Apple officially becomes the first trillion-dollar U.S. company

In case you didn’t know, the race to become the first U.S. company to hit a trillion dollar level is over.

The U.S. stock market closed Thursday with the clear winner in the books and the first company to win the trillion-dollar mark didn’t come as a surprise to anyone. (You probably know who it is.)

Read on and see how this company made a big comeback from near-bankruptcy to the trillion-dollar company it is today.

Welcome to the Trillion Dollar Club

Apple made history on Thursday by becoming the first U.S. company worth more than $1 trillion in the public stock market.

What caused the big uptick? It looks like Apple’s second-quarter earnings report on Tuesday exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, causing its shares to surge by more than 5 percent on Wednesday.

The surge continued on Thursday, finally hitting the trillion-dollar threshold when its share price reached $207.05 at around 9 a.m. PDT.

And the rally didn’t stop there as the shares went up as high as $208.14 at around 11 a.m. PDT, putting Apple well beyond the trillion-dollar mark. By the time the market closed, Apple held on to its record-breaking valuation.

What could be responsible for this surge? Aside from good projections for its popular hardware products like the iPhone, analysts are also crediting Apple’s growing revenue from software services such as Apple Music, Apple Pay, the App Store and other cloud services for the stock market surge.

The greatest comeback ever

It’s an incredible turnaround for, believe it or not, the once-struggling tech company.

Remember, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985. Without its visionary leader, the company almost went bankrupt in 1997 due to years and years of mismanagement and overwhelming competition from Microsoft in the personal computing market.

It also didn’t help that Apple had numerous product misfires during that period. Notable flops included the Apple III, the Lisa, the Macintosh Portable, and the Newton.

But fate always has ironic twists up its sleeves. It took the return of Jobs and a surprising $150 million investment from rival Microsoft itself to put Apple back on track.

Fun fact – Apple was worth $3 billion when Steve Jobs returned in 1996.

With Jobs’ bold management style and the company’s renewed flair for innovation, Apple scored big with products like the iMac and, of course, the iPod, which paved the way for the company’s resurrection.

However, there’s this one product that’s almost single-handedly responsible for Apple’s ascent to the $1 trillion mark. You might have heard about it, no?

Yep, it’s called the iPhone.

Here’s another fun fact – When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple was valued at a “mere” $73.4 billion. And now, here we are.

Image Credit: Bloomberg

Apple beat Amazon to the punch

Apple may be the first U.S. company to break the $1 trillion threshold but the other tech giants are not far behind.

In fact, earlier this year, many analysts were predicting that Amazon, and not Apple, will be the first trillion-dollar U.S. company.

Amazon was hot on Apple’s heels, surpassing $900 million in July but fell back to $872.5 billion on Wednesday.

Both Microsoft (currently hovering around $820 billion) and Alphabet (around $852 billion) are also hoping to join the trillion-dollar club soon.

A trillion dollars?

What can you even do with a trillion dollars? Well, you can help save the world by putting more than 8 million people through college. Or maybe pay for around 6 percent of our national debt.

Or maybe just buy stuff – tons and tons of stuff. I can think of a gazillion things you can do with that kind of money.

Are you struggling to visualize how much one trillion dollars is? I can’t blame you. It’s a million MILLION dollars!

Still struggling? Here are other ways to put Apple’s trillion-dollar value into perspective:

• Apple is now worth almost as much as the big four American banks – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo – combined!
• Apple is worth more than the combined value of the entire American media industry, and that includes giant companies like Netflix, Comcast, and Disney, plus all the major news networks and TV channels.
• Apple is now valued more than all the major automakers in the world joined together!
• Apple is now worth almost as much as most of the world’s airlines and aviation companies combined!
• Apple is now worth more than the gross domestic product (GDP) of all but 26 countries in the world – higher than the GDP of countries like Switzerland, Sweden, and Argentina.
• A trillion dollars can buy you all the sports leagues and teams in the U.S. and still have 3/4 of your cash left. Whoa!
• You can buy a billion 64GB iPhone Xs with a trillion dollars.

But if you’re Apple, you just don’t rest on your trillion dollar laurel. As capitalism goes, at the end of the day, you want to stay on top by constantly outdoing yourself, of course, and by keeping all your investors happy.

Here’s a comparison chart of Apple’s value compared to other tech companies:

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