4 companies with revenue per employee exceeding one million dollars

There is a little-used metric that reveals a surprising amount about a company’s business model: revenue per employee. While traditional metrics such as operating margin or return on capital measure how much a company earns from sales or invested capital, revenue per employee reveals something else: the extent to which the business model relies on human labor versus the extent to which it is driven by machines, networks, patents, or software. A company that generates over a million dollars in revenue per employee almost never relies on the labor of its people. It relies on assets, intellectual property, or both.

We’ve selected four companies from completely different sectors, all of which exceed this threshold. At first glance, they have nothing in common. But upon closer inspection, they reveal different formulas for how a handful of people can generate billions in revenue. High revenue per employee is not a virtue in and of itself. What matters is how much of that revenue ultimately…