Intel can break into other markets as PC sales, and thus demand for PC chips, continues to dip.

James, who in 2013 became Intel’s highest-ranking female executive ever, was named No. 21 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women in business list last year. She’s been a fiercely loyal Intel employee for over 25 years.

For more from James and Intel, check out Leigh Gallagher’s interview with her for Fortune Live. It airs on Fridays at 3 p.m. ET.

Rumors about the soon-to-be-announced features include talk about a full reveal of Apple's AAPL home automation solution (known as HomeKit), improvements to Apple Maps, and the introduction of transit data, in a bid to take on Google’s GOOGL online mapping service. The company is also reportedly set to announce improved iOS platforms for older devices, including the iPhone 4S and original iPad Mini.

Below are four iOS features that I believe need to be fixed--and hopefully included in next week’s update--to improve overall user experience and lure more consumers away from its competition.

Default apps

The number of third-party apps that rival Apple's core iOS staples (Mail, Safari, etc.) is growing and now is the perfect time for the company to release an in-house solution that will let users set their own default apps.

Instead of being forced to use Apple's Safari app for web browsing, users should have the option to set Chrome (or any others) as their chosen web browser. The same options should also apply to email (Outlook vs. Mail), and calendars (Fantastical vs. iCal).

Android users have long had the ability to select default apps, and it's time iOS users did as well.

Third-party keyboard improvements

When iOS 8 was released, users were given the option to install and use third-party keyboards, such as Swype or SwiftKey.

However, the keyboards haven’t made a drastic difference in the day-to-day lives of users since most of its features are hampered by the iOS 8 operating system. For example, users can't access a keyboard from a locked screen on an iOS device--which is an issue for individuals who frequently use the quick-reply messaging option--and the "globe" button used to switch between keyboards is inconsistent and has poor functionality.

Apple will need to find a way to improve general performance and reduce crash issues to appeal to more consumers.

Document viewer upgrades

iCloud Drive is a popular feature that seamlessly syncs files, settings, and photos between Apple devices.

As more and more users began using the service, developers responded by integrating the feature into their respective apps. For example, in February Microsoft integrated iCloud Drive support into its suite of Office apps for iOS, despite already having a similar program called OneDrive.

iCloud Drive’s problems can be traced back to its iOS platform that forces users to use a specific app to view and/or open various file types. For instance, a text file isn't viewable in Powerpoint (and vice-versa).

An update that would create a central location to view all files stored in iCloud Drive--which can then be moved, altered, or opened as one would do on a computer--would be a welcome addition.

Share sheet improvements

For those unfamiliar with the share sheet feature, it allows users to share data (ranging from photos and videos to websites and location) with third-parties and other Apple services. Users can also enable or disable certain apps and arrange them into their preferred order.

However, since its introduction, share sheet has become increasingly crowded and a time-consuming program to navigate as more sharing options became available.

A consistent experience--perhaps one where the user's default apps and most-used apps are presented first--would greatly improve the feature.

There are dozens of other enhancements that could be added to this list, but the four mentioned above would provide a good foundation for future changes and significantly improve the iOS experience. Luckily, we won't have to wait much longer to see exactly what Apple has been working hard on over the last couple of months.

The Montreal-based beverage company priced its shares Thursday evening at $19 apiece and posted a 35% gain on Friday. Investors leapt at a chance to invest in a tea retailer with 136 stores in Canada but just 25 locations in the U.S. Shares jumped as much as 42%, but were recently trading at around $34.80 under the ticker symbol DTEA on the Nasdaq Global Market.

“Tea is a big market, it is growing and very popular with millennials,” David’s Tea Chief Executive Sylvain Toutant told Fortune. Toutant, who personally drinks tea “four to five times a day,” said his company more directly competes with grocery chains because a bulk of sales are tied to teas meant to be brewed at home.

David’s Tea is a relatively new, but fast growing, beverage and retail chain, and it is the latest consumer-focused company to see a strong market debut. Almost two-thirds of the retailer’s sales are derived from loose-leaf tea and tea-related gifts meant for the home, while tea accessories contribute 22% of sales and food and beverages prepared at the stores make up about 10%. That contrasts drastically with Starbucks SBUX , which pulls in over 90% of revenue from food and beverages sold at its retail locations.

David’s Tea’s market debut is almost a perfect mix of two other companies: it is based in Canada, like coffee and doughnuts seller Tim Hortons THI , and it mostly focuses on the sale of tea, like Teavana. Teavana was once public but sold to Starbucks for $620 million in 2012.

How does David’s Tea stack up? Well, Tim Horton’s first-day pop was 22%, while Teavana’s shares grew 64% on its market debut, according to IPO ETF Manager Renaissance Capital. Another competitor, Dunkin’ Brands DNKN , saw its shares leap 47% on the first day of trading when it went public in 2011.

Toutant said one misconception that still exists regarding tea is that it is looked at as a bit too traditional. “We are trying to make tea fun and accessible,” Toutant said.

David’s Tea has launched over 400 different teas since it was founded in 2008. But, within the $40 billion global tea market, it is a relative small player, particularly compared to Teavana, which has more than 360 locations. David’s Tea says it believes it can add an additional 100 stores in Canada and 300 more in the U.S., which would bring the total count a tad over 550 in those two countries over an indefinite time frame. Toutant said the company is planning to open 40 additional locations this year, with up to 15 of those in the U.S.

While new store openings and a string of 22 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth are both encouraging trends, sales increases at existing locations have slowed a bit. Comparable sales jumped 11% for the most recent fiscal year, slowing from a 26.6% increase two years earlier.