Walmart, Disney, Nike, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, McDonald's, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, IBM and Ford are combined.
Apple is worth more.
Apple is now worth $3 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world. It was the first publicly traded company to reach the figure.
Apple is even more remarkable because of how quickly it has risen. It took 42 years for Apple to become the first American company to be worth $1 trillion. Two years later, it reached $2 trillion. It took 16 months and 15 days for its next trillion.
A few years ago it would have been crazy to value it that way. It seems like another milepost for a corporate titan that is still growing and has few tall hurdles in its path. Apple could join Microsoft in the $3 trillion club early this year.
We thought it would be a successful company that would last forever. Steve Wozniak, the engineer who founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976, said that you don't really envision this. The amount of memory that could hold one song was $1 million at the time.
A $3 trillion valuation is striking. It is worth more than all of the world's cryptocurrencies. It's roughly the same as the gross domestic product of Britain or India. It's equivalent to six of the biggest banks in the US, or 30 General Electrics.
Apple has overtaken IBM as the most valuable company in the S&P 500, according to Howard Silverblatt, an analyst who tracks valuations at S&P. He said that Apple is 3.3 percent of the value of the global stock markets.
Behind Apple's ascent is its tight grip on consumers, an economy that has especially favored its business and its stock, and its shrewd use of an enormous pile of cash.
In January 2007, Apple was worth $73.4 billion. Fifteen years later, the iPhone is still one of the best-selling products. In the year ending in September, sales of the iPhone were $192 billion, up almost 40 percent from the year before.
Sales of other Apple devices went up as people used them more to work, study and socialize, sending investors fleeing to the safety of Apple's stock in an uncertain global economy.
The image is.
Customers line up at the Apple Store in New York during the launch of the new iPhone 13 in September.
Apple has a large amount of cash that can be used to buy a company like Starbucks or Morgan Stanley. At the end of September, Apple had $190 billion in cash and investments.
Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor, said that Apple created the greatest cash machine in history.
Apple has decided to give its cash back to its investors by buying its own stock, instead of making a major acquisition or building multiple factories in the United States.
According to an analysis by Mr. Silverblatt, Apple has purchased the most shares of any company over the past decade. Apple spent a lot of money after it used a tax law to move most of its overseas holdings back to the US. He said they are the poster child.
Over the past five years, Apple has spent more than $82 billion on research and development, and has increased its investment each year, and it has employed more than 154,000 people.
Some economists are in favor of buying back their own stock. Companies with excess cash should return it to their shareholders. They say that it is better for the economy than sitting on billions of dollars in cash.
Mr. Damodaran said that the idea that the purchases are going into a black hole is incomprehensible. That money is going to investors.
Other economists say that the money should be used to invest in the business, raise wages or even cut prices, instead of being used to increase a company's valuation.
Apple has spent billions of dollars buying its own stock while also using low- wage workers to assemble its products, working hard to avoid taxes and tariffs, and continually raising the prices of its devices.
Apple could have spent that money on a lot of things. William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts who has been a leading critic of stock buy backs since the 1980s, said that they are using it to boost their stock price.
Mr. Lazonick said that stock prices increase when investors buy, and then cause the stock market to go up as other investors look to cash in on the increase.
The number of shares available for purchase is reduced. That makes each remaining share more valuable and improves the underlying fundamentals of the company in equations that large investors and automated trading systems use to pick stocks. The stock price goes up.
A $3 trillion valuation is the result of a mix of factors. It is not possible to know how much of that is speculation, how much is manipulation and how much is innovation.
Kellen Browning was involved in reporting.
