Apple is the first company to hit $3T market cap

Combine Walmart, Disney, Netflix, Nike, Exxon Mobil, CocaCola, Comcast, Morgan Stanley, McDonald’s, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, IBM and Ford. Apple is still worth more. Apple, the computer company that started in a California garage in 1976, is now worth $3 trillion. On Monday, it became the first publicly traded company to ever reach the figure.

Although Apple failed to hold above the level through the end of the trading day. It closed 2.5 percent higher at $182.01 and with a market capitalization of $2.99 trillion. The advance came on a broadly positive session for stocks, where Apple and Amazon.com Inc. both contributed to the Nasdaq 100 Index outperforming.

Apple’s value is even more remarkable considering how rapid its recent ascent has been. In August 2018, Apple became the first American company ever to be worth $1 trillion, an achievement that took 42 years. It surged past $2 trillion two years later. Its next trillion took just 16 months and 15 days.

Such a valuation would have been unfathomable a few years ago. Now it seems like another milepost for a corporate titan that is still growing and appears to have few tall hurdles in its path. Another tech giant, Microsoft, could follow Apple into the $3 trillion club early this year.

“When we started, we thought it would be a successful company that would go forever. But you don’t really envision this,” said Steve Wozniak, an engineer who founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976. “At the time, the amount of memory that would hold one song cost $1 million.”

By just about any measure, a $3 trillion valuation is striking. It is worth more than the value of all of the world’s cryptocurrencies. It is roughly equal to the gross domestic product of Britain or India. And it is equivalent to about six JPMorgan Chases, the biggest American bank, or 30 General Electrics.

Apple now accounts for nearly 7 percent of the total value of the S&P 500, breaking IBM’s record of 6.4 percent in 1984, according to Howard Silverblatt, an analyst who tracks valuations at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Apple alone is about 3.3 percent of the value of all global stock markets, he said.

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.