I went to the referenced article about the 15 years (https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42134/), but I'm very skeptical as to what that actually means without more info (I just read the abstract, don't have access to the full article). I'm sure a huge part of that is there is much more M&A than there was 80 years ago. I also don't even understand how the quote in the abstract can make sense, because it states "The average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years", but that article was written in 2018 and the S&P 500 was only created in 1957. There were no "S&P 500 companies" 80 years ago.

I'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.

I think you are right about the M&A influence, just looking at one random company sitting at 434th of the S&P500, it has been around for only 16 years and the abstract mentions 5 other companies that had major influence on its trajectory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyworks_Solutions

I think this is still on point with what the parent was alluding to: if your company lives and dies by M&As, do you have a clear vision of what the future will be in even a few years ? When two company merges, one of the vision mechanically dies after all.

Hmm I guess it's a good point that a lot of those 1000 companies are not startups and will be around in 3 years

My impression is that bigger companies still come and go at a pace we're not used to.

It might be an extreme, but streaming services for instance are their own companies within a group, and outside of the biggest two or three ones they get merged/split way more than we'd expect.

I experienced the same in the restaurant field, where middle sized companies would get merged, become a business unit, then get spinned out again as independant entities, to get absorbed some other faceless blob. When enough money is involved these kind of operation are relatively fluid.