These are all brick-and-mortar companies that were built around a single product (electricity, telephone, railways, airlines, dairy roll-up) and later expanded by merging with competitors or expanding into related fields. You can also add P&G, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, and many more.

In each and every case, these companies delivered a product or service in exchange for the customer's cash. This is the key distinguishing factor between companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, who deserve to belong on that list, and companies like your hyped SV unicorn that has no business model besides "eventually we'll introduce ads".