America went 242 years without a trillion-dollar company, until Apple happened.
A new benchmark has been set by Apple.
The iPhone company maintains its role as a 21st century kingmaker as it becomes the first publicly traded U.S. company to hit $1 trillion in stock market valuation as its stock rose 3% after their strong third-quarter earnings report.
Apple is now the second trillion-dollar company as Jeff Bezos’ Amazon rose as much as 1.9% to $2,050.50 in New York during August, sending its capitalization above $1 trillion for the first time.
Apple is not the first in the world to cross this milestone—Chinese oil company PetroChina hit $1 trillion in market cap in 2007. (It has since crashed and lost 80% of its valuation.) Privately held Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, valued at $2 trillion by investors, is not yet listed publicly.
- To visualize how many zeroes one trillion is, let’s write it out in full: $1,000,000,000,000
Another way to attempt to show how massive an amount the number one trillion represents, consider that the average apple picker in the US picks about 15,500 lbs of apples per day. To pick 1 trillion pounds, it would take about 176,756 years.
Immediate competition
Amazon became the second American company to cross that once-unimaginable line.
Its shares rose as high as $2,050.50 on September 4th, pushing it over $1 trillion in value, before immediately falling back and then ending the day at $2,039.51, below the $1 trillion threshold.
According to a New York Times Article, this time, the explanation is more complicated.
Amazon captures 49 cents of every e-commerce dollar in the United States. It employs more than 550,000 people and generates $178 billion in annual revenue. It sells everything from computing space to peanut butter to appointments with plumbers.
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