The Companies that Defined 2021

Attention is an increasingly valuable form of currency in the Information Age.

In 2021, a handful of companies stood out from the pack, dominating the conversation and influencing society in both positive and negative ways. After vigorous internal debate, here is Visual Capitalist’s list of companies that defined 2021:

• Robinhood
• Pfizer
• Coinbase
• Tesla
• TikTok
• Facebook/Meta

We looked at a number of metrics to select these companies, including Google search and news volume, performance relative to competitors, industry-specific indicators, and more.

Many of these are digital companies, and all have massive reach, scale, and influence. Interestingly, many of these companies also faced controversies along with their success, and were caught...