Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/19/apple-becomes-wall-streets-f.html
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Microsoft ($1.59T) and Amazon ($1.65T) are in second and third place, respectively.
That sounds like it should be third and second, respectively.
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it’s kind of incredibly how the biggest companies and wealthiest individuals have been able to prosper when times are good and when times are bad.
i remember right at the start how people were talking about how single payer healthcare and wealth redistribution would have to happen in order to get through this. and here we are seemingly further away from that than ever
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Damn, if only I hadn’t been a 20-year-old working for just above minimum wage at the campus Mac store back in 1997 when Apple stock was down to $12/share. According to this calculator, if I had bought $10K worth of stock back then it would now be worth about $8.1 million. 
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If you went back to 1997 and told people this news
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I remember how smug I was about Apple’s tiny market share, back around the turn of the century. Can’t feel bad about missed opportunities, though. I had no money to invest.
On a related note, how far off is its stock valuation from an actual justifiable valuation?
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From my (completely useless non-economist non-stock-trader) perspective, it doesn’t shock me.
It sells A LOT of phones and tablets, and also some computers sometimes. It’s been very successful at essentially inventing new markets by making products that other companies have made in the past more attractive and user-friendly. Eight years ago I was an outlier at work because I wore a smartwatch (a Pebble). Now it’s weird to see someone not wearing a little black rectangle on his or her wrist. Same thing with bluetooth headphones–they existed before AirPods, but they weren’t widespread or popular–but, at least around here, every third person I see on the street has AirPod stems sticking out of her ears.
Apple also just sits on north of $150 billion in just, y’know, cash. (Its reserves have been as high as $250 billion; not sure what they currently are, but it’s safe to say that somewhere between 1/20th and 1/8th of its valuation is just sitting in a bank somewhere.)
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If you had told Gil Amelio:
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It took 42 years to hit the first $1 Trillion.
It took 2 years to acquire the second $1 Trillion.
I don’t know what to do with this information,
but I feel a kind of “what hath capitalism wrought?” gnawing at my soul.
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The big connection between all these companies is that a massive pandemic just accelerated demand for their goods and services. Amazon and Microsoft are both massive cloud services providers, and Apple sells portable devices like laptops that are in huge demand.
It’s not innately nefarious - none of these companies engineered a global plague, but it is very interesting, especially when you look at all those companies communications/etc, which continue to put them as ‘oh we’re just scraping by and have to save every dollar’, like the apple v. fortnite thing going on.
Edit: I think I responded to the wrong person. My bad! Point still stands.
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Yeah, it’s great to have cash sales, but the days of valuing a company at 15X earnings is long gone. Even an elevated expectation of future earnings is kinda old. Nowadays, folks (who are we kidding here - investment managers) are running out of places to earn a return so they put money into stocks like Apple. So as prices climb, returns thin, and now where else do we look? The broader market rises because money has no where else to go. Individuals are lured in to the market because savings accounts and certificates are paying literally nothing. Yet the world’s economies are in or near recession with more pain to come. So the valuations are based on nothing but excess capital looking for a return.
Can’t see this ending well.
And what is cash? It’s not sitting in a vault. At that level, a group of banks has accepted the deposit then used it to lend out. To whom? Business owners and individual mortgages on residences. In a looming/actual recession. Can’t see this ending well.
Think happy thoughts! Hoard your cash! Buy copper ingots! And seeds!
The conventional wisdom would suggest it should be harder/take longer to get from $1T to $2T than from 0 to $1T.
There is something really screwed up in our economy.
Why would you think that?
In capitalism, owning stuff allows you to extract rent. If you already have $1T you can own a fucking lot of stuff, and extract a lot more rent than if you don’t already have $1T
It’s the fundamental basis of capitalism! I’m already rich so I get richer faster. You’re poor so you’ll never ever be middle class and in fact get poorer and poorer until my getting rich is interfered with by you and you end up dead.
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