Apple Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap, Is That Good?
A momentous thing happened today. Just as the lunch hour hit here on the East Coast, Apple's stock hit a high of $207.05 per share, pushing the technology company's market capitalization — that is, the sum total of the companies 4,829,926,000 shares — past $1 trillion. This makes Apple, before adjusting for inflation, the first publicly-traded company in the US to become a trillion-dollar company.
A trillion dollars is a lot of money! While it would be great fun to spin a yarn about all the various trials and tribulations Apple went through to get here, the simple truth is that they made the first good smartphone, everyone liked it and then bought it. Then, based on how much they liked the iPhone, Apple was able to convince them to buy other Apple products — first a computer, then a tablet, then a smartwatch, then wireless earbuds and most recently, a smart speaker. To be honest, it feels a little silly to explain this, since Apple's market cap suggest that most of you reading this own Apple products and probably have a better idea of why you own them than someone typing words on a website.
For the past four years, I've covered almost every iPhone announcement in the Fall and every WWDC in the Summer. At first it was a nervous scramble to try and live blog every single detail uttered by the Apple Dads hours-long presentation. But after a few I feel into a familiar rhythm. Every year Apple trots out a new phone, a new tablet, a new computer, new software. Everything is, honestly, a little bit better than the stuff that came before it. The hardware is faster, the battery life is somewhat improved, the software holds a litany of quality-of-life improvements. As much as people clamor for Apple rumors, everything they have announced since Tim Cook has taken over 2014 has not been a surprise. I think that's the secret.
One thing that has slightly caught me by surprise is just how I feel about Apple becoming a one trillion dollar company. Not that my feelings are especially important or valuable, but reading that Apple has literally become the most successful company in modern history just kinda feels like blankly staring at a huge monolithic skyscraper. "Well, they did that, I guess," you mutter to yourself as you stare up into something that is now inexorably part of your life, but you could never hope to impact one way or another and are forced to passively reckon with its existence.
I own an iPhone 6S, and am currently writing this thing on a 2014 MacBook Pro. I don't feel validated in that the company that makes these devices now has more money than God and will likely stick around so long as people use smart phones and type things on computers.
So how should you feel about this? Bloomberg's Brad Stone, who has extensively covered Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Facebook and Google, wrote about Apple hitting $1 trillion. Near the end, there is a particularly telling passage:
That doesn't mean these companies are immortal apex predators, free of all threats. Apple can hardly rest, taking refuge in its size, or else it risks Alphabet, Amazon, or Microsoft swooping in and stealing customers. Competition among members of the trillion-dollar club may provide its own system of checks and balances, ensuring they will keep elbowing each other in a scramble to create the next big thing.
I suppose if there's one thing to glean from Apple becoming the first company to grow incomprehensibly large is that there are a handful of companies about to do the same. If a future where a half-dozen or so trillion-dollar companies fight it out to find a place in every aspect of your life seems OK, then yes, Apple hitting $1 trillion is good.
If you're sitting here reading this, trying to kill some time at your job and have zero stake in any of these tech behemoths, then I'm going to say that on balance this is probably not a good thing. Apple skipped out on paying some $50 billion in taxes earlier this year. Amazon paid a net $0 in taxes in 2017. You can look at the skyscrapers and marvel at the capital and engineering it took to create them, but you know that they aren't for you. In fact, they're blocking your view of the sky.
