(FORTUNE Magazine) – Fortune rarely invokes the phrase "Fortune 50." Others use it all the time. In advertising, it denotes the companies that own the world's best brands--Coke and Pepsi, to name two. In banking, the Fortune 50 are the master lenders and biggest borrowers. When people say "big business," whom do you suppose they mean? Bigness has no larger size. The Fortune 50's total revenues last year--$1.8 trillion--were more than three times the GDP of Canada. In the cosmology of capitalism, these are planets. About them, lesser bodies aspire to revolve.

Moto Photo, a franchiser of film-developing shops, has systemwide sales of only $120 million, but CEO Michael Adler can dream. How would life be sweeter if Moto Photo joined the Fortune 50? "It's got to be exciting to have the breadth of power and influence an organization of that magnitude has. These companies are bigger than most banana republics. I wouldn't have to travel coach. One of my fantasies is that I'd be sued for antitrust violations."

He's kidding at the end, there, of course; but while the Fortune 50 may not be trusts, they do constitute a kind of club. The question is, what kind? Is it the benign kind that plays bingo and hosts potluck suppers? Or is it the naughty kind whose members, with the shades drawn, hatch plots to topple governments?

This we know for sure: Dues are way up. This year for the first time, as Thomas Stewart explains in this issue (see "A New 500 for the New Economy"), Fortune has conflated its service and industrial lists. Result: The revenues cutoff for the top 50 companies has jumped to nearly $16 billion. When companies such as J.P. Morgan and Goodyear no longer make the cut, you know you're in tall cotton.

The club's amenities are fine. It is safe to bet that in no member's dining room has the phrase "pass the fish sticks" ever been uttered-or at least not until this year, when Wal-Mart joined. On the Fortune 50's boards sit celebrities, including Roger Penske and Rupert Murdoch. Do you sit on the board at Kokomo Gas, Kokomo Glass, or Kokomo Sanitary Pottery? Then probably you do not know Roger or the Rupe. Over the years, some 18 of the club's CEOs have had their portraits painted by the same artist used by Presidents Reagan and Bush: Everett Raymond Kinstler.

Members enjoy camaraderie. Since few people outside their circle appreciate the responsibilities they carry, they are united in a bond of sympathy. Other bonds are tangible: The 50 CEOs belong to many of the same associations, including the Business Roundtable, the Business Council, and the Conference Board. Half or more belong to at least one of the three. Six are on the Trilateral Commission. They lobby together. They assist the same charities. Since their companies are so planetlike, perhaps it isn't odd that the orbits of these men seem fixed, their circle of friends complete.

Hmmm. Fifty powerful companies. Fifty associated CEOs. Together, what couldn't they accomplish? Let your imagination go: If just two of them were feeling puckish--Du Pont and Philip Morris, say--they could coat the state of Rhode Island in Teflon, sending its one million citizens sliding off into Connecticut. These accidental tourists then could be refreshed at their ride's end with 60 million gallons of Jell-O.

Less whimsically, any one of the Fortune 50 could subvert an election. ITT attempted that in Chile in the 1970s. In fact, big business has gotten itself involved in all manner of unbusinesslike ventures. Summa Corp., at the behest of Howard Hughes, outfitted the ship Glomar Explorer with a giant mechanical claw to pluck a sunken Russian submarine off the ocean floor. Historically, conspiracy theories involving businesses have run the gamut--everything from Du Pont starting World War I to, well, Du Pont starting World War II.

Isn't this the true test of a Fortune 50 company--that it's big enough to inspire a conspiracy theory? You never hear about Eskimo Pie being at the center of a vast web of intrigue. Yet within the Fortune 50 even minions rate their own conspiracies. Jack O'Dwyer, publisher of a weekly PR newsletter, rails against a secretive, by-invitation-only group called the Seminar, to which Fortune 50 flacks belong. "You might as well ask me about the CIA!" says Jack. "It's very secretive. They never discuss PR--that's too pedestrian. Instead they discuss things they don't have the remotest responsibility for, like Sino-American relations. They're supposed to be friends of the press, but they hate the press. They wear black tie and look down their noses at the world. It's a scandal."

The wonder is that people aren't more suspicious of the Fortune 50. Big business right now is enjoying a sunbath of approbation. The musical How to Succeed in Business has been revived, with its vision of business as "a brotherhood of man."

