All those iPhones add up to 12 zeroes.
Apple’s market value keeps inching up and up, and now, nearly six months into the pandemic, it’s worth $2 trillion. That’s $2,000,000,000,000.
Apple is the first publicly-traded U.S. company to hit that high of a valuation, followed closely by Microsoft and Amazon. Notice it’s all tech companies hitting or nearing record-breaking valuations, mostly because these digital-first companies have taken advantage of the recent shift to remote work and learning. Microsoft is currently valued at about $1.63 trillion, while Amazon is at $1.65 trillion based on YCharts data. Just last month, analysts predicted the e-commerce giant would hit the $2 trillion milestone soon.
All this tech growth is directly connected to the pandemic. Apple’s second trillion came in the past 21 weeks as the ongoing spread of the coronavirus changed the course of the economy and purchasing behavior, the New York Times reported. Apple first hit $1 trillion in 2018, but as recently as mid-March, the impact of COVID-19 sent Apple’s shares tumbling below that trillion-dollar mark. However, it quickly recovered within a few months.
Apple’s two-trillion-dollar valuation comes after two years of product updates to its iPhones, laptops, smartwatches, and other computers and devices. But in that time period, Apple didn’t introduce any innovative products aside from new services like its streaming platform, Apple TV+, which launched in November 2019.
It’s not just outside stockholders raking it in as the top tech companies increase in value mid-pandemic. Apple’s own executives are seeing a financial windfall, too. Last week, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook became a billionaire as his company holdings soared.