Result: Hardly one good conspiracy theory is now in circulation. Oh, yes, there are a few anemic ones. According to CENSORED: The News That Didn't Make the News--and Why, a yearbook edited by Carl Jensen, professor of communications at Sonoma State University, Unocal hushed up some oil spills, and various drugmakers paid pharmacists to push certain drugs. Big deal. Neither one of these is a conspiracy worthy of the name. These aren't going to send an angry mob of farmers with pitchforks and torches to the gates of the Bohemian Grove. Real theories require a group of big business leaders conspiring to a truly wicked end, ideally in secret, ideally as they travel by private railroad car to Jekyll Island. A real conspiracy was never better described than in the 1976 movie Network, where (fictional) CEO Arthur Jensen explains to a dumbfounded employee: "There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dol- lars . There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."

Sadly, there is but one current theory that fills this bill: Pat Robertson's charge (in his 1991 book The New World Order) that not only big business but all the establishment in the U.S., Europe, and possibly the world is engaged in a well-orchestrated attempt to usher in a coercive New World Order. Some operatives, he writes, like Presidents Carter and Bush, act naively, out of good intentions. What they don't suspect is that they are serving the Illuminati who killed Lincoln (don't ask), whose weapon is compound interest, and whose master is Lucifer himself.

Not one respectable villain sits atop a Fortune 50 company now. In fact you have to go all the way down to No. 250 to find even a candidate: Bill Gates. And he is feared only by a narrow audience within his industry. Main Street, which views him as a nice young man who got rich by hard work and moxie, doffs its cap when he passes and says, "good morrow to 'ee, Master William."

The U.S. has always oscillated between two conflicting schools of thought about big business. (School One: "I don't care how many midgets you put on J.P. Morgan's lap; I don't care how many dimes old John D. gives away--they're crooks." School Two: "Aw, they're just lovable mugs, no different from you and me.") Right now we, as a nation, are leaning mug-ward.

Why? If the year were 1895 and six CEOs of the biggest companies in the U.S. had just finished playing golf together (six Fortune 50 CEOs currently are members of Augusta National), the public would be murmuring "collusion." Today? "Nice putting." Headlines in 1895 would have spoken of a game between the Phone Trust, the Banking Trust, and the Oil Trust. No one uses those terms now. What's changed? To paraphrase the late Clara Peller: Where's the Beef Trust?

Nine decades of government regulation (and class-action suits) have killed trusts as Teddy Roosevelt knew them. But communications professor Jensen ascribes the waning of big-business conspiracy theories to different forces, including lazy journalists and the rise of tabloid television, which likes stories less costly to report than conspiracies.

Ben Stein, a professor of law at Pepperdine University, ascribes the falloff in conspiracies to four causes. First, business no longer need engage in conspiracies. CEOs, by their adroit use of lawyers and compensation consultants, can get rich almost legally: "Who needs to loot Guatemala when you can loot your own shareholders?" Second, conspiracies are tiring to follow--too much work: "Nader was the last guy who was up to the job." Third, semantics: "The Beef Trust used to call itself the Beef Trust. They used to announce, 'We're fixing prices.' " Finally: "Companies are so much hipper now about PR. While prospering, they've learned to cry, 'Poor me, poor me, I'm being creamed by competition.' "

Executives have made themselves more accessible, more casual, more human. It's hard not to like that fellow in bright suspenders, pictured seated on the floor of his office. And when he tells you that he's broken up over his divorce or that his high school nickname was Stinky or that he eats a whole box of Oreos each night at bedtime, it's even harder. This is the business version of "confession" television. J.P. Bolduc, late of W.R. Grace, once told Fortune (okay, me) that he liked to break his toenails off with his fingers while sitting in bed. He offered this fact up freely and with pride--the way you would a stamp collection. Disgusting? Maybe. Humanizing? You bet.

The Fortune 50 have gained still more sympathy by the pasting they've taken. Quinn Spitzer, CEO of management consultants Kepner-Tregoe, says: "You have to remember where we've been economically the past five years. America's prestige has been called into question. Japan was held up as the model of what business ought to be. Some of these companies were on the ropes. But America likes nothing better than a comeback kid, and many of these companies have come back. They're still big. They didn't cave in. They're the Rockys of business.

"It's as if, for a number of years," he continues quotably, "you looked up into the sky, and the shining stars were Sony and NEC and the like. Now some of their glitter has come off. What you see again are the Fortune 50." Or put less eloquently: Hey, they may be amoral behemoths; but they're our amoral behemoths.

Maybe the Fortune 50 aren't up to no good right now. Maybe Samuel Johnson (who was a very clubbable man and right about a lot of things) was right to say, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money." Personally, I hope otherwise. I mean . for mere gain we buried communism? For gain we're hollowing out mountains to stockpile glowing waste--as if this were a hobby? Business should be chasing bigger game. If not the brotherhood of man, then something else. Oh, that Mr. Hughes still trod the boards! Where's that giant claw?